Tagged: theater

If you weren't a college theater major, you can be forgiven for not knowing much about commedia dell'arte, the 500-year-old theatrical tradition that Carlo Goldoni used for his comedy The Servant of Two Masters in 1743. Contemporary playwright Richard Bean has adapted that play into the decidedly British laugh riot One Man, Two Guvnors -- and he says all you really need to know about commedia is ... well, it's funny.

"Commedia dell'arte," Bean says, "is very physical comedy, and there's a lot of clowning in it. ... You won't find much irony in this play. You know, if you think this is gonna be one of those very sophisticated British ironic comedies, no. ... We're a little bit more Benny Hill than Monty Python."

Earlier this month, tenor Juan Diego Florez made headlines when he sang the aria "Una furtiva lagrima" in the Donizetti opera L'elisir D'Amore at the Metropolitan Opera — not once, but twice.

The audience responded so enthusiastically that after well over a minute of applause and shouts of "Encore!" he sang the whole thing again — all five minutes of it.

Letting someone re-sing an aria is rare at the Met; there have been only three encores in the past 18 years, because the company has had a policy forbidding them. But there's a reason most places don't have policies against this sort of literal "showstopper": Audiences love them.

Since they made their debut in 1971, it's been rare for Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice to not have a show on Broadway. But now they're ramping it up, with the opening of Evita following fast on the heels of Jesus Christ Superstar.

"It's actually just a coincidence as far as I can tell, because the two shows came from totally different sources," Rice says. "And by sheer chance, they've arrived within two or three weeks of each other on Broadway, which is fun!"

They're fancier now — Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber and Sir Tim Rice — but when they wrote these shows they were just Andrew and Tim, a couple of young, hungry songwriters who wanted to bring a rock 'n' roll energy to the musical stage.

When 21-year-old Kevin Smith decided he wanted to be a filmmaker, his sister gave him some advice: "Don't say you want to be a filmmaker; just be one." So he did. He made his first film, Clerks, on a shoestring, shooting at the convenience store where he worked.

Smith has gone on to have a long and quirky career; his films, including Chasing Amy and Dogma, bear his unmistakable imprimatur — the black humor, the verbose slacker genius characters. But Smith, who has already garnered a huge following with his podcasts, says he is taking his ideas — and career — into "other arenas."

When Philip Seymour Hoffman took the stage on March 15 in the new revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, he became the fifth actor in 63 years to walk the boards of Broadway in the shoes of the blustery, beleaguered salesman, Willy Loman. In the last six decades, each incarnation of the play has resonated with a new generation of theatergoers.