A belated happy birthday

The composer of the score for my beloved Wicked, Stephen Schwartz, turned 60 years old yesterday, and I completely forgot to wish him a happy birthday. So to make up for it, and to mark the occasion, here are some places to see and hear from him.

Last month, Schwartz was interviewed during his first trip Down Under by the arts editor for Australian Jewish News. You can listen to him talk about a variety of topics in the 18-minute interview, from his Academy Award nominations for Enchanted, to the Australian Open tennis tournament. (Schwartz is a big tennis buff).

Of course, Schwartz also talked a little bit about his reason for visiting Australia: The fourth international production of Wicked, after London, Tokyo and Stuttgart, Germany, opens in Melbourne in July. (With the Broadway production, sitdown companies in Los Angeles and Chicago, and a nationwide tour, has there ever been a musical theater phenomenon like Wicked?)

Schwartz said that when he came across Gregory Maguire's novel, he thought it was the best idea he'd ever heard of for a musical. "As soon as I heard the title and the basic idea, I thought that's for me." He said that the Wizard of Oz is such an American icon, and he enjoys spinning familiar characters and stories in a different direction.

He also talked about whether there's a particular Jewish sensibility to his work. While Schwartz said he never experienced any anti-Semitism growing up in a suburb of New York City, his sense of feeling a little bit outside the mainstream contributed to his interest in characters like Elphaba, "slightly alienated and slightly estranged and are struggling with that."

For a chance to see and hear from Schwartz, you can check out his 2006 appearance at The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. There are seven short video clips of Schwartz talking about his childhood and musical influences, as well as his work on Wicked.

So happy 60th birthday Stephen Schwartz! The first time I heard the score for Wicked, in January 2007, I was moved. Your words and music resonated with me. They opened the door to a magical year of theatergoing. And 14 months later, whenever I listen to them, I'm still moved. I'm a fan - for good.

A new season

I couldn't believe it when I read about next season's lineup at Trinity Repertory Company, which was announced this week by artistic director Curt Columbus, pictured above.

On the schedule for Dec. 5 to Jan. 11 is a play by Adam Bock, The Receptionist. Given that I haven't been a regular theatergoer for very long, what are the chances that they'd pick a play I've seen? I took in The Receptionist last fall at the Manhattan Theatre Club. I didn't realize this, but Bock has an MFA from Brown University and worked for Trinity for awhile, so I guess it makes sense.

I have to admit I didn't absolutely love The Receptionist. It was good, but it just seemed somewhat underdeveloped. The story of the mysterious goings on at the Northeast office of an unnamed company was a little vague. I got impatient with all the small talk. The resolution wasn't quite satisfying, and I left the theater a bit confused about what it all meant.

But Bock has written some great characters and injected lots of humor. It'll probably remind you of some offices you've worked in. I loved Jayne Houdyshell's wonderfully funny yet spot-on performance in the title role. I said in my review: "She's efficient, overprotective of office supplies, motherly, humorous and has plenty of advice to dispense, whether you want it or not."

I'm looking forward to giving The Receptionist a second chance. Hopefully, I'll gain a deeper appreciation for the play. I'll be able to pick up on all the little clues I missed the first time around. And the best thing about Trinity's staging is I'll be able to go to the talkback afterward and say in by best theater-snob voice: "Well, when I saw it in New York ...."

From what I've seen, Columbus puts together a good mixture of classics and new works. And Trinity always manages to put its own spin on the classics. Our Town, from a couple seasons back, is a great example. While it was pretty traditional, there was also a little something that made it unique: in this case, a two-level stage that allowed the audience to watch the actors get ready for the performance.

This is Columbus' third season at the helm. He came to Providence from Chicago's esteemed Steppenwolf Theatre Company. My regular trips to Trinity coincided with his arrival, so I feel like there's a special connection between the two of us. He hosted the talkback held after the first show I saw at Trinity in decades: Hamlet. (And yes, someone at the session did preface their comments by saying, "When I saw it in New York.")

Columbus likes to arrange his lineup around a theme. Next season, it's personal change. Associate Director Craig Watson says: "We wanted to look at plays that spoke about hope, and all the possibilities hope can bring."

One of the shows I'm most looking forward to seeing in the new season is A Raisin in the Sun, which runs from Jan. 30 to March 8. I just watched it on ABC last month, with Phylicia Rashad and Audra McDonald reprising their Tony-winning roles from the Broadway revival. They were just terrific, so compelling and believable. I think the play, about an African-American family in Chicago in the 1950s and their dreams of a better life, has great resonance today.

