Fancy Flock

"Language of Birds," a floating installation of 23 illuminated polycarbonate books at the corner of Broadway and Columbus avenues, has just been dubbed one of the best public artworks in America.

It was chosen from among 300 entries at the Americans for the Arts convention in Seattle last June.

Since it was installed last fall by San Francisco artists Brian Goggin with Dorka Keehn, the street corner has become focal point for art lovers and tourists.

The flock of twenty-three white translucent books are suspended from a web of stainless steel aircraft cables, and resemble birds in flight. The books are opened in various positions, which give the books the appearance of flying.

At night LED lights embedded within the books create visual patterns.

Goggin and Keehn worked with scientist David Shearer and Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore to provide solar power. The solar panels are mounted on top of the iconic bookstore, located half a block away.

The artists embedded words on the ground under the flock, to create the sensation that words had fallen from the pages. Working with shop owners and residents, the artists chose words from books that reflect the area's literary history, including works by Armistead Maupin, Gary Snyder, William T. Vollman, and Jade Snow Wong.

Goggin has been creating public artworks since 1991. He attracted national attention in 1997 with Defenestration, which features furniture falling from the windows and crawling down the sides of a 5-story South of Market tenement building. Goggin has created sculptures for the Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale, the Sacramento International Airport, the Seattle Arts Commission, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Keehn hosts her own online arts and culture talk show, KEEHN ON ART. She is a sculptor, writer, photographer and the Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker OF CIVIL WRONGS AND RIGHTS: The Fred Korematsu Story.

Posted By: Meredith May (Email) | July 07 2009 at 09:01 AM

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/cityinsider/detail?entry_id=42978

'Tales Of The City' A New Musical From 'Avenue Q' Creators

By FRANK RIZZO The Hartford Couran
July 3, 2009

WATERFORD - The last time librettist Jeff Whitty and director Jason Moore were at the O'Neill Theater Center's National Music Theater Conference, they were working on a little musical with puppets called "Avenue Q," a show that eventually went on to Broadway, where it won a Tony Award for best musical and will end its 6-year-plus run in September.

Their new project is making a musical from Armistead Maupin's "Tales of the City," the collective name for the series of books based on the era of the colorful, comic and culturally significant San Francisco life in the 1970s and beyond.

"Avenue Q" producers Kevin McCollum, Robyn Goodman and Jeffrey Seller are positioned to take the show to the next step after the O'Neill staged readings Saturday, July 4, Sunday, July 5, Wednesday, July 8, and Saturday, July 11, in Waterford.

Moore says "Tales" translates well to the musical stage because "most musicals are essentially about two things: people searching for love and community."

That's certainly the case with "Tales of the City," which concerns the socio-sexual climate of the era as seen through the friends and lovers who live on Barbary Lane.

But what makes "Tales of the City" sing?

Whitty says he was inspired to turn the material into a musical while watching the 1994 TV mini-series on a plane trip to London three years ago. He says the '70s are "such an incredible decade for music and that music is such an essential part of the stories themselves. It just seemed natural. The first thing [leading character] Mary Ann does is tell her mother that she is not going back to Ohio and that she is staying in San Francisco. I thought, 'Oh, that's how musicals start.'"

When he got off the plane he contacted one of the "Avenue Q" producers, inquired about the rights, and when he found they were available, "snapped them up."

He then turned to an East Village pal, Jason Sellards, also known as "Jake Shears" from the band Scissor Sisters, which draws on disco, glam rock and pop.

"I always wanted to do a musical," says Sellards. "Then Jeff wrote me another e-mail and said it was 'Tales of the City' and when I read that my heart started racing. For so many teenagers the books are a right of passage, and I so identify the 'Tales' with my youth. I immediately wrote back: 'Absolutely!'"

He asked bandmate John Garden to join him in the project.

"Jason just came up to me one day," says Garden, "and said, 'Grab a keyboard. ... We're writing a musical.' ... And that was my introduction to the project."

Director Moore says the Scissor Sisters musicians were a great match.

"There's a theatricality to their music,' says Moore, "and the lyrics are quite funny and smart, and some of their songs have characters and tell stories. There's also a theatrical awareness to their shows as well. They are showmen."

Garden wrote the music to the show; Sellards is the lyricist. Sellards is inspired by the rock musicals he grew up on.

"Since I was a kid I was obsessed with 'Rocky Horror,' 'Tommy' and 'Hair.' They've really been a part of why Scissor music sounds the way it does and has that kind of story-telling function."

All About Story
Storytelling is the challenge for Whitty, who has color-coded and tab-indexed his dog-eared edition of "Tales of the City" and its sequel, "More Tales of the City."

