The song “Shy” from the Broadway musical, Once Upon a Mattress, made a star out of Carol Burnett. The score was composed by Mary Rodgers, and of course, the last name Rodgers should ring a bell because indeed, Mary Rodgers was the daughter of Richard Rodgers, which was both her blessing and her curse. “Shy” is not only the name of the song but also the name of Mary Rodgers’ recent autobiography, published posthumously with the help of NY Times theatre critic Jesse Green. if there is a major theme in the story of Mary Rodgers life, it is how does a talented daughter get out from under the shadow of a very famous musical genius.
Click on the triangle or mp3 link above to hear my review of Shy, as broadcast today on the Art Express radio program, heard on WBAI-FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.
Imagine please: A working class uprising. The lower classes are starving. They demand the right to eat. They want access to the great stores of grain that have been won in the recent war, confiscated from the enemy, but withheld from the peasants. And so begins the most class-conscious play that Shakespeare ever wrote, called Coriolanus.
Click on the triangle above or mp3 link to hear our commentary on Coriolanus, as broadcast yesterday on the Arts Express radio program, heard on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation
Click on the triangle or mp3 link above to hear the piece as broadcast today on the Arts Express radio program on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.
** Actress Inger Tudor of Goliath speaks about Voodoo Macbeth and playing Rose McClendon, the legendary Depression-era African-American theater actress.
** A portfolio of photos from the actual historic 1936 Federal Theatre Project production of Macbeth
** 28 Children: Artist Mary McClusker’s moving tribute to children killed by guns
and more!
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In our Arts Express Playhouse, a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Gilman is best known for her novella The Yellow Wallpaper, but she also wrote hundreds of other short stories. The one I’m reading above, “If I Were a Man,” was written in 1914, before women even had the right to vote in the US, but it seems a whole lot more modern.
Click on the triangle or mp3 link above to hear the story as broadcast today on the Arts Express radio show, heard on WBAI-FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.
It’s April 23rd, and for us it marks the anniversary of both the birthday of William Shakespeare and the day he died. In celebration of the date, we have produced a new radio version of one of the most intriguing of Shakespeare’s plays, Measure for Measure. I call it Shakespeare’s #Me Too play, and with its up to the minute Me Too themes of sexual harassment and hypocritical Puritanical seeming lying politicians, it couldn’t be more relevant to today. Of course, we couldn’t broadcast our entire play in our Arts Express time slot, but we are happy to present to you a key scene featuring two of our Arts Express stalwarts, Mary Murphy and KeShaun Luckie.
So let’s set the scene: We’re in 16th century Vienna and the newly appointed interim Mayor, Lord Angelo, has just declared a new Puritanical ban on out-of-marriage fornication, punishable by death. A young woman, Isabella, learns, just as she is about to take vows to become a nun, that her poor brother Claudio has run afoul of these laws and is about to be executed. She runs to Lord Angelo to beg him to spare her brother’s life, but Angelo insists that the law must be done. However, Angelo is secretly enamored by Isabella and he wants to see her again, so he tells her to come back the next day and maybe he will reconsider. And so, Isabella returns to Lord Angelo to plead again for her brother.
And now what happens next, from Measure For Measure.
Click on the triangle or mp3 link above to hear the segment as broadcast today on Arts Express radio, heard on WBAI FM and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.
And If you’d like to listen to our entire production of the play, you can hear it here:
Here he is in one of his most masterful performances as Walter Lee Younger in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.
The play was originally directed on Broadway by Lloyd Richards, the first Black director on the Broadway stage. In their lean days as struggling actors, Richards and Poitier would pool their money to buy and split a hot dog. They promised each other that if one got an opportunity, they’d bring the other along. When Poitier got Hansberry’s script, he insisted that Lloyd direct the play. Lloyd worked intensely with Hansberry to shape the play and then cast and directed the play perfectly. The stage cast, many of whom were also in the film– and who you can see in this clip from the film–included Ruby Dee, Diana Sands, Claudia McNeil, and John Fiedler.
There’s a long history of actors and variety performers who have had their first taste of theater with a basement childhood puppet stage. But actor Robert Brock of Lancaster PA was determined to make good on his childhood dream of building a marionette theater for the public and living in an apartment upstairs. Now in a new documentary, director Alexander Monelli brings to life the joys and woes of Robert’s single-minded adult pursuit of his childhood dream in Monelli’s new film Marionette Land.
