American Conservatory Theater: A limited-time offer to buy TALES tickets now!

Be among the first to buy tickets to
Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City!

Dear Tale Chaser,

After an exciting workshop production this fall, the countdown to Tales has officially begun! And now you have an exclusive, limited-time opportunity to purchase tickets—before they go on sale to the general public.

Click here or call 415.749.2228 to order your tickets! Don't delay—sales end at 11:59 p.m. on Thursday, December 9.


The capstone of A.C.T.'s 2010–11 season, Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City will unleash an exuberant celebration of the irrepressible spirit that continues to define our City by the Bay. Performances begin May 19.

Interested in bringing a group of 15 or more? Enjoy free tickets for group leaders and amazing discounts! Call 415.439.2473 for details.

Don't miss out on the magic of this unprecedented theatrical event—and your chance to see Mary Ann, Mona, Mouse, and Mrs. Madrigal take the stage. Lock in your seats today!

See you at the theater!

 http://www.act-sf.org/site/MessageViewer?em_id=11802.0&dlv_id=15002

Seeking to Create Buzz, Tales of the City Musical Will Get "Flash Sale" Dec. 5-9

By Kenneth Jones
30 Nov 2010

American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) will put single tickets for the world-premiere musical Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City on the market in an early "flash sale" offer Dec. 5-9.

The highly-anticipated show from the writer and director of Avenue Q is based on the popular novels (first seen as newspaper-serial columns) by Maupin, who wrote of life, love and friendship in pre-AIDS San Francisco. The limited-time opportunity to purchase single tickets begins 10 AM Dec. 5 and ends 11:59 PM Dec. 9. A.C.T. performances in San Francisco are expected to sell out quickly, and single tickets will not be available for purchase again until January 2011.

Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City will play May 17-June 19, 2011, at the American Conservatory Theater at 415 Geary Street in San Francisco. No casting has been announced, but it's thought that Tony Award winner Betty Buckley will play Anna Madrigal, a part she performed in the recent workshop of the show.

According the not-for-profit A.C.T., "Three decades after Armistead Maupin mesmerized millions with his daily column in the city's newspapers, detailing the lives and (multiple) loves of Mary Ann, Mouse, Mona, Brian, and their beloved but mysterious landlady, Mrs. Madrigal, his iconic San Francisco saga comes home as a momentous new musical from the Tony Award–winning creators of Avenue Q (librettist Jeff Whitty and director Jason Moore) and the musical minds behind the glam-rock phenomenon Scissor Sisters (composers Jake Shears and John Garden). The capstone of the 2010–11 season, A.C.T.'s world premiere musical adaptation of Tales of the City unleashes an exuberant celebration of the irrepressible spirit that continues to define our City by the Bay."

Tickets will be available on the A.C.T. website at www.act-sf.org.

"Tale Chasers," members of A.C.T.'s email fan club, will be able to purchase tickets beginning Dec. 2. To join "Tale Chasers" — and to receive exclusive first looks, presale ticket information, and other special offers — visit www.act-sf.org/TaleChasers.

*

Development of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City was supported by the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center during a residency at the National Music Theater Conference of 2009.

http://www.playbill.com/news/article/145408-Seeking-to-Create-Buzz-Tales-of-the-City-Musical-Will-Get-Flash-Sale-Dec-5-9?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4cf5da978b5e1961%2C0

Armistead Maupin Interview

Thanks to Tim Brunsden for bringing this to my attention.

Armistead Maupin, celebrated author of Tales From The City talks to Lou Muddle on his new novel Mary Ann In Autumn ;After the intimate first-person narrative of Maupins last novel, Michael Tolliver Lives, Mary Ann in Autumn marks the authors return to the multi-character plotlines and darkly comic themes of his earlier work. Among those caught in Mary Anns orbit are her estranged daughter, Shawna, a popular sex blogger; Jake Greenleaf, Michaels transgendered gardening assistant; socialite DeDe Halcyon-Wilson; and the indefatigable Anna Madrigal, Mary Anns former landlady at 28 Barbary Lane.






http://homotopiafestival.blogspot.com/2010/11/armistead-maupin.html

Armistead Maupin opens next chapter in Tales of the City series

Mary Ann in Autumn, the eighth instalment in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series, was released earlier this month and he told The Hour why his story has kept going for thirty years.

26 November 2010 16:50 GMT

The literary character Mary Ann Singleton first arrived in San Francisco 34 years ago and her life since then has been immortalised by author Armistead Maupin. Originally serialised in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Tales of the City series that she starred in has now become eight novels and been dramatised on screen. After twenty years away from ‘Frisco, she finally makes her return in Maupin’s latest work, Mary Ann in Autumn.