The question, is how do you include the characters and stories into a 2-hour-and-40 minute musical?

"A big inspiration, weirdly enough, is 'Les Miz' and the way [its creators] were able to take that huge book and condense the material. One of things that I love about that show, which I think is terrific, is that it feels so pulpy and rich in storytelling, and in a way, it's the musical version of the page-turner. That's what my goal is," says Whitty.

"I've sort of restructured it. For a musical we need to have a clear ending. Armistead is totally on board and has been delightful to work with. He is just really happy with how much we've been able to keep in."

Whitty and Moore are happy to be at the O'Neill.

"The band tours a lot and all of us are in different cities so for us to be focused for two weeks is great," says Whitty. "The show won't be perfect when we end here, though. 'Avenue Q' sure wasn't. We made so many changes after the O'Neill, but you learn so much."

And the future track for the show?

"I am working toward this Saturday," says Whitty. "If I think about it any further I will freeze up. If someone told me last time we were here that the show would go on to Broadway and run for six years we would have never been able to finish it. The pressure would have been too great."

But there are no puppets in "Tales of the City" — right?

"Well," says Whitty, laughing. "Mrs. Madrigal..." .

TALES OF THE CITY will perform as a staged reading Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 p.m., Wednesday at 8 p.m. and July 11 at 8 p.m. at the Rose Barn theater at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, 305 Great Neck, Waterford. Tickets are $20. Tickets and information: 860-443-5378 and www.theoneill.org.

Copyright © 2009, The Hartford Courant

http://www.courant.com/entertainment/stage/hc-tales.artjul03,0,4910987.story

Scissor Sisters Cut Loose with "Tales of the City"

By
Frank Rizzo
on July 2, 2009

Jason Sellards (aka "Jake Shears") and John Garden of Scissor Sisters are writing the music for a new musical based on Armistead Maupin's "Tales of the City" books.

The show is being developed at the O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn.at its National Music Theater Conference.readings of the show will be held Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m., Wednesday at 8 p.m. and next Saturday (July 11) at 2 p.m. Tickets are $22.

I talked with the two -- as well as director Jason Moore and librettist Jeff Whitty -- for an article that runs in Friday's Courant.

In my conversation with the band members (above, photo by Patrick Raycraft), the two talked about the project at length. For Scissor Sisters/Tales of the City fans a few more details about the project:

"Jeff sent me an e-mail not being specific what the show was," says Sellards.

"I always wanted to do a musical," says Sellards. "I've always been a big fan of them and it was always something I thought I would end up doing some day. So I wrote back and said, 'Yeah, it sounds really cool.'

Their first song they wrote for the show was "Me Plus One," a song in the second act. A more thematic song in the show is one called "Atlantis," about Mrs. Madrigal's belief that San Francisco is a re-incarnated version of Atlantis. "I think that song really sums up the connections between everyone in the city," says Sellard.

'They also talked about going to San Franciso when the band was on a break, meeting Maupin and soaking up the vibe of the city.

"The music [of the era -- the books are mostly set in the '70s] is automatically part of our musical vocabulary so it's automatically going to be there,' says Sellards. "Even though the era is very important, it takes a back seat to these characters."

"It's about the struggle they have in the time they are living,' says Garden. "It just happens to be the '70s."

"The characters are so strong it makes it so much easier to write songs for them," says Sellards.

Both composers have some familiarity with musicals. Garden played a Nazi youth who sings "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" in a student production of "Cabaret," and Sellards was Little John in "West Side Story" and Sky Masterson in "Guys and Dolls" when he was in high school.

"That's where I figured out I could sing,' Sellards says. "It was the first time anyone came up to me and told me I was a singer."

http://blogs.courant.com/curtain/2009/07/scissor-sisters-cut.html

Christopher J. Hanke Is "Mouse" in "Tales of the City"

By
Frank Rizzo
on July 2, 2009

Here the who's who in the cast of the reading of the new musical version of "Tales of the City" starting this weekend as part of the National Music Theater Conference at the O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford.

Christopher J. Hanke plays Michael "Mouse" Tolliver. Hanke was the lead in Broadway's "In the Life" and "Cry-Baby."

Candy Buckley plays Mrs. Anna.Madrigal. Buckey was in TheatreWorks' production of "The Little Dog Laughed," Broadway's "After the Fall" and "Ring Round the Moon."

Betsy Wolfe plays Mary Ann Singleton Wolfe was in the Roundabout Theatre Company revival of "110 in the Shade."

Mary Birdsong plays Mona Ramsey. Ramsety is in TV's "Reno 911" and Broadway's "Hairspray" and "Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me."

