TCR on Show Business: "Judy + Liza + Robert + Freddie + David + Sue + ME" by Stevie Phillips

"What is an agent?" asks Stevie Phillips in her recently published memoir Judy + Liza + Robert + Freddie + David + Sue + ME  (St. Martin's Press). Phillips knows the answer. She was once among the most powerful talent agents in the entertainment industry, having shepherded Liza Minnelli and Robert Redford to superstardom.

"An agent is a fraud, but a fraud with good intentions...someone totally willing to sublimate herself to be the person the client wants her to be. Do you want me to be angry on your behalf? Here I am. Do you want me to be docile for you? Here I am. But regardless of what role-playing takes place, an agent must always maintain integrity and never lead a client knowingly in the wrong direction," Phillips writes.

Unlike the legendary agent Irving "Swifty" Lazar, whose Oscar night parties were the height of Hollywood A-list gatherings. or the world class schmoozer Sue Mengers, such a big personality that she was brought back to life in 2013 by Bette Midler in the one-character Broadway play I'll Eat You Last and is the subject of a just published biography (Can I Go Now? by Brian Kellow) Phillips never became more famous than a lot of her clients. Her stock in trade was cool, calm, behind the scenes efficiency.

TCR on Broadway: Interview with Author Peter Filichia on Broadway Musicals That Did Not Win the Tony Award

In the recently published Strippers, Showgirls, and Sharks: A Very Opinionated History of the Broadway Musicals That Did Not Win the Tony Award author and theater critic Peter Filichia takes a vibrant and extremely well-informed look into why so many classic shows failed to win Broadway's biggest prize. The book's title refers to three especially admired non-winners -- Gypsy (strippers), Follies (showgirls) and West Side Story (Sharks, a street gang).

The Tony Awards are given out by the American Theatre Wing, a service organization founded during World War II to oversee Broadway's contribution to the war effort. The Wing ran the famous Stage Door Canteen. After the war, the Wing remained in existence, shifting its mission to supporting the theater generally and bringing theater resources to communities. The Tony Awards -- named in honor of the Wing's co-founder, director and actress Antoinette Perry -- began in 1947. The first awards ceremony was a relatively modest affair in a hotel ballroom. Only a handful awards, many of them honorary, were presented.

"Vanessa: The Life of Vanessa Redgrave" (Interview with biographer Dan Callahan)

At the opening of his superb new biography Vanessa: The Life of Vanessa Redgrave, author Dan Callahan takes readers back to 1997 when he was a drama student in New York. From a discount-price, obstructed view seat the young Callahan watched the great Vanessa Redgrave as Cleopatra in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. At the end of the performance, a matinee at the Public Theater, Redgrave solemnly informed the audience that she had just received word of the death of Fred Zinnemann who had directed her Oscar winning performance in Julia two decades earlier. Redgrave praised Zinnemann's Western film classic High Noon, citing it as a brave statement against the obsessive anti-Communism that pervaded American society in the early 1950s. Then, in her soft British accent, Redgrave astonished the audience by launching into a rendition of the theme to High Noon, a twangy ballad ("Do not forsake me, oh my darling!...") originally sung by Tex Ritter.

The crowd drifted out of the theater as Redgrave continued through the verses of the song but Callahan was transfixed. Nearly twenty years later, his fascination with Redgrave has not diminished.

"I just can’t get enough of watching her. I think that there is something very special going on when she acts, and I wanted to celebrate that," Callahan told The Committee Room.

TCR Remembers Penelope Niven, author of books on Thornton Wilder and James Earl Jones

Thornton Wilder: A Life
by Penelope Niven

The Committee Room notes with sadness the death of Penelope Niven, biographer of playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder (Thornton Wilder: A Life). Niven died unexpectedly on August 28, 2014. At the time of her death, Niven was working on further Wilder projects, including a book titled Wilder on Writing.

In early 2013, Niven generously gave an engaging and in-depth interview to TCR in regard to the recently published Thornton Wilder: A Life.

Kirkus Reviews called Thornton Wilder: A Life "satisfying and insightful...a perceptive, indispensable portrait of a productive and restlessly intellectual life" and the Boston Globe praised it as "a sweeping look into the life of a man who left an indelible mark on the American theater...a vital work of scholarship."

TCR Spotlight on Theater: Most Produced Plays in American Theaters, 2013-2014

Playbill from Venus in Fur,
Goodman Theatre, Chicago, March 2014
(Image/Seth Saith).

The most produced play in America during the now ending 2013-2014 theater season was Venus in Fur by David Ives.

In this two-character black comedy, which runs for an intermission-less ninety minutes, a theater director is having trouble finding the right actress to play the lead in his stage version of Venus in Furs (note the plural), the 1870 novella of female sexual domination and male submission by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (and the origin of the word masochist). When a disheveled and seemingly lame-brained actress shows up late for her audition, she and the director's interaction strangely begins to blend with the themes of Sacher-Masoch's racy novella.

David Ives is a veteran playwright whose work has been produced professionally since the 1970s. His collection of one-act comedies, All in the Timing, was the most produced play of the 1995-1996 season.

A film version of Venus in Fur, directed by Roman Polanski, with a screenplay by Ives and Polanski, was released in June 2014.

According to Theater Communications Group, an organization of American regional theaters, Venus in Fur was produced by twenty-two of its member theaters, during the 2013-2014 season.

Reese Madigan and Greta Wohlrabe in Venus
in Fur, Milwaukee Rep, September 2013
(photo/Milwaukee Rep).

Misha Berson in the Seattle Times, reviewing the Seattle Repertory Theatre production, calls Venus in Fur, "an explosive, erotic and cerebral dialectic" that is "a banquet for actors."

In her review of San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater's production of Venus in Fur, Karen D'Souza of the San Jose Mercury News calls the play "a metatheatrical game of cat and mouse laced with titillation and plot twists" but adds that the "primary flaw in this play within a play is how easily you see into the heart of the matter. Loud echoes of everything from Genet's The Balcony to 50 Shades of Grey ensure that you see where this is going from the first kiss to the last slap."

TCR Recommends -- "The Play That Changed My Life: America's Foremost Playwrights on the Plays That Influenced Them"

The Committee Room loves theater and highly recommends The Play That Changed My Life: America's Foremost Playwrights on the Plays That Influenced Them (2009), a collection of entertaining essays by leading contemporary playwrights in which they recall the pivotal experience that set them on the road to a life in the theatre.

The twenty-one playwrights offering their reminisces come from a variety of backgrounds. Some of them, such as Christopher Durang and Lynn Nottage, were taken to the theatre as children by theatrophilic parents. Others, such as John Patrick Shanley and Diana Son, had little early exposure to theatre and came to it on their own through school productions, television broadcasts, or by reading play texts. Two of the playwrights (Beth Henley and Sarah Ruhl) had mothers who acted in community theater productions but nobody is from a family of theatre professionals.

TCR Spotlight on Theater: Most Produced Plays in America

Walnut Street Theatre,
Philadelphia, 2013

The Committee Room takes a look at what plays are being produced at American theaters.

According to Theatre Communications Group, which includes nearly five-hundred professional, not-for-profit theaters, large and small, across the United States, the most produced play of the 2012-2013 season is Good People by David Lindsay-Abaire.

A drama peppered with biting wit, Good People is the story of an unemployed single mother from blue collar South Boston reconnecting with a high school boyfriend in the hope of finding a job. The boyfriend got out of their gritty neighborhood and is now a doctor living in an upscale suburb.