Raisin will be the centerpiece of Trinity's Project Discovery Plus program, which brings students to the theater and cast members to schools for workshops with students. "These themes of race and class really resonate with students who live in our cities," Watson said. "They’re dealing with these issues on a daily basis."

A little sneak preview

The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis held a sneak preview yesterday for the new musical based on Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie books. Steve on Broadway was there and as usual provides an excellent firsthand account.

Also, you can hear from director Francesca Zambello and get a taste of three songs from the show in a short video clip on the Guthrie's web site.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Zambello said that the musical will take place in the 1880s and focus on a teenage Laura. The story will open in western Minnesota, then move to South Dakota, where the Ingalls family relocated to file a land claim. "They were constantly moving," Zambello said. "They were poor, poor people, constantly in search of land that would yield them something."

Casting for the show will be announced in April, according to a story by Dominic Papatola in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Previews start on July 26, with opening night on Aug. 15. The musical runs through Oct. 5.

And while there's no specific mention of a Broadway run, Papatola says the Guthrie is working with a team of commercial producers led by Ben Sprecher, who most recently helped bring A Moon for the Misbegotten to Broadway last spring. Coincidentally, Moon was my first-ever Broadway show.

The Little House books were some of my favorites from childhood, so I'm looking forward to my first-ever trip to Minnesota this fall, when I'll take in the tuner with my two very wholesome, theater-loving Midwestern friends.

Desperate for a musical?

I know that eventually just about every book, movie and television program gets made into a Broadway musical - or at least someone talks about doing it. But this one I have a hard time picturing.

Actor Kyle MacLachlan tells the British radio station Heart that series creator Marc Cherry has been dropping hits on the set about a Desperate Housewives musical.

"Marc has said that when he finishes his seven years at ABC, he plans to go to Broadway and move into the musical world so maybe he does have some designs in that way," says MacLachlan, who plays Orson Hodge, the husband of Marcia Cross' character Bree on the hit series.

When asked whether he'd be involved, MacLachlan responds, "You never know. It could happen. Never say never, right? There is more chance of that than seeing me in a Twin Peaks musical."

Sorry, I just don't see this. While Cherry has created some very funny situations and interesting, quirky characters, I just can't see them breaking into song.

Caveat lector

File this under the literary deception du jour.

I was in Borders on Sunday and as I always do, I stopped by the table of new hardcovers. I'm often drawn to a cover, and I'll turn to the flap on the dust jacket to see what it's about. I remember looking at a book that had a picture of an older African-American woman with her arm around a young white girl. I skimmed the description, wasn't really interested, and moved on.

Well, I should have looked at it a little more closely. Margaret B. Jones, the author of Love and Consequences, a just-published and highly acclaimed memoir about growing up on the mean streets of South Central Los Angeles, has admitted that she made it all up. It's a complete fake.

Apparently, Jones is not half white and half Native American. She never ran drugs for gang members and she was never a foster child. She never graduated from the University of Oregon, as it says on the book's dust jacket. Her real name is Margaret Seltzer and she graduated from a private high school in North Hollywood. According to the Times story detailing the deception, Seltzer's sister tipped off her publisher that the book was untrue.

In her review, obviously written before the fraud was discovered, the Times' Michiko Kakutani calls the book "remarkable." She wrote "Ms. Jones has done an amazing job of conjuring up her old neighborhood." Apparently, Seltzer did a better job than anyone realized. The Times also published a glowing profile, including pictures of Seltzer at home in Oregon with her 8-year-old daughter. What a great role model for the kid, huh?

Here's her explanation: “For whatever reason, I was really torn and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to,” Ms. Seltzer said. “I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it’s an ego thing — I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.”

Sadly, this isn't the only recent example.

Last week, author Misha Defonseca admitted that her 1997 memoir, Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, was a complete fabrication. In the book, Defonseca describes her experiences as a young Jewish girl in Belgium during World War II. She travels across Europe to flee the Nazis, accompanied by a protective pack of wolves. But it turns out that Defonseca isn't Jewish. Her parents were Catholic resistance fighters executed by the Nazis and she spent the war safely in Brussels with relatives.

Defonseca, who now lives in Massachusetts, released a statement through her lawyer: "Ever since I can remember, I felt Jewish. . . . There are times when I find it difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world. The story in the book is mine. It is not the actual reality - it was my reality, my way of surviving."