Steve Kazee plays Brian Hawkins. Kazee was also in "110 in the Shade" as Starbuck and Broadway's "To Be or Not to Be."

Jeffrey Carlson plays Beauchamp Day; John Jellison is Edgar Halcyon; Diane Davis is DeDe Halcyon Day and Connie; Matt McGrath is Norman Neal Williams; Josh Breckenridge is Jon Fielding; Kristine Zbornik is Mother Mucca and others; Jose Llama is Lionel, others.

Readings are Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m., next Wednesday at 8 p.m. and Saturday, July 11 at 8 p.m.

The show has libretto by Jeff Whitty and direction by Jason Moore, both of "Avenue Q." Music is by Jason Sellards and John Garden of the Scissor Sisters. Music director is Stephen Oremus.

http://blogs.courant.com/curtain/2009/07/christopher-j-hanke-is-mouse-i.html

"Avenue Q" To Close; Began at Waterford's O'Neill Center

Frank Rizzo
on July 1, 2009 1:26 PM

"We never dreamed it would go to Broadway, much less run for six years," says Jeff Whitty reacting to the news that the musical in which he was the librettist, "Avenue Q," will be ending its Broadway run in September.

Whitty was speaking yesterday at the O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford where he is working on a staged reading of a new musical based on Armistead Maupin's "Tales of the City" books. "Avenue Q" director Jason Moore is also directing the new project which features music by Jason Sellards and John Garden of the band Scissor Sisters.

"There is definitely a wistful feeling," says Moore. "We knew it was coming and when the call came last week, it was like, OK."

"You want to end it with a bang and with a great cast and a full house. Now the show can go on to other things like amateur productions."

Staged readings of "Tales of the City" are Saturday, Sunday, and next Wednesday and Saturday at the O'Neill, where "Avenue Q" had its start when it, too, was part of the National Music Theater Conferece.

Variety reports that Broadway's "Avenue Q" grossed almost $120 million so far, and, according to reps for the show, returned $23.5 million to its investors.

Pictured above: Jason Sellards and John Garden of the Scissor Sisters and Jeff Whitty. Picture by Patrick Raycraftt of The Hartford Courant.

http://blogs.courant.com/curtain/2009/07/avenue-q-to-close-began-at-wat.html

At Play in Waterford

The O'Neill Center camps out once more

By Christopher Arnott
Tuesday, June 30, 2009

ational Music Theater and National Playwrights Conferences
Through July 26 at the O'Neill Theater Center. $20. 305 Great Neck Rd., Waterford. (860) 443-1238, theoneill.org.


Arriving at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, I had a bit of a Private Benjamin moment. This place is not a theater, it's like summer camp, and I've never been a big camper. ... The kitchen served nothing but carbs. There was nothing but a narrow bed with a small desk in the room. Bathrooms were shared. The first night, I spent a few hours slapping at bugs, then went and slept in my car. I woke up cold and cranky, thinking 'What am I doing here? Forty-eight hours ago I was on Broadway.'"

That's Kristin Chenoweth (of Broadway's Wicked, You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown and The Apple Tree, not to mention TV's "The West Wing," "Pushing Daisies" and her own sitcom "Kristin") in her autobiography A Little Bit Wicked. It's perhaps the fullest description you'll find in print of the culture shock that can greet city-folk performers when they venture out to the grassy expanse of Waterford, Conn., for one of the Center's distinguished, down-to-earth new-works laboratories.

There's some dramatic license here of course. The O'Neill is a stone's ocean-skip from New London and a reasonable drive from much bigger cities. Its staff and audiences are assuredly theater-savvy. Chenoweth is setting a bleak scene so she can emphasize the thrill when she connects with Andrew Lippa, who became her fast friend and musical director of her concert tours, at that 1997 O'Neill workshop of The Wild Party.

I remember strolling the grounds of the O'Neill in 2002 and chatting with a couple of bleary-eyed New Yorkers who'd been up all night rewriting virtually every page of their unusual new musical following its revelatory first public presentation there. The show was Avenue Q, and you may find it ironic that such an urban-inflected social satire, reliant on the rarefied art of puppetry, could find its voice in the few-frills complex of lawns and barns of Waterford.

Avenue Q returns to Connecticut this October when the Tony-winning Broadway hit's national tour hits both New Haven and Hartford. Meanwhile, one of the show's co-creators, Jeff Whitty, is back at the O'Neill this summer launching another city-soaked, risk-taking musical project, an adaptation of Armistead Maupin's sweet and soapy yet sexually charged 1970s serial novel Tales of the City. Whitty is working with two composers, Jason Sellards (who also did the lyrics) and John Garden. Tales of the City plays the countryside of the O'Neill July 4, 5 and 11 at 8 p.m., with a 2 p.m. matinee July 5.

