Zachary Pincus-Roth.com

"Indiana Jones and the Whatever Whatever"

I vividly remember thinking as a kid, "I can't believe there are no more Indiana Jones movies. How can I even g on watching movies, now that there are no Indiana Jones movies. There will never be any movies as exciting as those." It seems strange that I thought that, because they weren't my favorite movies, even at the time. And I saw them all on video.

I guess I just got such a rush from them -- well, Raiders and Last Crusade at least. I saw Temple of Doom last, after all my friends in school played it up, talking about how awesome it was -- or rad, or gnarly, whatever word we used those days. I think seven-year-old boys just liked seeing people eating eyeballs and getting their hearts pulled out of their chests. I was not as much of a fan, except for the opening series of scenes, which are fantastic.

I liked Last Crusade slightly better than Raiders, maybe because I saw it first, but perhaps also because it seemed cleaner and more polished and more accessible. And I liked the ending better in Last Crusade -- the ark frying everyone at the end of Raiders freaked me out more than the guy getting his face melted off in Last Crusade did, perhaps because in Last Crusade I was comforted by the presences of that kindly king in the cave ("you have chosen wisely").

Anyway, I now have a new least favorite. When I went to see the new Indiana Jones, I vowed not to join the chorus of people I talked to who spouted the cliche, "Harrison Ford is too old." But from the very beginning, something was off about him. His voice felt very unfamiliar -- maybe because I haven't seen a new Harrison Ford movie since "Air Force One" in 1997. I kept thinking his voice was being dubbed, since they kept cutting away from his face in weird ways. Even in closeups, his mouth didn't match his voice and he didn't open his mouth that wide. Botox? I dunno. Maybe it was just that his voice has changed. But something felt strange. Then of course they kept cutting away during that stunts. You rarely got that anguished look on his face that's so memorable.

Further diluting Indy's presence in the movie was Shia Labeouf, Indy's younger sidekick. I usually like Shia, and he was fine, but the chemistry between him and Indy -- and I usually hate talking about chemistry because I never care about that kind of stuff -- felt a little stilted, it wasn't all there. Indy also had little chemistry with Marian. They got so little emotional mileage out of these -- spoiler alert, sort of -- revelations (which I won't give away, but which even I, who is unable to predict movie plots, saw a mile away) regarding Indy, Marian and Shia.

As for the action scenes, my brother Nathaniel pointed out that the CGI effects here made things seem less real than in the not-as-CGI-heavy previous films. For instance, he noted, the car driving along the cliff, and, even more so, the lackadaisical way in which Indy, Marian and the kid were fleeing from the huge gears that were destroying the path behind them at the end. Very true.

Some things just felt downright unreal, and I know they can be unreal in Indiana Jones, but these went off the deep end. Like Marian drove her car off a cliff and into the river far below, saying "trust me," and I thought that was because it was it was half car, half boat, which it is, but it turned out that she also knew the car-boat would fly into a tree, that would bend and then place it nicely into the river. Yeah, right. Indy could do that, maybe. But not Marian.

Plus, there were random obstacles that felt inorganic or purposeless, like all those natives with bones through their noses that kept randomly appearing. And the waterfalls that they had to go down -- ok, we get it, they're going to go over the big waterfall and survive. I know, I know, we always know they're going to survive, in every action sequence. But this sequence was weird, because it felt somewhat exciting to watch, but afterwards I just felt manipulated, it felt too easy. And that skull that was so magnetic at the beginning was conveniently not-magnetic for most of the movie.

The movie was a bit too self-conscious. Some self-consciousness is ok -- like how the mountain in the Paramount logo morphed into a molehill at the very beginning, paralleling how in Raiders the Paramount logo morphed into a mountain (which my brother Ezra, when we saw this on video for the umpteenth time, on Cape Cod when he was some ridiculously young age, somehow remembered would happen). I like how they went back to that warehouse where they put the ark, but they could have done that reference better -- I (and I imagine many other fans) got that reference when they first when into the warehouse, and then they beat it into our heads by later showing the ark peaking out of  a box, which felt like a cheap gag and didn't acknowledge that we had realized that the ark was in that warehouse all along.

Also -- aliens? It didn't turn out to be as horrible an idea as it sounds, but I like how in the previous films  the mystery came out of the ancient civilizations themselves. I guess Da Vinci Code had beaten that to death? Either way, I wasn't really into the story and at every point I kept wondering "so where are we and what are they trying to do now?"

Overall, I never felt excited by the exciting scenes, or a sense of mystery from the mysterious scenes. And my contact lenses felt weird for most of it -- I guess that's not Steven Spielberg's fault. Whatever it was, I was just bored.

P.S. No more talk about Cate Blanchett! So she spoke with a Russian accent in a vaguely cryptic manner. Big deal.

Ask Playbill.com: Merchandise

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from an anonymous reader.

Question: When did Broadway shows start selling merchandise? How is it decided what will be sold (for example, the designs of T-shirts)? Who receives the profits from the items sold?

Answer: For this question, we spoke with Randi Grossman, the owner of Max Merchandising, who began selling Broadway merchandise when she signed on with Rent shortly after it opened and is now overseeing merchandise for at least ten current shows, including Spamalot, Spring Awakening, Avenue Q, Legally Blonde, Mamma Mia! and A Chorus Line. As for the history of Broadway merchandise, Grossman says, "As we know it to today, it started with Cameron Mackintosh," she says. "With his productions of Cats, Phantom and Les Miz, it's at that point where it really took off. It really became a business, and there was more than a CD and a brochure being offered."

When Grossman and her team first start work on a show, they meet with the producers, the ad agency, the marketing team and sometimes the creative team and the authors to start thinking up their ideas. Grossman and her team read through the script and highlight certain lines that would make for good quotes to put on a T-shirt or other item.

Show to show, the scope of merchandise is similar. "There is a core line that is logo-specific," she says, meaning there have to be some items that simply have the show's logo. "And then it branches out from there," she adds, "depending on the direction the show takes. We'll start working with different graphics or we'll add lyrics that are in a song or text and we branch out. But it starts with the logo."

Another rule of thumb: You want some merchandise for each gender, but more for women. "Women buy more merchandise than men do," Grossman says.