No doubt Defonseca did have a traumatic childhood. But fabricating a Holocaust memoir is a pretty repugnant thing to do. It denigrates the experiences of authentic survivors, and gives ammunition to the Holocaust deniers. And Defonseca isn't the only writer who's ever done it. Blake Eskin helped unmask an earlier deception, by an author named Binjamin Wilkomirski, which he writes about in Slate.

I don't think Defonseca or Wilkomirski are evil people. But somewhere along the line, they became unable to separate fantasy from reality. They needed help, not an advance from a publisher. But as Eskin writes, there's an inherent difficulty in unmasking this type of fraud. "Raising questions about the authenticity of someone's Holocaust testimony, however implausible it seems, is a joyless task."

And another author or two admitting that they faked their memoir shouldn't even surprise us anymore.

In January 2006, James Frey admitted altering large parts of his story of drug addiction and recovery, A Million Little Pieces, which had been featured as a selection of Oprah's Book Club. Oprah, who helped turn the book into a besteller, said later that she felt "conned" by Frey. "It's embarrassing and disappointing for me."

For his party Frey still maintains that the book is a memoir. "I think part of what happened with a number of the things in the book, is when you go through an experience like the one I went through you develop different coping mechanisms. I think one of the coping mechanisms I developed was this image of myself that was greater than what I was."

In another famous case, Forrest Carter's 1976 Native American memoir, The Education of Little Tree, was unmasked as fiction in 1991. It turns out Carter was actually a white supremacist and former Klansman.

Dan T. Carter, a distant relative, wrote about how Carter became an author and remade himself in the process. "Unfortunately, "The Education of Little Tree" is a hoax. The carefully constructed mask of Forrest Carter -- Cherokee cowboy, self-taught writer and spokesman for Native Americans -- was simply the last fantasy of a man who reinvented himself again and again in the 30 years that preceded his death in 1979."

I guess we all embellish our lives a little bit at times, in fairly harmless ways. With each retelling of the story, the fish grows bigger, the obstacles we overcome get more difficult, our feeling of desperation increases. The difference is, most of us don't get book deals. And when you put your name on something, when you send it out for public consumption, well that's a whole different story.

One question that always gets asked whenever another one of these cases arises is, Why didn't the author simply write the book as fiction rather than pass it off as a true story? Maybe they think that a true story, or one with more harrowing details, will be more compelling, will sell better. In other cases, perhaps some authors, who've had deeply traumatic experiences, simply come to believe that what they've written is true. They can't tell the truth from a lie. In still other cases, perhaps they're just dishonest individuals who don't believe that they'll ever get caught.

Whatever the reasons, it's disturbing. These are stories that readers picked up in good faith, really wanting to believe that they were true, expecting that they were true. Sadly, I don't think the phenomenon is going to disappear anytime soon, so caveat lector.

Breaking the rules

For the past couple of weeks The New York Times' Reading Room, described as "Conversations about Great Books," has been tackling Tracy Letts' August: Osage County. As a neophyte theater critic, and as someone who absolutely loved the play, it's been interesting to follow the discussion. I've gained some new and deeper insights into what I saw on stage in November at Broadway's Imperial Theatre.

The panel includes Times op-ed columnist Frank Rich, the paper's chief theater critic from 1980 to 1994; playwright Marsha Norman, author of night, Mother and the books for the musicals The Secret Garden and The Color Purple; and novelist Eliza Minot, author of The Brambles and The Tiny One.

Last week, Norman wrote that August: Osage County is a play whose structure only seems traditional, but when you look at it more closely, it breaks the rules of playwriting. And it works despite, or maybe because, it breaks them. Here are Norman's rules:

Rule #1: No passive central character. "The general idea of this rule is that the main character - and there can be only one - has to want something, and the play ends when the main character gets it or not." Norman says that in August: Osage County, the main character isn't exactly clear. She guesses that it's Violet Weston, the acid-tongued, pill-popping matriarch. Although she says you could make a case that it's her daughter Barbara. But what Violet wants, other than to make her family miserable, isn't very clear.

Rule #2: "On or about page 8, tell the audience why they are here and what is at stake, or to put it more simply, when they can go home." Norman says the audience doesn't really know what the action in August: Osage County is building toward, there are so many twists and turns. We're kind of kept off balance, and that's a good thing. At first, we think the play is going to be about the search for Beverly Weston, the family patriarch who disappears after the first 10 minutes. But it's not. "I think Tracy Letts didn't want you to know what was coming," Norman writes, "any more than any of us do when we go home for the holidays."