Now 57, she has aged as her creator has aged. Like her, he first arrived in San Francisco young and naïve. There he found a city far more comfortable with his homosexuality than he was, and ultimately he flourished there. For Mary Ann, the city wasn’t such a success:

“She left in kind of a bad way,” Maupin told The Hour. “A lot of people didn’t like the character by the end of the sixth book because she’d left her husband and child to go pursue a career in television.
“It didn’t pan out for her so she ended up stranded in suburbia in Connecticut, but now she’s had a couple of major life crises that have brought her back and the only person she feels she can talk to still is her old best friend Michael Tolliver, a gay man who’s her age, in his late 50s.”

When Maupin first began writing about his eccentric cast of characters he never could have imagined the success they’ve now had. As well as his eight novels, his stories have been dramatised as TV series and Scissor Sisters front man Jakes Shears is now collaborating with Tony award-winning writer Jeff Whitty to produce a musical.

Although his success has taken him by surprise, Maupin did have his suspicions why the characters had so much resonance:

“It’s very hard for me to analyse my own work but I think there’s a sense of family, a sort of modern urban family. I use the term you’re ‘logical family’, as opposed to your ‘biological family’, meaning the one that you make for yourself.

“Sometimes that includes members of your biological family but not always. I think that people respond to that: the notion of a big inclusive household where people are chasing love in all different directions and connecting with each other and making friends with each other in the process.”

For Maupin, one of his best friends is American actress Laura Linney, who starred as Mary Ann in the TV mini-series of his first three novels. When he married his partner two years ago, she came to the wedding and read a poem that had figured in their courtship. Four months later, she asked him to read the same poem at her wedding.

“We’re very bonded and I think we always will be,” he said of her. “Mary Ann in Autumn is actually dedicated to her.

“She serves as a kind of literary aid for me now because I hear her voice when I write the character and that makes it so much easier. I used to hear my own and I couldn’t quite separate myself.”
Mary Ann in Autumn is out now.

Video interview at the link
http://entertainment.stv.tv/tv/212266-armistead-maupin-opens-next-chapter-in-tales-of-the-city-series/

Tale Wagging

The Advocate
December 2010

Armistead Maupin revisits his Tales of the City characters — older, wiser, yet still endearingly neurotic as ever — in Mary Ann in Autumn.
By Jeremy Kinser

“I was in a gothic mood,” Armistead Maupin says with a laugh. “I wanted to do something spooky and sad and funny all at once.” The celebrated author is speaking by phone from the attic office of his San Francisco home about writing Mary Ann in Autumn (Harper, $25.99), the eighth novel in Maupin’s popular Tales of the City series. The new book is a return to the multi­character tapestry and mordantly humorous themes that made Maupin’s reputation when he began chronicling the fictional denizens of 28 Barbary Lane in San Francisco newspaper columns in the 1970s.

After an absence of 18 years Maupin’s beloved characters resurfaced in 2007 in Michael Tolliver Lives, which reunited readers with his fictitious alter ego, lovingly nicknamed Mouse. That book’s first-person narrative was a departure from Maupin’s cliff-hanger style in his compulsively readable original series. But with Mary Ann in Autumn he returns to the third-person format of his earlier work and brings fans up to date with Mouse’s longtime best friend, Mary Ann Singleton (memorably played by Laura Linney in a trio of television miniseries). “Writing in the third person enables me to create stronger suspense; it gives me more freedom,” he says. It also allowed him to tell a more populated, complex story. “I like being with a number of characters from the earlier books.”

Mary Ann finds the titular heroine returning to San Francisco two decades after she abandoned her husband and child there to pursue a television career in New York. Faced with the end of her second marriage as well as a terrifying health crisis, Singleton seeks refuge in a backyard cottage owned by Mouse and his much younger husband. (Similarly, Maupin, 66, is married to Christopher Turner, 39.) Soon, Singleton’s past comes back to haunt her in a way she hadn’t imagined.

Because Tales has such a devoted following, Maupin is scrupulously attentive to detail, even rereading his previous books to maintain consistency with his own lore. In fact, a major plot twist in this new tale was set up 21 years ago in the sixth book, Sure of You. “Somebody out there will inevitably point it out to me if I contradict something I said in the past,” he says, adding that that kind of clarification flatters him. “I like knowing that I’ve been telling a story for 34 years and that it’s mattered to people.”

http://advocate.com/Arts_and_Entertainment/Books/Tale_Wagging/

Mary Ann is back where she belongs

FICTION | Returning character to San Francisco brings return to form for Maupin in ‘Tales of the City’ novel

November 14, 2010
BY MISHA DAVENPORT mdavenport@suntimes.com

As a longtime fan of the “Tales of the City” books, Armistead Maupin’s San Francisco saga, I prefer to believe that 2007’s Michael Tolliver Lives never happened.

The first book in the series, Tales of the City, was set in 1976 and opened with seemingly naive Cleveland native Mary Ann Singleton turning her back on Ohio to take an apartment at 28 Barbary Lane. As far as I am concerned, the series ended with 1989’s Sure of You. That’s when Mary Ann packed her bags and abandoned her husband, adopted daughter and friends for a job in New York.

Until now.