Max Merchandising's in-house graphic artist will design some of the items and create print-outs, which are then presented to the producers to decide what they like. After that, the physical samples get made, and the producers and Grossman's team decide what goes on the shelf.

Then they see what people buy. "We'll put things out there," she says. "We had high hopes for a particular shirt, and it didn't do as well, and we'll pull that shirt and we'll put in another item and see how that goes."

It's a lot of trial and error. For example, Grossman's vice--president came up with the idea for a Legally Blonde T-shirt that read, "kiss a leprechaun for me" — a line from the show — for St. Patrick's Day. Max often does holiday-themed merchandise in December, such as Christmas ornaments, but had never done it for another holiday. "I just thought it wouldn't work at all, and, lo and behold, it was terrific," Grossman says. They now plan to do merchandise for other holidays mentioned in Legally Blonde. "Most shows wouldn't be able to do that," Grossman says. "Legally Blonde has the right audience. Legally Blonde has a lot of repeat business, it has the right fan base that is in the right demographic to like that idea. It's not something that would work at Curtains."

The lines that go on the T-shirts can change over time. For Rent, Grossman says, "We didn't put 'no day but today' on a T-shirt until probably the second year, and it was one of those 'a-ha!' moments. I was like, all of a sudden, 'That's what's supposed to be there, that's what will resonate.'" On the other hand, she adds, "When we did Legally Blonde we knew that 'Oh my God' was going on a shirt from day one."

At Spamalot, the top selling T-shirt slogan and top-selling button is "I'm not dead yet." The second highest-selling button is "I fart in your general direction." "We don't have the 'fart' T-shirt," Grossman says. "We decided that women wouldn't want their husbands to buy it. We do have holy grail boxer shorts." Overall, Spamalot sells around 1,400-2,000 T-shirts a week. But the show is unique in that the novelty items — such as killer rabbit puppets and the coconut shells — sell well. "Most shows have a few break-out items," Grossman noted in a follow-up email, "but Spamalot is unique in that the wide range of audience demographic leads to a wider assortment of top-selling items." Spamalot is known for having a higher percentage of male audience members as compared to other musicals, which generally tend to attract more females.

At A Chorus Line, of the many potential lines to put on T-shirts, Grossman's company chose "And now life really begins," a reference to adolescence, from the song "Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love." That's because, "when this production opened, it was an attempt — and they succeeded — in bringing in a younger audience," Grossman says.

As creative as the merchandise can be, Grossman says, the top sellers at a musical tend to be the souvenir program and the CD. Those are followed by the T-shirt of the large logo across the chest. "As much as we want to create an opportunity for your fashion line, and the opportunity for people to buy many things, first and foremost it is still a souvenir to take home of their experience on Broadway," Grossman says.

For a children's show, things work a little differently: The top sellers are the toys, followed by the "plushes," Grossman calls them (the stuffed animals, or Grinches, or whatever), followed by the T-shirts — but the T-shirts can't just have the logo. For Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, Grossman says, "We need to have the Grinch in a really cute characterization," some sort of pose, or else the kids won't want it.

So, how do you decide what merchandise to use for a play such as Thurgood? People aren't exactly going to buy miniature stuffed Supreme Court justices. Grossman says for that show, the producer, Bill Haber, came up with the idea to have a book on Thurgood Marshall's life, which is selling well. With a recognizable play like Macbeth, you can have more fun. For the recent revival, Grossman's company did a hat that said "The Scottish Play" and a T-shirt with the line, "by the pricking of my thumbs something wicked this way comes." "It's a little sexy," Grossman says. "I don't think I could go through The Country Girl script and come up with something like that."

As for the financial arrangement, Grossman says, typically, her company runs like an independent store, taking case of all its costs and taking home the money it makes — except for a percentage of the gross sales that goes to the production, which can be anywhere from 15 to 35 percent. That means that when a show closes after three weeks and there are T-shirts left unsold, Max Merchandising takes the hit.

"Recount" on HBO

I enjoyed and was very much disturbed by "Recount," the HBO film about the Florida recount in 2000, which I saw in a hotel room Monday night and then stayed up for hours, unable to fall asleep.

When I watch films or plays based on real-life events, often the fact that it's based on real events makes it more powerful to me. And as my brain gets really into the story, it starts to naively think that every little bit of it actually happened real. Which is why I worry that the writer is taking advantage of me by secretly fictionalizing the events (like in "The Great Debaters," in which apparently a lot was invented). And I rarely actually go on the internet to find out what is true, perhaps because I don't want to shatter the illusion created by the enjoyable work that I just saw (or perhaps just too lazy). Normally I'm all for freedom of expression in movies, but this is one area in which that freedom makes me a bit queasy.

For "Recount," I don't have too many of these concerns, though. A New York Times article discussed some complaints about the film's portrayal of the Democrats' head negotiator Warren Christopher, in which Christopher himself said the portrayal of him was pure fiction. If he's right, that's somewhat unfortunate, but Christopher isn't too big of a figure in the film and his character is not part of its appeal for me. What I liked was the excitement of seeing the sequence of events laid out before me, getting more and more ridiculous and the case for Bush as the winner seeming more and more uncertain, as Gore's team battles every obstacle. And then you're just whalloped by the result at the end, when they can go no further. It's like an action movie, where you know how it's going to end but you somehow convince yourself that it might not end that way, which allows you to enjoy the ride. Except here it's in the reverse -- you convince yourself it could all turn out ok, but you know ends very badly.

The film came down very hard on Katherine Harris (played by Laura Dern), as the film portrayed her as completely evil, bowing to the worst aspects of the Republican party machine, and being almost knowingly ditzy about it all in the process. She was always making sure she looked perfect, and taking big breaths before going out and deceiving people, like a dumber version of Tilda Swinton's character in "Michael Clayton." She made my skin crawl.

On the other hand, I was always reassured whenever Kevin Spacey's Ron Klain (the lawyer and former Gore chief of staff who was involved in the day-to-day operations in Florida) and especially Ed Begley, Jr.'s David Boies (the famous appellate lawyer Klain hired) was on screen. I always rooted for them as they made their arguments, and they never disappointed.

