[title]
The holidays are over and students are getting ready to return to school, hit the books and wait for the end of spring term. We’re sort of doing the same in theater. Right now it’s pretty slow (except for, y’know, Under the Radar, COIL, PROTOTYPE and the 14 other festivals this month) but by March it’ll be crazy. Let’s make like college students and do some cramming and research before the wave hits. The following blog post is most definitely not for spoiler haters.
Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies
I’ve already got my paperback copies of Hilary Mantel’s two-volume Tudor doorstop. (Thanks for the Barnes & Noble gift card, mom!) I’ll have to use every free second I have on the subway or during intermissions plowing through them.
Cheat: If you don’t mind catching up with the stage show in May or June, you can see a TV-movie version of the story when PBS’s Masterpiece broadcasts a starry adaptation (starring Mark Rylance and Damien Lewis) on April 5.
Finding Neverland
The 2004 fantasy weepie was based on Allan Knee’s 1998 Off Broadway play The Man Who Was Peter Pan, which we can assume took liberties with the factual record. The story is basically how a bunch of kids and their lonely widowed mom inspired J.M. Barrie’s classic play Peter Pan. So you could read the play the movie and musical purport to show the making of.
Cheat: Are you kidding? The movie is the main reference point; get it on Netflix.
Fun Home
Alison Bechdel’s widely acclaimed graphic novel about her complex, closeted father and her own coming out was the inspiration for this groundbreaking musical. You could get the source and see how book writer/lyricist Lisa Kron and composer Jeanine Tesori transformed it for the stage.
Cheat: No need to cheat; Bechdel’s amazing.
Doctor Zhivago
Apparently producers think that New York is clamoring for a musical based on Boris Pasternak’s 1957 novel about love and art and Russia from World War I to the Revolution. Got time to read the 600-page tome? No? Then you better block off more than three hours to screen David Lean’s 1965 film adaptation.
Cheat: Either way you’re going to be spending a long time in Siberia.