Mary Ann in Autumn is a return to form, with Maupin once again returning to a third-person narrative (he shifted to first-person in Michael Tolliver Lives). The resulting book is a heart-warming and life-affirming tale that should please fans as well as those new to the series.

After a 20-year absence, Mary Ann returns to San Francisco. Now 57, she’s facing her autumn years with much uncertainty and returns to the playground of her youth to lick her wounds. Her once-promising television news career went bust and the once-independent Mary Ann spent the last decade or so as a housewife — until her Republican husband had an affair with her life coach, of course.

Despite being abandoned by Mary Ann 20 years ago when he began to get sick from AIDS, Michael “Mouse” Tolliver welcomes her back with open arms, even offering her shelter in the detached, one-bedroom cottage on his property. Tolliver’s much younger husband, Ben, is less than enthused.

Meanwhile, Anna Madrigal, the pot-growing, transgendered matriarch of 28 Barbary Lane, where Mary Ann and Mouse both once lived, has survived a stroke and is now a “transmother” to her pre-op, transgendered caregiver, Jake Greenleaf.

Rounding out the cast, Mary Ann’s estranged and bitter adopted daughter, Shawna, is in a committed relationship with a pier clown named Otto. After Shawna befriends a dying homeless woman named Leia, she sets the novel’s mystery into play as she attempts to discover who Leia was and thus lend some meaning to the deceased woman’s life.

As the mystery unfolds, the plot threads begin to connect in surprising ways, uniting strangers and long-lost friends and family. This has always been Maupin’s biggest point. Though we may feel isolated and alone while living in big cities like Chicago, New York or San Francisco, we cannot shuck off our inherent humanity and — at least in Maupin’s books — the world continually reminds us that we are all connected.

http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/books/2892144,mary-ann-in-autumn-maupin-111410.article

Author Armistead Maupin: Jake Shears has done a great job on my musical

 Andrew Williams
16th November, 2010 


Author Armistead Maupin, 66, is best known for his Tales Of The City novels which started as a column in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1976. He returned to the series after an 18-year break in 2007. The latest book in the series, Mary Ann In Autumn, is out now.

One of your new characters is a female-to-male transsexual. Did you have to do much research?

One of my friends is a transman who was enormously helpful when I was writing the character of Jake. He told me to ask whatever I wanted. I write about what’s going on around me.

Were you surprised by anything he told you?

I got a clearer vision of what it must be like to be someone who was born female but who now wants to be a man loving a man. That’s the situation with my character, Jake. He goes to gay bars looking for male companionship but doesn’t have the one thing a lot of the guys in the bars are looking for. That makes my own romantic quandaries pale by comparison. Gender and sexuality are completely fluid and independent of each other. I’ve been exploring that notion since 1976.

Weren’t your publishers unsure if they wanted to include the character in the last book?

That’s true. I had the same problem with Anna Madrigal, the male-to-female transgendered character, 34 years ago when Tales Of The City was written as a newspaper column. They refused to include the fact she was a transsexual until the column had been in print for at least a year. They thought it was possibly threatening to their readers.

Is it depressing you’re still facing the same issue 30 years on?

Publishers always trying to read the minds of the public. I had an editor and agent tell me I went too far in the last book when I got specific about gay sex. There were probably people who were put off by it but I don’t care. I’ve always tried to keep the story true to my own emotional landscape.

Have things got better or worse for the gay community in the US since you started the books?

It’s got both better and worse. People forget 35 years ago the subject of homosexuality was taboo. Now the subject is open and stories about people fighting for their rights are covered in the news. But as a consequence churches and politicians have become organised against it. In some ways they’ve made life more of a torture for gay teenagers today.

Is that what’s behind the recent spate of gay teenage suicides in the US?

Yes, it’s not about stopping bullying in schools it’s about stopping bullying in the pulpits. There’s a YouTube campaign called It Gets Better in which gay adults address gay kids. They’re saying ‘enough is enough’ and they’re supporting young people. Parents who rail against homosexuality in front of their children are, in the cases where those children are gay, committing child abuse. They’re torturing their children over something they can’t change.

Why’s the situation more extreme in the US than it is in Britain?

The fundamentalist sects don’t have a grip on your country the way they do on ours. You wisely threw out your Calvinist witch hunters 400 years ago but they landed in the US and have never gone away.

Do you have any unusual writing habits?

I write and re-write endlessly before I proceed with the next paragraph. Writers’ manuals often tell you to spill it all out and go back and re-write it but I don’t.

How’s the Tales Of The City musical going?

They’ve just done the first presentation and it’s set to open in June 2011. I wasn’t familiar with Jake Shears’s music before he was proposed as composer and he’s done a great job.

What’s been your most extravagant purchase?

I bought a small antique woven Native American basket for my husband for his birthday. The tribe that lives near us in the mountains made it and the dog ate it.

Mary Ann In Autumn published by Doubleday is out now.

http://www.metro.co.uk/lifestyle/847413-author-armistead-maupin-jake-shears-has-done-a-great-job-on-my-musical#ixzz15XidZ7qP