During the recount, the Republicans were trying to show that the recount was a joke through their PR and protests and repeated questioning of the process. But, ironically, the more you find out about the events, the more the Republican case and the election results and the case for Bush as the winner seemed like a joke.

Ask Playbill.com: Tony Statuettes

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from the Playbill.com staff.

Question: A Tony Award statuette made news recently when a 1991 Tony for Best Musical Revival, which went to Fiddler on the Roof, was sold at a Dallas auction in April for $5,676.25.

How many statuettes are made each year? How are they constructed? How are they prevented from being sold? When are the winner's names engraved? And, is the statuette that the winner lifts into the air on television the same one he or she gets to take home?

Answer: Let's start with that last question: This year will be the fourth year in which the answer is yes, according to Jean Kroeper, manager for Tony Award administration at the Broadway League.

The statuettes on the winners' shelves at home have their names engraved in the medallion, the metal disc that spins around on top of the black base. But since no one but the accounting firm that counts the votes can know the winners before the ceremony, the statuettes can't be engraved until afterwards.

It takes about two weeks for the performers', designers' and directors' engravings. The producers take longer. For the Play, Musical, Play Revival and Musical Revival categories (and the Theatrical Event category when they have it), the producers in each category get two awards for free, but can order more if they pay the cost (which Kroeper wouldn't reveal). Every producer whose name is above the title is allowed to get one, and basically 99.99 percent of them choose to do so, Kroeper says. Organizations that are above the title get one for every principal in the organization, up to four — and the organization's name is what's engraved, not the person's name. Last year's Best Musical winner Spring Awakening has so many producers above the title, Kroeper says, that "last year's producer Tony orders basically took the entire summer to fill."

"When The Producers won, it was a good year," adds Frank DiBella, co-owner of Academy Engraving, who has been working on the construction and engraving of the Tony statuettes for about 15 years. "They were ordering some for everybody. We even laser-engraved brooms because they 'swept' the Tonys. Somebody brought in actual brooms, and we laser engraved all the names in the handles."

For many years, during the ceremony, about ten blank statuettes were used over and over again. But starting four years ago Kroeper decided to change the system, so that the winners could keep their Tonys for the rest of the evening and take them home. "It would be nice that they could walk it around and share it with their friends and family and cast and crew," Kroeper says.

So, this year (as in the three previous years), before the ceremony, Kroeper receives about 75 blank statuettes. She writes down the serial numbers of each statuette and which statuettes will be given out for which categories. In categories like Best Score where there are multiple winners, she sets aside the maximum possible number of statuettes, and after those winners walk offstage she taps each one on the shoulder and asks to check the serial number to write down who was given which one by the attractive women you see handing them out on television.

Over the next couple days, Kroeper rounds up all the awards, typically by sending a messenger service to the winner's home or to the theatre where the winner is performing. During the week of June 16, messengers will be biking around New York City with Tonys sticking out of their backpacks? "Usually someone's placed it in a bag or something," she says. "It's usually concealed." Tony statuettes began getting serial numbers in 1996 to keep track of them in case they get stolen or sold (the lower serial number is 101, on the statuette given to Peter Stone for the book of Titanic). After the ceremony, but before (or sometimes right when) the winners pick up their engraved awards, they have to sign what Kroeper calls "a medallion agreement." "The medallion agreement is basically stating that if they wish to not own their award any more, they would give Tony Awards Productions first rights to buy it back for them, so you don't have awards going up on auction," she says.

Now, about the construction of the statuette. It's made of three parts:

-The medallion, which is a mix of mostly brass and a little bronze, with a nickel plating on the outside. A company on West Broadway in Manhattan stamps the brass-bronze with the medallion's design, similar to how a coin gets minted. The medallion then goes to a plater in Rhode Island for the nickel plating, which gives it a polish, and is "a good surface for engraving" the winner's name, DiBella says. (For a video on how a medallion is made, check out one of the video features in the middle of the main page of the Tony Awards website).

-The base, which is black acrylic glass, a synthetic material used instead of regular glass. "Acrylic is good because it take a beating and yet it still looks elegant," DiBella says. The base is made by an acrylic caster in Quebec.

-The swivel, made of nickel-plated pewter, is the small piece that holds the medallion to the base and allows it to spin around. The swivel is made by a caster in California.

There's also the elegant, black, velvet-lined box that the winners receive that can hold the Tony. It's constructed in Massachusetts.

Before the ceremony, all the components are shipped to DiBella's company, Academy Engraving, at 271 Madison Avenue, at 40th Street, to be put together by DiBella's team of about five people. (All the materials used to be made in New York City, DiBella says, until EPA regulations forced chemical companies to move elsewhere).

Winners who have had their awards lost or stolen — such as Carol Channing and Patricia Neal — can get new ones. If your Tony falls off the shelf, you can bring it to Kroeper who will send it to DiBella, whose company has fixed Tonys for Dick Van Dyke and others.

DiBella says there's a squadron of about ten Tonys that are used for promotional purposes, such as department-store windows. They get banged up the most — he fixes about six or seven of them every year.

What makes a Tony harder to construct than an Oscar or Emmy? "It does something: it spins," says DiBella. "So many awards are just statues." It's tough to create a statuette with moving parts that is still "stable and durable enough so that the piece doesn't fall apart," he says.

So on June 15, if you win a Tony statuette, you can hoist it into the air, take it to the party, take photos with it, have everyone coo over it and spin the medallion over and over again as you ride the limo (or the N train) home. Just don't sell it.

Ask Playbill.com: Makeup

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from Eric Lee of Dallas, TX.

Question: I know that a show has a make-up designer, but do the actors have any input into those decisions? Also, who actually applies the make-up? The actor? Make-up artists? Fellow performers?

Answer: AskPlaybill.com spoke with Thelma L. Pollard, production make-up supervisor for Phantom of the Opera, who started off in the hair department when the show opened in January 1988 and became make-up supervisor soon after Michael Crawford (along with his make-up supervisor) left the show in September of that year.

For Phantom, Pollard says, the make-up was originally designed by Maria Björnson (who designed the sets and costumes) and Christopher Tucker (whose official credit is "Phantom character make-up created and designed by") for the original London production. Pollard's task is "maintaining the show as it was when it opened" with the make-up scheme Björnson and Tucker designed (Björnson passed away in 2002).