Tales joins an even further-out new sociosexual musical, Picnic at Hanging Rock (July 1 & 3 at 8 p.m.), adapted by Daniel Zaitchik from the same Joan Lindsay novel about vanishing Victorian schoolgirls which also informed Peter Weir's late-'70s arthouse flick.

Then there's the hallowed O'Neill Playwrights Conference, which has jump-started the professional careers of countless writers and on whose business model Robert Redford based his Sundance Film Institute. This year the Playwrights Conference overlaps with the Music Theater Conference.

(The stand-alone Cabaret Conference ends the O'Neill summer sweat-and-entertain festivities July 29–Aug. 8.)

Playwright highlights include The Language Archive (July 4 at 8:15 p.m., July 5 at 5:15 p.m.) by Julia Cho, whose BFE and Durango were done at Long Wharf Theatre's Stage II in 2005 and 2006. Fire Work (July 9 at 8:15 p.m., July 10 at 7:15 p.m.) is by Laurie Gunderson, whose plays frequently have scientific and/or historical underpinnings. And you can add Nilo Cruz to a club that includes August Wilson and Lee Blessing: Pulitzer Prize winners who continue to choose the O'Neill as a summer retreat. Cruz's The Color of Desire (July 11 at 8:15 p.m., July 12 at 3:15 p.m.) is a culture clash/romance between an American businessman and a Cuban actress in 1960 Havana.

http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=13659

Casting for O'Neill New Musicals, Plays

Casting for O'Neill New Musicals, Plays
By
Frank Rizzo
on June 10, 2009 8:49 PM

Candy Buckley, (TheaterWorks' "The Little Dog Laughed"), Mary Birdsong, Jeffrey Carlson, Christopher J. Hanke are featured in the cast of the new musical "Tales of the City," which will be in development at the National Music Theater Conference at the theater center.

Public readings for the work-in-progress are July 4, 5, 8 and 11. The musical, directed by Jason Moore ("Avenue Q"), also features Diane David, John Jellison, Steve Kazee, Jose Llana, Matt McGrath and Kristine Zbornik.

The musical version of "Picnic at Hanging Rock," which will be presented June 28 and 28 and July 1 and 3, features Laila Robins, Whitney Bashor, Charlie Brady, Matt Doyle, Jessica Grove, Veronica Kuehn, Hannah Laird, Anne Letscher, Anne Nathan, Lauren Nolan, Sarah Shahinian, Nick Sullivan, Kate Wetherhead, Jessica-Snow Wilson, Lauren Worsham and Valerie Wright*.

Over at the National Playwrights Conference casting is also set.

Johanna Day (Hartford Stage's "Peter and Jerry"), Dick Latessa (Broadway's "Hairspray"), Alan Ruck, Lynn Cohen (off-Broadway's "Chasing Manet") and Sue Jean Kim are featured in Julia Cho's "The Language Archive," directed by Mark Brokow. Readings are July 4 and 5.

Brandon Dirden, Suehyla El-Attarcq, and Kevin Geer are cast in "Fire Work" by Lauren Gunderson, directed by Sean Daniels. Readings are July 9 and 10.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Nilo Cruz' new play "The Color of Desire" will feature Day, Alma Cuervo, Maria Cellario, Mike Doyle, Rey Lucas and Stephen Schnetzer. The play, staged by conference director Wendy Goldberg, plays July 11 and 12.

Karen Briscoe, Matt D'Amic*, Stephen Ellis, Evan Enderle, Kevin Geer, Ben Gunderson and Karak Osborn are cast in Gregory Moss' "House of Gold", directed by Sarah Benson. The show is performed July 16 and 17.

Ryan King (Hartford Stage's "Dying City"), Michelle Beck, Scott Drummond and Makela Spielman are cast in Josh Tobiessen's "Spoon Lake Blues, directed by Kyle Donnelly, presented on July 18 and 19

Craig Bockhorn, Christian Conn, Emily Donahoe and Matt Rausch are featured in Emily Schwend's "Carthage," directed by Davis McCallum, on July 23 and 24.

Abbie Spallen's "Bogwog" features King , Dane Dehaan, Birgit Huppuch and Rachel Leslie. The show, directed by David Esbjomson, plays July 25 and 26.

Tickets are on sale now. Tickets and information: 860-443-1238 and www.theoneill.org.

http://blogs.courant.com/curtain/2009/06/casting-for-oneill-new-musical.html