Posts Tagged ‘theater’
“Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction ; they can be deceived by the stories in the women’s magazines.”*…
In the 1890s, empire building was in the air in New York, and magazine editors succumbed to the craze. As President Theodore Roosevelt sent troops to Cuba and the Philippines, the magazine men—they were nearly all men—had quieter plans to extend their influence. They used their brands to sell model homes, universities, and other offerings of middle-class life. It was, after all, the Progressive Era, when technological innovations and post-Victorian values were supposed to hasten the arrival of a more enlightened, egalitarian social order. Before the concept of branding even existed, these new magazine ventures represented an exercise in branding. But woven into this phenomenon lay a stealth traditionalism, a new way of packaging the often conservative, sometimes quixotic visions of a few titans of the press.
Editors Edward Bok (Ladies’ Home Journal), John Brisben Walker (Cosmopolitan), and S.S. McClure (McClure’s) saw a way to directly shape their readers’ class aspirations. In 1895 Ladies’ Home Journal began to offer unfrilly, family-friendly architectural plans in its pages. They were mainly colonial, Craftsman, or modern ranch-style houses, and many still stand today. The Cosmopolitan, as it was then known, advertised the Cosmopolitan University, a custom-designed college degree—for free!—by correspondence course. McClure’s magazine, the juggernaut of investigative journalism—home to Ida Tarbell’s landmark investigation of Standard Oil, among many other muckraking articles of the Gilded Age—began to plot an array of ventures, including a model town called McClure’s Ideal Settlement.
Cannily noting the trend for smaller, servantless suburban homes, Journal editor Bok [the grandfather of Harvard President Derek Bok] was selling more than home design. Every house should be occupied by a female homemaker, he decided, and every family should aspire to a simpler, more frugal way of life. The campaign rapidly succeeded. By 1916 the editors of the Journal claimed that thirty thousand of their homes had been built. Part of this was due to the Journal’s wide circulation—it was the first American magazine to surpass a million subscribers. Its sister publication, the weekly Saturday Evening Post, was a fixture of nearly every household…
“A Fireproof House for $5,000,” illustration by Frank Lloyd Wright in Ladies’ Home Journal, 1907
When the (male) proprietors of women’s magazines believed that their publications could change lives on a grand scale: “Editorial Visions.”
* C.S. Lewis
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As we shape society, we might recall that it was on this date in 1914 that George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion premiered in London, featuring Mrs Patrick Campbell (for whom Shaw had written the role) as Eliza Doolittle.
The Greek myth of Pygmalion, who fell in love with one of his sculptures, was a popular subject for Victorian English playwrights, including one of Shaw’s influences, W. S. Gilbert, who had written a successful play based on the story, Pygmalion and Galatea, that was first presented in 1871. Shaw’s play in turn has been adapted numerous times, most notably as the musical My Fair Lady and its film version.
A Sketch Magazine illustration of Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Eliza Doolittle from April, 1914
“The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory”*…
In May of 1849, at the now-demolished Astor Opera House in Manhattan, a riot left… 31 dead, and more than 120 people injured. It was the deadliest to that date of a number of civic disturbances in Manhattan, which generally pitted immigrants and nativists against each other, or together against the wealthy who controlled the city’s police and the state militia.
The riot resulted in the largest number of civilian casualties due to military action in the United States since the American Revolutionary War, and led to increased police militarization (for example, riot control training and larger, heavier batons)…
There’s something both grimly funny and profound… about the riot; it seems to express the madness of American history. A mob of thousands attempted to storm a theater over a performance of Macbeth, the National Guard had to be called up, 31 people were killed and more than 100 wounded all over the personal jealousies of two vain and insecure actors, an Englishman with aristocratic airs named William Macready, and an American, Edward “Ned” Forrest, who seemed to his audiences to embody a new democratic energy…
The Astor Place riot combined two of 19th-century America’s favorite pastimes: going to the theater and rioting. This was especially true in the period after the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828, who was swept into office on a wave of raucous populism and expanded suffrage to all white men. Jackson’s inauguration was very nearly a riot itself: a horde of drunken men packed the White House, destroyed furniture and overturned the food laid out. The crowd could only be lured onto the lawn with the promise that more whiskey-spiked punch would be served outside. The violence peaked in 1835, when the country saw some 147 riots, according to David Grimsted’s American Mobbing: 1828-1861: Toward Civil War...
The remarkable true tale of the competing Shakespeareans who (literally) drew blood: “The most fascinating riot you’ve never heard of.”
* Iris Murdoch
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As we agree that all the world’s a stage, we might recall that it was on this date in 1938 that James M. Cain’s stage adaptation of his 1934 novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, opened on Broadway. Cain had hoped to have the novel adapted as a movie, but the Hays Office (the Production Code Administration, the Motion Picture Industry’s self-policing moral authority) deemed it too steamy for the screen.
