New Year and a lot of activity. I had the pleasure of attending the Telsey + Company's auditions for the upcoming Broadway production of
"A Street Car Named Desire". It was a great experience and hopefully the first of many at T + C.
Ben Gazzara died earlier this month. I had the honor of watching Mr. Gazzare work in a production of Clifford Odets's "
Awake and Sing!" on Broadway in 2006. Among his long career in theater and film he played Brick in the original
“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” on Broadway. We are slowly loosing a whole generation of giants that help shape American theater as we know it. As an actor its important to look at the legacy that the generation of the "Golden Age" have left us.
Amazingly enough the original cast of
Awake and Sing! included Stella and Luther Adler, Morris Carnovsky and Sanford Meisner. All of these actors came out of the Actors Studio who's work was about the pursuit of a deeper and richer form of acting.
How do we get back there? It seems like most of the movies being produced these days are about profits with little attention to storyline or quality of the acting. Yeah, yeah, I know, that's also what Stanislavski said 90 years ago (but seriously), who would you cast today to act in
God Father,
Kramer vs Kramer, Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf,
Dear Hunter, Street Car Named Desire, ect.
Let me know what you think, even if you don't agree. How do we get back to a focus on acting and storytelling?