Typically, when a show has a lot of complicated make-up —such as the make-up effect to create the ugly part of the Phantom's face, underneath his mask, which is eventually revealed — that show will have a specified make-up designer, Pollard says. The designer doesn't have to stay with the show — he or she can bring in a make-up supervisor to oversee it on a daily basis. When there's only minor make-up, a show might only have a make-up supervisor, or a make-up consultant (Pollard is a consultant on Passing Strange). A show's original actors do have a say in their make-up, just as they often talk with the costume designer about which costumes fit the character, and with the director about how to play the character.

The performers apply their own make-up. Other performers can't do it for them. "It's against union rules," Pollard says, referring to Local 798, the union for workers in hair and make-up. The exception is for effects make-up, such as the Phantom's ugly face — Pollard spends a little over an hour every night on that project, which mainly involves applying three prosthetics (a head piece, face piece and lips) and putting on make-up over it. (Pollard is also in charge of supplying the actors with make-up, which she orders from the company Alcone in Long Island City in Queens.)

When new performers join the cast, Pollard teaches them how to put on their make-up. Many use the basics: foundation, eyeliner, eye shadow, contours, blushes and mascara. Other performers have to get a bit fancier, such as the ones who have the Kabuki-style white faces. After teaching, Pollard watches the performer put on his or her own make-up to make sure he or she is doing it right.

Pollard mainly gives each performer the same instructions as all the performers who played the role previously. But she often has to adjust the instructions to accommodate the performer's particular face. For instance, if a person has smaller eyes, their eye shadow can't be as dark, or else audiences will have a harder time seeing their eyes, Pollard says.

Pollard later sits in the audience during a show to make sure the new performer put on the make-up correctly. She also has to watch for renegade actors who change their make-up routine on their own. "Sometimes actors, [when] they get bored, they may want to change the lipstick or something. Or they might put on too much blush or not enough blush. They might say, 'I saw this model, I saw her make-up,' and they might put on too much eye shadow." She adds, "They might not think they look glamorous enough" when the role requires an unglamorous look. Pollard also has to make sure their make-up fits with turn-of-the-century Paris. "The period was smoky eyes," she says. "People might think the darker eyes might make them look too old."

Audiobook review: "Predictably Irrational" and others

“Predictably Irrational” is one of several pop social science books I’ve read and listened to (on audiobook in the car) over the last few years. To give you an idea of its place in the spectrum of these books, I’ll give you a quick rundown on each one:

“The Paradox of Choice” by Barry Schwartz
This book hit close to home for me, because it was about how the increasing abundance of choice is creating problems for indecisive people. It provided some tips on how to cope with indecision, such as “make your decisions irreversible.” This book has definitely influenced my daily life and I even emailed with Barry Schwartz for career advice, another topic that creates fits of indecision for me.

“The Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki
I enjoyed this book for the way it brought a scientific approach to business, using data to poke holes in baseless theories that businessmen have had for years. I especially liked this book for the way it questioned the wisdom of experts and expertise generally, a concept that has always made me skeptical. People think that CEOs or other experts have some special ability to make decisions. But even if those abilities are indeed better than anyone else’s (and let’s see proof of that), they still pale in comparison to an aggregate of the decisions of many people of various levels of education, knowledge and perceived talent.

“Freakonomics” by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
I had a great time reading “Freakonomics” over several trips to Barnes and Noble. But I wondered about the response to this book and the controversy surrounding it, which implied that the idea of applying economics to everyday problems was so novel. No one had thought of that before, really?? Perhaps the two authors were simply the first people to market this idea in a way that created a phenomenon.

“The Tipping Point” and “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell
I thought “Blink” had a less original perspective than the other books on this list and less compelling of a thesis (that making decisions more quickly was better than taking longer to make them – but only sometimes), but it was still enjoyable for its various individual stories. I preferred “The Tipping Point,” which felt like a more original, illuminating concept.

“The Progress Paradox,” by Gregg Easterbrook
This book had applications to our everyday lives that were both practical and convincing: for instance, it discussed how money and material things don’t make us happier, and then actually proved it with data and experiments. It also showed the ways in which we fail to realize how great life is, especially as a well-off person living in America in 2008. Though it’s technically a social science book, in reality it’s the best version of a self-help book I could think of, since it teaches you how to live better but its statements are backed by statistics and scientific evidence.

“Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely
Unlike all of the books above, except for Schwartz’s, “Predictably Irrational” was written by an academic, the person who actually did all of the experiments in the book: Dan Ariely, a professor at MIT. The book (which, like “Blink” and “The Progress Paradox,” I listened to on audiobook in the car) is a primer on behavioral economics, a field that explores why people make the decisions that they make, and the ways in which people sometimes act irrationally. The field questions basic principles of supply and demand, which assume that everyone acts in his or her best interests.

Ariely seems to have put his whole’s career’s worth of work into the book, structuring the book so that every piece of his career feels completely cohesive, all leading up to this simple but powerful thesis, that people are “predictably irrational.” Each chapter offers a simple lesson on human nature, and each one includes an experiment or two that Ariely performed that proves that lesson.

Many of these lessons would be invaluable to marketers and entrepreneurs. For instance, Ariely argues that people flock to things that are free, in ways that cause them to give up deals that don’t involve free items but are still far better deals. It explains that when making a purchase, people feel better when they’re comparing similar items, as opposed to viewing one item in isolation. So when William Sonoma introduced a bread maker for $275, people didn’t buy it, but when they added a larger bread maker for 50 percent more, people stated buying the original one. We overvalue the things we own. We’re too eager to keep our options open. We’re affected not only by placebos in pill form, but also placebos in price form: all things being equal, a more expensive pill helps us more than a cheaper one does.

The book was so convincing that I was surprised when Ariely indicated that behavioral economics is a new and very controversial area. That makes me a bit disappointed in the field of economics. Why didn’t anyone think about this before? And why aren’t more people more open-minded to it now? If economists can’t see both sides of an issue, who can?