Cain’s play ran only 72 performances. But it was adapted as a motion picture the following year in France (by Pierre Chenal), then in Italy in 1943 (by Luchino Visconti); finally– emboldened by Paramount’s success with Cain’s Double Indemnity (which had raised many of the same moral concerns)– MGM moved ahead. Its 1946 production of The Postman Always Rings Twice was a huge hit, and is now considered a film noir classic.
“Don’t try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it”*…
Your correspondent is headed several time zones away, so (Roughly) Daily will be on hiatus until February the 10th or so. Meantime…
In 2000, the OECD asked 15-year-olds what they wanted to be when they grew up. Some 47% of boys and 53% of girls picked 10 careers, including doctors, teachers, lawyers and business managers.
In 2018, the OECD asked again. Though the nature of work has changed dramatically since the turn of the century, kids’ answers have not: An even larger share of both boys and girls say they want to go into the same 10 professions…
See the breakdown at “The world of work is changing, but the career aspirations of teenagers are not.”
[image above, source]
* Russell Baker
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As we reassess our aspirations, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 that Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers premiered at the Old Vic in London. A satire of academic philosophy– likening it to a less-than-skillful competitive display of gymnastics and juggling– the play is set in an alternative future in which British astronauts have landed on the moon… leading to fears that the landing would ruin the moon as a poetic trope and result in a collapse of moral values.
Egad!
Michael Hordern as philosopher George Moore (from the playtext cover). Moore is about to loose the arrow and disprove Zeno’s arrow paradox.
Happy Groundhog Day!
“I don’t know what I’m doing and it’s the not knowing that makes it interesting”*…
Koyaanisqatsi is a 1983 wordless documentary primarily made up of slow motion and time-lapse footage. If you haven’t seen it, you can watch the trailer here.
I wondered how easy it would be to make an internet version using random Giphy ‘gifs’ which have been tagged as slow motion or time-lapse, playing them along with the Philip Glass soundtrack…
Rico Monkeon has built a “random Koyaanisquatsi generator.”
* Philip Glass
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As we commune with the cosmic, we might send dandy birthday greetings to Sir Noël Peirce Coward; he was born on this date in 1899. A playwright, composer, director, actor, and singer, he wrote more than 50 plays from his teens onwards. Many of his works, such as Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter and Blithe Spirit, have remained in the regular theater repertoire. He composed hundreds of songs, in addition to well over a dozen musical theater works (including the operetta Bitter Sweet and comic revues), screenplays, poetry, several volumes of short stories, the novel Pomp and Circumstance, and a three-volume autobiography. Coward’s stage and film acting and directing career spanned six decades, during which he starred in many of his own works.
For all that, he may be best remembered for his persona, for his wit, flamboyance– and for what Time magazine called “a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise.”
“Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot”*…
Composer Frederick Loewe (left) and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner in a 1956 photo
In the preparation for the Broadway debut of Camelot— on the heels of their shared successes with Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon, My Fair Lady, and Gigi— the relationship between the creative team Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe began to fray…
By the end of the week Fritz and I were seeing less and less of each other. Irritations and differences between us that had been long forgotten and were of little consequence at the time had now become the subject of questions by interviewers. Our replies traveled from mouth to mouth and by the time they reached us they were unrecognizable distortions. If we had stayed steadfastly and constantly together as we always had in the past we would have laughed, rowed, or shrugged, but in the end gone on about our business. We did not. I do not know why we did not. I may have thought I knew then but whatever I thought, I am certain I was wrong. I have a feeling the reason was far more insidious, something of which neither of us was aware and which affected each of us in different ways. I have a feeling it may have been too much success.
Success, as I mentioned earlier, can be a creative stimulant. It encourages reaching in and reaching out. But it can also take the concessions of collaboration and call them compromise. It can embitter as often as it elates and inflates and it can weaken as much as it toughens. It can magnify faults and unearth a few new ones and its only virtue is when it is forgotten. Perhaps I was too disdainful of the words of others and Fritz too vulnerable. Perhaps I misinterpreted our differences as lack of support and he misinterpreted mine as heroics. Perhaps. Perhaps not. I will never know. Too much was never said. In the end we were a little like the couple being discussed in one of Noel Coward’s early plays. “Do they fight?” said one. “Oh, no,” said the other. “They’re much too unhappy to fight.”
From the memoir of Alan Jay Lerner, The Street Where I Live, via the ever-illuminating DelanceyPlace.com.
* Alan Jay Lerner, Camelot
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As we contemplate collaboration, we might send dramatic birthday greetings to James Maxwell Anderson; he was born on this date in 1888. A playwright, screenwriter, author, poet, journalist, and lyricist, Anderson had a string of theatrical successes (e.g., What Price Glory, Key Largo, Bad Seed, Anne of a Thousand Days), adapted his plays and the works of others and created original works for the screen (e.g., All Quiet on the Western Front, Joan of Arc, Ben-Hur), and wrote the book for two of Kurt Weill’s productions (including Knickerbocker Holiday, the standout number in which, “September Song”, became a popular standard).