Click on the triangle or mp3 link above to hear the interview with Alexander Monelli, as broadcast yesterday on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica stations across the nation.
Daniel Radcliffe in a non-Harry Potter-ish role, insists on the unity of us all, as his corporate brethren in How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying agree. Robert Morse and Matthew Broderick who both played the same role, introduce the high-spirited number at the Tony Awards.
Who knew that Radcliffe was such a great song-and-dance man?
At the closing performance of Jonathan Larsen’s Rent, after 12 years on Broadway, the cast was joined in their finale by the original 1996 cast to sing “Seasons of Love.”
A romantic ghost story of the transients from O Henry, adapted and performed by myself.
Click on the triangle or mp3 link above to hear the story, as broadcast today on the Arts Express radio program heard on WBAI FM NY and Pacifica stations across the nation.
Monday Morning, waking up hyperactive, the power is out and last year’s rent is due.
The frenetic choreography is over the top for me, but the music and lyrics as sung by the 2008 Broadway cast of Jonathan Larsen’s Rent are still zippy.
John Bernos and Dominique Xi during the Sunday performance of “Covid Crime” at Richard Tucker Park on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Photo Credit…An Rong Xu for The New York Times
This is a play by Lionelle Hamanaka concerning the wave of anti-Asian hate crimes that have occurred in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak. The play was performed live on the streets of NYC. The cast also got together to do a radio version which I helped put together. This radio version was heard yesterday on WBAI FM.
You can hear the radio version of “Covid Crime” by clicking on the triangle or mp3 link above.
For Halloween, an original update of an old-time radio show, we call 2121: A Tale of the Near Future.
In a world where efficiency must be maximized, are poets and artists non-essential workers to be imprisoned and exterminated?
Featuring Mary Murphy as Caroline, Rick Tuman as the Guard, Julius Hollingsworth as the General Manager, and myself as James T. Randall. With music from Kojiro Miura.
Click the triangle or mp3 link above to hear the story, as broadcast today on Arts Express on WBAI FM NYC, and Pacifica stations across the country.
A delightful dance from The Birmingham Royal Ballet in David Bintley’s Hobson’s Choice, about the three daughters of a shoestore owner. With Stephen Wicks as Albert Prosser and Chenca Williams as Alice Hobson.
More and more today’s world is looking Kafkaesque, so I thought this week we’d go back to the original. The Franz Kafka’s short story, “A Hunger Artist,” was published in final form in 1924. In it, Kafka tells a tale that almost any artist today can identify with. Kafka edited the story on his death bed as he lay dying from tuberculosis at the age of 40.
Click on the grey triangle or mp3 link above to hear the story, which I adapted and performed, broadcast today on Arts Express on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the country.
This September we celebrate the birthday of author Sarah Jewett, who was born September 3rd, 1849. Her short stories and poetry were infused with local color and country life, but there are deeper themes running through her work as well: feminist critics have championed her writing for its rich account of women’s lives and voices, and ecologically minded critics have praised her works for her deep love of the natural world.
I adapted and performed on the radio one of her most famous stories, “A White Heron,” in which a young girl has to decide what’s most important to her in life.
Click on the grey triangle or mp3 link above to hear the story as broadcast today on Arts Express on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the country.
We were happy to bring on a new contributor to Arts Express radio, storyteller David Lepelstat. David is a storyteller who has appeared twice on The Moth Radio Hour podcast telling original stories from his childhood. Here in an Arts Express exclusive, he tells a story of youth and the lure of New York City, written and performed by himself.
Click the triangle or mp3 link above to hear David’s story as broadcast today on Arts Express on WBAI FM NYC, and Pacifica stations across the country.
“Why I came here? Start the machine. I’ll tell you everything…Because the olive trees were bare, because the date trees gave no fruit…”
For the week of Father’s Day, A Fathers Day Fatherly Story. Performed by myself and Linda Shalom, as adapted from my novel, The New World, which begins with a Syrian-Jewish immigrant’s journey to this country at the turn of the 20th century.
Click the triangle or mp3 link above to hear our tale, as broadcast today on Arts Express on WBAI FM NY and Pacifica stations across the nation.
