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Where Are the Deaf Children at Aladdin?

Yesterday I sat in the New Amsterdam Theatre for the interpreted performance of Disney’s Aladdin. The show was fine. The interpreting was fine. Neither held my attention the way the audience did. It was Scouts Day. The hearing children came dressed as princes and princesses, sashes weighed down with badges, parents fussing over phones and snacks. The aisles filled with the small chaos that always attends a children’s matinee. Within all of that, in a designated seating block to the side, sat the Deaf audience. I counted, roughly, sixty of us. The youngest among us looked sixty herself. Most of those sixty people were between sixty and eighty-five years old. A handful of hearing family members translated stage business in side conversations. Deaf children were absent from the section. Deaf teenagers, if any were present, were too few for me to identify in a careful sweep.

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A New Old Musical, Now Available in Book Form

I have written a new musical. It is also, simultaneously, an old musical. The story happened in 1537. Shakespeare wrote the central character in 1595 and disappeared him from the text in the same scene that introduced him. My piece sits in Renaissance dramatic verse arranged into two acts with song cues a composer can set for voice and chamber orchestra. So when I say I have written a new musical, I mean that I have written the most ancient kind of thing a person can write and I have written it in 2026 and I am calling it new because that is what it is.

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Opera in Mainstream American Culture

With our ASL Opera project picking up steam, I was curious to know just how the “High Art” of Opera has influenced mainstream American culture over the last 50 years or so, and I was surprised to learn, via ChatGPT-4 AI, just how deeply many of the most famous Opera melodies made their way into our shared childhoods and our culturally maintained totems of relevance!

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And Jeremiah Wept

The idea of “and Jeremiah Wept” is both a fascination and a complication. If we weep for others, are we weak, or empathetic? Framing matters. A hundred years ago, openly weeping for a friend may have been seen as inappropriate, but today, a public weeping may be assigned as a sign of strength of character in the bleeding heart of dismay.

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Attention and Intention: Contextual Consequences and Cultural Confusion in Deaf West’s Spring Awakening Broadway Revival

Let’s agree on one thing: Deaf West’s excellent Broadway revival of “Spring Awakening” is a fine production currently showing at the Brooks Atkinson theatre in a limited run. The sets and lights are magnificent. The staging is right. The actors are completely superb. The effort is noble, but perhaps, imperfect in the execution of its essence, and it is in that vacuum of those slight flaws in amber that this review reflects — to make you think and wonder in preservation and ponder beyond the simple joy of watching a few Deaf actors on a live Broadway stage.

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Liviu Ciulei and Marlon Brando: Recoiling the Mortal Coil!

The great international stage and screen director and designer, Liviu Ciulei, and the divine stage and screen actor Marlon Brando both share something disturbing as it is true: They both believed in bringing coiled drama into an explosion on the live stage. If the purpose of the Dramatic Arts is irrevocable change, they reasoned, then coiled detritus is the user agent that propels forward the story to the tragic, if not always cathartic, end.

I was fortunate to purchase authentic photographs of both Liviu and Marlon and I appreciate this moment of sharing them with you. Here’s the caption for Liviu’s photo:

International director Liviu Ciulei has been named Artistic Director of The Guthrie Theatre beginning Sept 1. 1980.  The 57-year-old former head of Rumania’s leading repertory theatre, the Lucia Sturdza Bulandra Theatre, has earned an international reputation as a stage and screen director, actor, designer, and architect. His directing and design credits include productions throughout Europe, Great Britain, Australia, Canada and the United States.

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Socialized Medicine and the Broadway Softball League

We, The Americans, like to think we’re in this world together — United We Stand, Divided We Fall — but in reality, we know in our bones we are not equal.  We understand the separatist One Percenters own 99% of us, and we live only to mew when asked for a response from our monied overlords.

However, there was a time in the history of this nation, not too long ago — when the system could be exploited for the grander benefit of the few against the many — and that moment in time was the early 1980s.

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Do You Remember Kaposi’s Sarcoma?

The other day, an old graduate school friend and I got together to rehash our old lives and new experiences, and one of the first things he said when he saw me was, “Those red marks on your face remind me of Kaposi’s Sarcoma.”  I was instantly stopped — “Kaposi’s Sarcoma” was a phrase I hadn’t heard in over a decade — and when I quickly explained the marks on my face were actually pinches of frostbite from the dermatologist to remove some overactive sebaceous gland residue, he smiled with relief. As an older Gay man, my friend knew lesions that look like that have traditionally indicated a dire diagnosis.

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A Memory of Marvin Hamlisch

I had the great honor of meeting SuperGenius composer Marvin Hamlisch many years ago when I first left Nebraska and lived in Washington D.C. for awhile on my way to graduate school in New York City.  I was stunned to learn Marvin died yesterday at the incredibly young age of 68.

In my January 11, 2010 United Stage article  — A Final Walk with Jim Brady — I mentioned Marvin’s kindness to me as a young student of the theatre:

The Victory Awards were intended to honor achievements of the human spirit. The show was hosted by Frank Langella and Marvin Hamlisch was the musical director.

Frank did not speak to any of the workers on the show while Marvin Hamlisch struck up a conversation with me backstage — I was a new transplant from Nebraska to D.C. — and he told me we’d one day “write a musical together” because “that’s just how things happen.”

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Julie Taymor as The Goat

In the past, I have written here in The United Stage of America about “On Not Becoming the Goat” —

The Goat is usually the least experienced person on the show in an important position and, unfortunately, that usually means the author gets the Goated label, and once you have that finger pointed at you as the root cause of all trouble, there is really no escape until the roller coaster everyone is riding slams into the concrete wall and kills everybody.

— and who would have ever thought that such a deep and magnificent talent such as Julie “I am the Lion King!” Taymor would ever, or could ever, become the goat of any production?

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