Today’s modern sporting events reflect the most seductive part of live performance: Creating Dramatic Tension — and the buildup to the annual Super Bowl celebration is one of the finest examples of spectacle in performance wrapped in football pads and held tight with crossed fingers. The countdown clocks on NFL.com today directly inherit, and reflect, the innate sense of doom and pending explosion that so many modern dramas lack on the live stage.
There’s nothing worse than listening to a performance filled with dialogue that does not ring true and does not feel and sound authentic. The worse dialogue offenders in the history of drama are writers on television process shows like “CSI” and “House” and “Criminal Minds” where lots of technical dialogue is supposed to promote authenticity and professionalism to a scene when all that sort of preciousness really provides is ear boredom.
Continue reading → How to Write Stiff and Really Fake Dialogue
Danny Gatton was one of the best and finest guitar players in the world. Danny befriended Arlen Roth early in Arlen’s career and helped find him work and a career in music. Danny was so beloved by Fender that they created a special one-off Telecaster for him:
When I first arrived in Washington, D.C. many years ago as fresh-faced lad freshly graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, one of the first places I was able to feed myself was at Arena Stage reading scripts at $10 a pop for Lloyd Rose and Jerry Manning. Arena Stage is one of the best professional regional theatres in the world — they were one of the first theatres to employ an acting core on a full time basis — and Zelda Fichandler created Arena Stage out of nothing and ran it for 40 years from 1950 to 1990 until she moved to New York University in 1987 to run the graduate school acting program.
Finding a modern voice that connects us back to the roots of The Blues is a rarity — but Duffy is just such a talent — and the delight in her gravelly voice socks us right back into the brazen Blues.
I am not a heavy metal fan — the harsh, unrelenting bass and drums do not appeal to me melodically — but that doesn’t mean I’m not a fan of Slipknot, for I am, and here’s why:
When you think of August Wilson, you quickly recall images from his amazing canon of plays that made him the best and most successful Playwright in the modern American theatre.
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