Rule #3: "The main character can't be clinically insane." Norman argues that plays with insane central characters kind of cheat the audience because we can't really see ourselves in the person or identify with his or her predicament. "Plays with insane central characters make us feel useless, and we don't like that." It's hard to sympathize with someone who treats everyone around her so horribly. But I guess I still felt some sympathy toward Violet. And even with her insanity at the center, Norman concludes that August: Osage County still works magnificently. "It's not about the tyrant," she writes. "It's about life with the tyrant."

The whole discussion is well worth reading. For me, it points to the reason why I loved the play so much. There's so much to talk about.

The curtain comes down

This is a bit of old news by now in the theater world, but it brings up some issues I've been thinking about ever since I became a regular theatergoer last year. On Tuesday, Playbill reported that the 43-year-old Studio Arena Theatre in Buffalo, N.Y., would be canceling the rest of its season and closing its doors due to a $3-million debt.

Studio Arena's final production, To Kill a Mockingbird, closed on Sunday. It was described on the Web site as the largest cast the theater had seen in years. The next shows were supposed to be David Hare's play The Vertical Hour and after that, the musical revue Side by Side by Sondheim.

The story kind of shocked me, because Buffalo is a big city. Its population is nearly 300,000, and more than a million people live in the metropolitan area. A region that big should be able to support a repertory theater. I've lived in cities that are much smaller and have done it successfully.

And it's not that people in Buffalo aren't theatergoers. The city's Shea's Performing Arts Center, which has more than a half-dozen corporate sponsors judging from its Web site, brings in touring companies of Broadway shows. The Drowsy Chaperone is playing next week, and Wicked is coming for a month over the summer.

In looking around for stories about the Studio Arena Theatre's closing, and the reasons for it, I found some of the usual suspects. A story in The Buffalo News reported a drop in season subscriptions, an aging population in the city, the loss of big donors and increased competition from other theaters.

A commentary from arts editor Jeff Simon is titled "In the end, Studio Arena lost its soul." Simon decries what he sees as "risk aversion which is ultimately the biggest risk of all, the suicidal insistence on playing it safe and the shameless pandering which, for so many years now, has made so many people in Buffalo soul-sick about the continuing operations of Studio Arena Theatre."

The comments on message boards are the kinds of things that seem to get trotted out whenever people start to bemoan the state of the American theater: an audience that is growing older and not being replaced by younger people, high ticket prices, unappealing shows.

A woman named Christina, who said that her grandmother had been a Studio Arena subscriber, put it this way: "Over the years, it was obvious that the loyal theatre goers were an aging fan base and younger subscribers were in the minority. In this day in age, there are many more entertainment outlets competing for our attention and limited discretionary income than perhaps in past generations."

I don't know enough about the situation in Buffalo to comment on the reasons for Studio Arena's problems, and none of what people like Christina say is particularly new, but I've also noticed the aging fan base, especially when I go to the theater outside of Broadway.

I'm in my 40s, and sometimes I feel like I'm among the youngest people in the audience. Granted, I usually take in Sunday matinees, and maybe that's not the optimal time for twentysomethings or thirtysomethings to see a show. Still, I'm sure there are plenty of 20- and 30-year-olds at the movies on weekend afternoons. It's really not that much more expensive.

At my local theater, Trinity Repertory Company, you can get rush tickets for $15 two hours before a performance. The theater seems to enjoy great support from the community and corporate sponsors, and has close ties to a university. It has a terrific troupe of resident actors, imaginative staging of new plays and classics, and I've enjoyed everything I've seen there. (In fact, one time this season I was too clever for my own good and couldn't get tickets for any price because the Sunday matinees were completely sold out). But the audience definitely seems to skew older.

For some reason, when I go to touring productions of Broadway shows, which are more expensive, there seems to be a much broader age range. Maybe it's because they're usually musicals and musicals have an easier time finding an audience. Also, they're playing for a much more limited amount of time, usually just five days, from Wednesday to Sunday.

I don't know how much overlap there is between the audience for touring Broadway musicals and for local repertory theater. I like to think I'm not the only one who goes to both and enjoys both, but I simply don't know. Maybe they're two separate audiences.

I hope the Studio Arena Theatre can get back on its feet next year, maybe with a reduced schedule or in partnership with a local university. Its closing is sad, and a real loss for the city. One thing I've come to believe in the past year is that a great theater scene is part of what makes a city vibrant and keeps downtown areas alive. The more choices, the better it is for everyone.