East West Players put their own spin on 'Pippin'

From the Los Angeles Times

BLYTHE MATSUI holds her arm straight out, hand flat, palm up, while rotating her body. Dressed in a white lace tank top cropped above her navel and camouflage cargo pants rolled up to reveal high-heeled leather boots, the dancer-choreographer and former Laker Girl turns to Mike Moh, an extreme martial arts specialist, and says: "Blade open."

Instead of a music video or black belt challenge, Moh, who has performed stunts with Jackie Chan, and Matsui launch into "Magic to Do" from the musical "Pippin."

"That's a dance step, 'blade open,' " director Tim Dang says, looking on. "That is not in my dance vocabulary."

Dang, artistic director for East West Players, is one of the few people in the room who, at 49, is old enough to have seen Bob Fosse's original 1972 Broadway production of "Pippin." To attract young audiences, he's updating the classic musical with an anime and hip-hop theme.

The idea for East West Players' production, which opens Wednesday, was spurred by good-natured prodding from Stephen Schwartz, the songwriter behind "Pippin," "Godspell" and "Wicked," when he and Dang would see each other at an annual theater conference. "He always ribs me," Dang says, "that East West has done so much Stephen Sondheim, that 'you never do my work -- the other SS.' " Finally, Dang gave in.

Although the show is loosely based on the son of Charlemagne, who ruled in 8th century Europe, the language is contemporary and the music is 1970s pop rock. "Pippin is obviously a contemporary story grafted onto a historical milieu, and when done successfully, sort of both things are happening at once," Schwartz says.

Anachronisms and young men on quests are frequent traits of anime, the American term for Japanese animation, known for its hand-drawn style, big eyes, dramatic lighting and wide variety of genres -- including kids shows as well as porn. Dang's main models were two series by Shinichir{omacronl} Watanabe, the space western "Cowboy Bebop" and the action comedy "Samurai Champloo."

Schwartz is accustomed to reinterpretations of the musical about a young prince who goes into the world to seek his life's purpose, trying out war, politics, sex and even domestic life. "It's not so specifically set in a place and a time that you can't fool around with it," he says by phone from his Connecticut home.

The melding of anime and hip-hop into "Pippin" fits the pan-cultural attitude Dang observes among young people at East West. "A lot of the younger audiences, the younger performers, don't want to be defined by race anymore. They're not necessarily Asian anymore, or African American or Latino," Dang says. "They're this urban, metropolitan, cosmopolitan kind of generation."

Dang's initial impulse to connect "Pippin" to hip-hop was inspired by Fosse. "Bob Fosse's choreography is very sexy; it deals with a lot of isolation of body parts -- lots of shoulders, lots of hips, lots of knees and all that. I see that correlation in hip-hop."

As he works with the actors during a rehearsal, Dang tells his cast to mimic the cool, understated style of anime. "We thought that everything that we do onstage has to be dead serious, as if it's life or death," Dang says. "There's a lot less 'Ta da!' "

For Gedde Watanabe, best known as the foreign exchange student in the 1984 film "Sixteen Candles," this means a change in tone. "My tendency is to go hammy all the way," he says. "I have to kind of squash it down a bit."

In keeping with the themes of the show, musical director Marc Macalintal has re-orchestrated songs to create hip-hop rhythms. This version of "Pippin" features a DJ who mixes music on turntables. Converting the songs into hip-hop sometimes proved challenging. "You get songs like 'Magic to Do,' where the melody line is so not hip-hop," says Marcus Choi, who stars as the Leading Player. "If anything, there's a sort of a pop element to it."

Matsui is co-choreographing with Jason Tyler Chong, who has danced in Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera videos. The dancers use not only the hip rolls of hip-hop but also the gravity-defying moves of karate -- all in the service of "visually trying to make a magical world," Matsui says.

Other touches include sword and spear routines during "War Is a Science." In "Spread a Little Sunshine," Jenn Aedo, who plays Fastrada, uses her professional bubble-blowing skills. "With You" is a suggestive rave, says Chong. "Not fully S&M," he says. "I'm going to insinuate some of it. This is a sexy 'Pippin.' "

The stage resembles a dance club, with characters perched on platforms to evoke anime's unpredictable camera angles. A large projection screen features "variations on Japanese woodblock prints with a kicked-up anime color scheme," designer Alan Muraoka explains. During Pippin's politics phase, live video will be shown.

The Leading Player has sunglasses and a long black trench coat, à la Keanu Reeves in "The Matrix." Charles, Pippin's dad, is a Transformer-like figure. The chorus girls could blend in in the Harajuku district of Tokyo, where young women rebel against the rigidity of Japan by dressing like punk schoolgirls, Lolitas and other outrageous personas.

With so many cross-cultural allusions, how will the show fit together? "I'm not sure I understand how it's going to work," Schwartz says, "but I look forward to seeing it."

Ask Playbill.com: The Dance Arranger

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from the Playbill.com staff.

Question: Peter Howard, the long-time Broadway dance arranger, passed away on April 18. What does a dance arranger do?

Answer: For this question, AskPlaybill.com spoke with David Chase, the dance arranger for the current Broadway shows Cry-Baby, Curtains and The Little Mermaid (not to be confused with the creator of "The Sopranos").

"The simplest answer is that my job is to be the liaison between the music department and the dance department," Chase says. He's "the person who takes both the melodic and the musical structure of the show, and what the choreographer wants to do physically, and tries to marry them."

Think of a classic cartoon, Chase explains: "Every time a character does something, it's [accompanied by] an appropriate sound. Every time someone takes a step, you hear the band go, 'bloomp bloomp bloomp.' Or every time they come down the steps, they go, 'de-de-de-de-de.'"

Similarly, the dance arranger has to make sure that the sound matches the dance movements. So when the dancers kick, for instance, the dance arranger wants to make sure that it's accompanied by a cymbals crash. Or perhaps he wants a softer accent, like a drum sound. Or perhaps the melody doesn't accommodate an accent on that kick, and you have to shift the melody around, or move the kick to somewhere else in the music. And, do you want the kick on the downbeat (the first beat in the measure, which is typically emphasized in classically derived music such as Rodgers and Hammerstein and Andrew Lloyd Webber) or the offbeat (the second beat in the measure, which is typically emphasized in rock-and-roll, Gershwin and other popular music forms).

Or perhaps, in some cases, you don't want the kick accented at all. "We sometimes refer to music becoming too Mickey Mouse," he says, when it's "too cartoony because you're hitting every accent." Think about scoring a movie, Chase says: Sometimes you want the music to enhance the scene emotionally, while other times the music should play against the scene. "If you have emotional music with an emotional scene, it can get sappy," he says.

Chase uses another useful metaphor (there are a lot of useful metaphors for his job): "It's like focusing a light on an actor's face — I'm using the music to tell the audience where to look at the dance." Sometimes you want an actor to be very well-lit; other times, you want him in a bit of darkness.

On a larger level a dance arranger has to look at the song as a whole. When should the dance breaks happen? When do the dancers need a short bit of background music to play as a transition, while they make their way up the stairs, for instance? What kind of music should that be? A dance arranger then has to write those dance breaks and those transitions, using music that the composer has written for that song, or for other songs in the show, or from other songs from that time period. While making these decisions, a dance arranger has to make sure that these decisions fit the style of music the composer is trying to evoke, and the story that the director wants the song to tell.

Chase says he starts his process by talking to the composer, the music director, the orchestrator, the arranger (if there is one), the director and the choreographer. He gets everyone's input and looks for a singularity of vision — typically coming from the director — that will guide his work.

After that, Chase spends a lot of his time with the choreographer. He explains: "Rob Ashford and Kathleen Marshall both like making ABC lists. The A numbers are the ones that really involve dance and specific dance movements. The B list is the one that involves essentially musical staging. The Cs are the numbers that they don't really need to think about except for shaping in a very general sense, like a ballad, something that isn't movement driven."

Starting with the "A" numbers and working their way down, Chase and the choreographer discuss their general thoughts on each song. For instance, in "A Little Upset," the prison number in Cry-Baby, Chase says that Ashford "knew it would have a chase sequence, he knew that within the number there would be moments when the guys break out of prison. Where can we expand the number?" Not only where it makes sense musically, but where it makes sense with what's going on physically.

They play through the song. "We say here's a place we can expand it. Then: how do we want to expand it? Is it just its own section, which means you're establishing something that has its own melody?" — like a dance break. "Or we're going to [only] add a couple of eights here" — that's dance language for eight counts. (When each measure has four counts, for instance, eight counts is two measures. If you've seen A Chorus line think of it as the eight in "five, six, seven, eight.")

Chase then has to write the music to fit what he and the choreographer decide. In "A Little Upset," he wrote the music and the words for the Latin chant that the prisoners sing as they go up the steps (approved by the songwriters). He created the music that's heard after the prisoners break out of prison and the police are chasing them around the stage. For that sequence, he drew from songs in the show, plus influences that fit the 1954 setting, such as Ray Charles' "Hit the Road Jack," Peggy Lee's version of "Fever," Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, and the music of Neil Hefti, who in the '60s wrote the "Batman" theme.

Chase and the choreographer start out spending a week together, four or five hours per day, discussing their general thoughts. Then after a month, they come back together for another week or two to nail down the details, this time with more people in the room, such as an associate, an assistant and the dance captain. "He'll come back and say, 'I wish I had four more counts here,' and I'll say, 'Can you do that for one more bar?'"

Other details get added later. At some point, someone in the creative team said that the characters of Allison and Cry-Baby should sing during this chase sequence. David Javerbaum, one of the songwriters, wrote a lyric for that section. Lynne Shankel, the music director and arranger, arranged the vocals. And then Chase inserted it into the song — he and Ashford decided that she should sing while three of the dancers run in slow motion.

After Chase is done arranging the whole song, he hands his music to the orchestrator to orchestrate, with very detailed notes: "This is what I hear, this is what's important, here's where it's loud, here's where it's really supporting the dance, here's where you can go a slightly different way," Chase says.

During rehearsals, Chase starts off as the rehearsal pianist during dance rehearsals, paying close attention to the dancers. "I might say, 'Gosh, that's a bigger accent than I thought,' or 'That's a bigger gesture than I thought.'" During breaks he'll often make changes to his score, which is on his laptop in Finale, and can even have the stage management print out the score and make copies for the actors that day. During previews, he still makes changes — he can sit by the sound booth, make a change, and have a new score ready by the end of a performance.

Some numbers are harder to crack than others. One particularly difficult song was "Kansasland" in Curtains. "On the script it says 'Bambi does an incredible dance that wows everyone,'" Chase says. "That character has to prove that she's truly talented and not just there because of her mother." Chase and Ashford created a whole Wild West-like dance sequence to convey this idea. Ashford took advantage of the actress Megan Sikora's flexibility, and Chase created music that was "somewhere between 'American in Paris' and Aaron Copeland," he says.

Chase has a few favorite songs from his productions, in which he felt the dancing and the music melded particularly well: "Too Darn Hot" from the 1999 revival of Kiss Me, Kate, choreographed by Kathleen Marshall; the courtesan dance in "The House of Marcus Lycus" from the 1996 revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, choreographed by Rob Marshall; the Havana sequence in Guys and Dolls in London, again with Ashford; and "Hernando's Hideaway" in The Pajama Game revival, with Kathleen Marshall, in which Harry Connick, Jr. had a piano solo in the middle of it. That song, Chase says, was "about how people interacted with him playing piano. How the song adjusted itself around the style of the playing." He adds, "That version of 'Hernando's' could only have existed with Harry Connick."

               

"Shine a Light"

Tonight, a friend and I saw “Shine a Light,” Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Stones concert documentary, at The Bridge. I don’t think I had been there since seeing “Minority Report” in 2002 during our cross-country road trip and then arguing about whether we the guy we spotted standing in the courtyard afterwards was Judge Reinhold.

I have fond memories of my dad and his friend Nate taking me to see the Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheels tour IMAX movie at the Air & Space Museum. When Mick Jagger entered with that long, red cape and sang “Start Me Up,” I was blown away.

It is a bit strange to watch a big, exciting concert on a screen with only ten other people on a Tuesday night, our butts firmly planted in the seats. (At the Air & Space Museum, one brave couple danced in the aisle.) But even if our body language didn’t show it, the movie was pretty exciting. I loved how close you got to all those craggily faces. I also liked how, when you see Mick Jagger from this close, you see his shoulders moving, his hips moving, and you realize how accomplished of a dancer he is. I always figured he was just haphazardly jumping around and twitching around. But I realized that this guy could probably be a Broadway dancer.

In terms of the songs, I especially liked “Brown Sugar,” “Tumbling Dice,” “As Tears Go By,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” and their cover of The Temptations’ “Just My Imagination.” The Christina Aguilera duet was fun, but despite her technical singing ability, I couldn’t understand a word (and, as my friend pointed out, she looked like a blow-up doll). Some parts slowed, like the songs where Keith Richards did lead vocals, which are always the slowest part of the concerts themselves. And I might have preferred the drama of a huge stadium to the intimacy of the Beacon Theater. But on the whole, I enjoyed myself. I even liked the little interview bits interspersed throughout, and the parts at the beginning where Scorsese tears his hair out trying to find out the set list.

My one question: why was the front row packed with attractive 25-year-old girls? At a Rolling Stones benefit concert, in an intimate theater, with tickets I’m sure costing unfathomable amounts, attractive 25-year-old girls bought up all the front row tickets? Martin Scorsese appears to be — unintentionally, I hope — emulating “American Idol,” which recruits sorority girls to sit in the audience and arranges them so that their distance from the camera is inversely proportional to their hotness, according to The New York Times. On second viewing, I’ll try to tell if these girls know the words.

Actor interviews

One main problem with entertainment journalism that I’ve slowly realized: actors are the people we focus on the most, while other people in entertainment have more interesting things to say.

At a “Brothers & Sisters” panel last week, the moderator kept asking the actors questions like “does Tommy still love his wife,” to which Balthazar Getty, who plays Tommy, said, essentially, “Of course.” In many of the questions, she was asking for descriptions of the characters, which isn’t particularly interesting to me. It doesn’t feel like the response to such questions would be a response that only the actor could offer. A lay observer could have said that Tommy still loved his wife. An example of a perspective that only the actor can offer is when Rob Lowe said that people walk up to him and say “I wish we could field a candidate like McAllister,” his presidential candidate character (that, incidentally, was the only sentence Rob Lowe uttered the entire time, since there were about 17 people onstage). Generally, what the actors said paled in comparison to what the executive producer Greg Berlanti — who is involved in charting these characters’ lives — could tell us about how the people in the writers room shaped the show, and indeed, he had the most interesting things to say: for instance, talking about how they first set up that Uncle Sol had some sort of mystery to him but didn’t know what that was, and then were trying to figure out what that was, until one writer jokingly said “what if Sol is gay,” and that stuck, and then how they had to get approval for it from various people, including the actor and the network. Not the most fascinating story, but still probably more interesting than what Ron Rifkin, the actor who plays Sol, could offer (one interesting thing Rifkin did say was he’s almost 70, which was very surprising, since he looks ten years younger).

Similarly, at a “Friday Night Lights” panel at the Paley Festival, most of the questions were directed at executive producer Jason Katims — who was sitting next to the entire cast — because he had the most interesting things to say and he could answer the questions people were most curious to ask. The cast sort of sat there, not doing much. One of the more fascinating aspects was what the actors didn’t know — the actress who played Tyra, for instance, didn’t know what grade her character is in.

Granted, famous film celebrities are more interesting than less famous TV stars, but the attention they get is not commensurate with the perspective that they offer. We resort to talking about the same old topics: their choice of roles, their onscreen persona, their return to theater or TV or wherever they happen to be headed. But unless they have a juicy personal life (as explained in all these identical articles about Robert Downey, Jr.’s recovery and now starring role in “Iron Man,” for instance), it’s hard to make interview with an actor more interesting than an interview with the person who created the story the actor is telling.

Perhaps we need to figure out new questions to ask actors. For instance, I was talking to Angela Bassett for my article about Laurence Fishburne, and she mentioned that after playing Tina Turner, she brought part of that character into her real life, kind of like how after Fishburne played a flashy Othello with an earring, he brought some of that flash into his life. That’s the sort of under-explored angle that I’d be interesting in writing about and reading about.

Ask Playbill.com: Lighting

From Playbill.com

This week's question comes from Robbie of Providence, RI.

Question: I often help out community theatre productions and local high schools with their lighting design, but often I'm brought in at the last minute, when all the sets, costumes and staging have been completed. I was wondering how lighting designers on Broadway handle their craft?

Answer: To answer this question, AskPlaybill.com spoke with Brian MacDevitt and Kevin Adams, two prolific, Tony-winning lighting designers.

Like many designers, lighting designers often work with directors they've worked with before. It's "kind of 50-50 between people I've worked with and people who have [only] seen my work," Adams says.

Sometimes they pick shows based on scheduling. And while major lighting designers' diversity of credits makes it seem as if any of them could do any type of show, Adams says he'll often turn down shows he doesn't think he's right for. He says, "There are shows that are realistic types of lighting, like sunrises and sunsets and candlelight. That's not me. I just don't have the patience to re-create all that. I like abstracted space, and I like event type of shows — heavier on the event than the realistic storytelling."

Is the set designer typically hired first? "That's typical of a commercial production, because people will open the purse strings slowly," MacDevitt says. It takes longer to build sets than it does to create the lighting. So if a producer is planning to open a show on Broadway this fall, for instance, even if the production isn't a done deal, you need to hire a set designer as soon as possible. Since you can wait a bit on the lighting designer, you might as well do so. Then, in case the show falls through, you've been spared the cost of the lighting designer's initial payment. At non-profit theatres, where productions are slotted into a theatre ahead of time, everyone tends to be hired at once, MacDevitt says.

Adams has had a slightly different experience. "Often I'm hired after the set designer," he says, but "the last few years I've been hired before the set designer." That's perhaps because — or why — the lighting in his shows Passing Strange and Spring Awakening, with their walls of light, is so prominent.

The designer starts the process by reading the script many times. While reading, MacDevitt says, he's "trying to respond to the show emotionally, and, with that emotional response, think of how you can contribute to it personally," he says. "Is it a happy place? A sad place?" For instance, he says, for A Catered Affair, he felt that "lighting should be warm and inviting, and we should kind of want to be in the room with the performers. That really has as lot to do with the color — having a warmer color, a softness to it."

MacDevitt says this conceptualizing is not unlike trying to alter the lighting in your home. "People are all lighting designers when they turn off the fluorescent lights in the kitchen and put the candles on the table. They're designing the lighting in the room to make it feel a certain way."

After initial conceptual discussions with the director and other designers, the lighting designer has to create a light plot. This is a map of all the lights in the show — how they're arranged on each pipe above the stage and in the house, where they point and what colors they are. "I often work from background to foreground, laying in layers of light," Adams says.

The designers have to decide how to circuit the lights together — the equivalent of deciding which lighting fixtures will be on which switches and dimmers in your house. And they also decide on lights with special effects. In Adams' design for The 39 Steps, for instance, he has a light with a moving cloud loop, to create the effect of clouds moving along a blue background.

MacDevitt says A Catered Affair, a small musical, has around 400 stationary lights and 30 robotic lights that move around. A big musical could have 1,000 stationary and 100 moving.

During this process, in addition to underscoring the emotions, a designer also thinks about how to frame what's happening onstage. This proved especially difficult, for instance, when Adams did Peter and Jerry at Second Stage. The director wanted the lighting to stay exactly the same for the entire show, throughout both one-acts. "At times the staging was very tight, just on a bench, and at times it covered a 25-foot wide space, so to make a look that could cover both of those was hard," he says.

The lighting plot gets turned in right before rehearsals start, or very early on in rehearsals, Adams says, "which I found very difficult to do when I first stated this. You don't really know what the staging is. You put in room to wiggle around." Does the plot have to change? "Sometimes very little changes and sometimes a lot changes — and a lot is like 30 percent," he says. "It's rare that an entire plot is overhauled."

MacDevitt mentions that after the designer turns in his light plot, there's usually a back-and-forth with the producers over costs. You're mainly trying to keep rental costs down, which on a play could be about $3,000 a week, while on a musical could be $15,000 a week and upwards, he says.

After the light plot is set, you go into the theatre and "focus" the lights — meaning you hang them up and point them at the right place on stage. Then you create each light cue in the show by setting exactly how intense each light or set of lights will be in each cue, and recording them on a computer. A big part of this process, MacDevitt says, is the "transition from scene to scene: Do they black out quickly or do they cross fade from one part of the stage to another like in a musical segue, or is the curtain coming down and you're taking all the light off the stage?"

Is lighting supposed to be noticed? Or is it like a film score, where, as the cliché goes, it's better if you don't notice it? Adams says, "There are times when the lighting is part of the spectacle, and should be very 'muscular,' I call it, should be doing a lot of the work. But there are times that l should sit back and let other elements push the storytelling along. A show can be all of one or all of the other or be combinations of those things." For instance, in Spring Awakening, "in the book parts of the show, the lighting sits back, and when you go into the songs, the lighting gets a little more muscular." In general, the effect should never be too obvious. "Someone's murdered — red light! After you do that a bunch of times when you're 25, you don't do that any more," Adams says.

How do these designers design a half-dozen shows at once? Typically, they're all at different stages, though not always: "In January I was working on three different shows, and I was in three different theatres some days," Adams says. And they hire a staff. MacDevitt, for instance, employs an associate designer to help him with a play, and one associate and one or two assistants for every musical (each helper is only on one show at a time).

Adams employs a unique philosophy for handling the workload. He explains, "I was a waiter when I was younger, at Bennigan's, and they taught us to think of your tables not as five separate tables but as one table. And that's helped me so much in my work. It's like one big show that you have to move forward every day instead of lots of little shows."

Octopus

I was watching the end of the movie “Love, Actually” at 4 AM the other night and I realized something about the octopus.

First, I’ll explain where we are in the story: On Christmas Eve, the prime minister gets a Christmas card from the girl he loves, Natalie, who used to work for him, which prompts him to go house to house on one street to look for her (it’s a fantastic sequence, and I never tire of watching it, especially the part where the prime minister and his driver sing Christmas carols for three little girls).

Finally, he gets to Natalie’s house, where the family is about go to a Christmas pageant. Natalie’s mom complains to the prime minister about having to sew her son’s octopus costume for the pageant. The prime minister says he’ll give them a ride to the pageant. He and Natalie sit in the backseat with the kid in the octopus costume between them, making it awkward for them to confess their feelings for one another. They give some vague apologies for what went wrong in the past, before arriving at the pageant, where the octopus kid finally climbs over the prime minister and squeezes through the door.

Here’s what I realized: The movie itself is an octopus. There are many different love stories, all of which are tied together (at least one character in each knows a character in another). There are, in fact, eight stories:

1. Prime minister and Natalie
2. Alan Rickman's affair with his co-worker despite being married to Emma Thompson
3. Laura Linney loving the foreign guy
4. Liam Neeson getting over the death of his wife while his pre-teen kid loves a girl from his school
5. The guy who loves Keira Knightley even though she's married to Chiwetel Ejiofor
6. Colin Firth loves the Portuguese woman
7. Bill Nighy loves his manager
8. The crazy dude who loves American girls

The mother who complains to the prime minister about having to sew eight legs onto the octopus costume is a stand-in for the writer who — at this very moment in the script — has to sew up the movie. And he does that at the Christmas pageant.

Not convinced? Richard Curtis, the writer-director, is one of the greatest writers alive and a hero in England. As I’m writing this now, the symbol feels, if anything, a bit gimmicky, even obvious. But that’s the point of the movie — the entire thing is gimmicky, schematic. It sets up many different situations in which there’s the potential for love, and in most cases love flourishes, and in a couple it flounders.

I’ve always thought of Curtis as the British Cameron Crowe. Both are romantic comedy writers reminiscent of Billy Wilder. And both are not afraid to be schematic, to be a bit over the top. They’re not afraid to be sentimental. Sometimes they go overboard — Colin Firth getting the new diary at the end of “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” the entire “Vanilla Sky” — but more often, they make it work brilliantly.