Neel Sethi on set for The Jungle Book

For those who work in the theatre, the idea of defending the term “live action” would seem an unnecessary task. But as movie marketers, abetted uncritically by the entertainment press, seem determined to diminish the concept, it appears that a brief primer is warranted.

Christopher Reeve as Superman

Live-action has, for many years, been a term reserved for that which actually occurs in real life, that is to say the activities of humans (and other animals). Whether performed on stage or captured on a camera, real people have been the central tenet of live action. In the theatre, while everything that surrounds people on a stage is by necessity a simulacrum of reality (and sometimes not even that), the presence of the actor grounds theatre in its “liveness.” The same has held true for most movies, even ones in which human action is assisted by tricks and tools (Superman flying; Jeff Goldblum transmogrifying into Brundlefly). Animated films were those which were understood to be drawn; in early years this was often quite rudimentary, and now it has become quite sophisticated, to the point that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to know where reality ends and digital imagery begins.

The Jungle Book (2016)

Why the compulsion to spell this out? Because of a series of films being released and planned by Disney, in particular. Following on their newest version of The Jungle Book, in which the only human actor – excluding voice actors – was the child playing Mowgli and as the newest version of the musical Beauty and the Beast approaches, Disney has announced what was widely described as a live-action version of The Lion King. With Donald Glover and James Earl Jones touted as starring, the latter “reprising” his role, the description of the film as live-action permeated the press, including CNN, Variety, Entertainment Weekly, BuzzFeed, Los Angeles Times and Time magazine, to name but a few. Even theatre-centric outlets like Theatremania and Playbill parroted this language.

The Lion King on stage

While I am not privy to the conceptual work in connection with new The Lion King, I am prepared to guess that we will not see James Earl Jones in a lion suit ruling over an African savannah. What we will most likely get is a reasonably photorealistic lion with Jones’s magnificent voice. Perhaps motion capture will be used to allow Jones’s and Glover’s facial expressions to be mirrored in their semi-anthropomorphized state, though at age 86, I doubt Jones will be providing the sort of full-body motion capture that we know from the work of Andy Serkis. There has been a live-action Lion King for 20 years, by the way, staged by Julie Taymor.

Disney’s Alice in the Wooly West (1926)

Live action and animation have been blended virtually since the start of film. Walt Disney’s earliest success came with a series of short “Alice” films in which a real girl undertook adventures in animated worlds, though no one would have confused what was real and what was drawn. Over the years we’ve seen animated characters in largely live action films (from Gene Kelly dancing with Jerry the Mouse, Don Knotts submerged as Mr. Limpet, and certainly Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the apotheosis of this technique). Most of the Marvel superhero films since X-Men have made extensive use of animated settings, with actors shot on greenscreen and surroundings added later – and when we see Spider-Man swinging through Manhattan, we’re not watching Tobey Maguire or Andrew Garfield in advanced rigging, but rather an animated figure in both filmed and simulated settings.

One need only look at the Motion Picture Academy’s science and technical awards to understand how important this sophisticated animation is to the field. There were certificates described as follows: “The Viper camera enabled frame-based logarithmic encoding, which provided uncompressed camera output suitable for importing into existing digital intermediate workflows” and “Meander’s innovative curve-rendering method faithfully captures the artist’s intent, resulting in a significant improvement in creative communication throughout the production pipeline.” There were three separate honors for facial capture systems.

None of this is meant to diminish the films that employ these techniques or devalue them as entertainment. But as we reach a point where nothing onscreen ever existed anywhere but within computers as a massive series of 0s and 1s, it’s time to fight for the preservation of “live-action” as being something that retains the human, the biological, the corporeal. This is akin to the Champagne region of France wanting to insure that only sparkling wines made there can be called champagne.

Kong: Skull Island

The Jungle Book may have looked fairly real (perhaps even a hyper-realism), but unless The Lion King will be employing a wide range of well-trained, stunningly collegial bunch of wild animals whose mouths are animated (a la Babe, the sheep pig), then it’s time the entertainment media stop playing into this live action narrative. After all, no one ever pretended that King Kong or Bruce the Shark in Jaws were real, but they were grounded in the physical world (often by the limitations of technology), whereas now Kong is a highly sophisticated piece of digital animation in the new Kong: Skull Island, and crappily rendered sharks fall from the sky every summer on SyFy.

It’s especially important for theatre that this distinction be made, because if people come to accept and even believe that what they’re seeing on screen is reality, how can theatre compete without giving itself over to holograms? Mark my words. It’s coming. But for now, let’s hold on to the idea that live action still shows us beings that draw breath, not just in body or in voice, but in complete form. The movies need to come up with their own term. Let’s fight for live action as a brand. Because that’s what theatre is all about.

Protesters at Me Before You screening in Manhattan

Before you start shouting about spoiler alerts, let me point out that the headline of this piece does not indicate in what context this suicide occurs. Could be real life. Could be a play, a movie, a TV, or a book. In fact, it’s several movies and at least one book; I’m sure there are many more. Because when it comes to representations of disability, the cliché of the person in the wheelchair who can’t accept life after becoming disabled is a fairly standard device, sad to say.

I am not, however, writing in the abstract, so let me now make clear: the headline refers, in this case, to the film Me Before You, which opens nationally this weekend. Marketed as if it were from the word factory of Nicholas Sparks, Me Before You is the work of romance novelist Jojo Moyes. It has reportedly sold some six million copies, which means that the target audience for the movie, namely fans of the book, already know the outcome. So I haven’t really spoiled anything. The spoiler, had the movie diverged from the book, would be, “The Guy In The Wheelchair Decides To Live And Love Like Countless People With Quadriplegia Do Even Without Having Bags Of Money Like The Dude In This Story.”

Protest leaflet handed out at Me Before You screening

Having seen the film, I would even argue that my headline serves as a useful translation of what takes place. Why? Because when it comes time for Will, the dashing wheelchair user, to end his life after being brought out of his shell by kooky Louise, who has been hired to be his companion, he merely asks her to bring his parents into his oh-so-charming bedroom at the assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland. Then we watch a single digitally rendered leaf fall from a tree, changing colors and turning brown before it reaches the ground. Yup, his suicide is equated with nature’s inevitability and we don’t see any of it, lest it trouble the sensitive viewer with anything nasty.

I want to be clear about this: whatever your position on assisted suicide, it is not part of the circle of life. Rather, it is a choice to alter life’s path drastically, and for god’s sake it’s not a metaphor. It is death. But the gauzy view of disability and dying on display in Me For You has no use for such truths, because that would mar the Cinderella/Pretty Woman paradigm it struggles to project. The film is so rigged in favor of Will’s choice that his parents barely appear on screen with him and both his pre-accident friends and Louisa’s athletic fiancée are insensitive dolts. There’s also a gender paradigm at play, with the film’s women arguing against Will’s decision, while the men position his choice as being somehow the manly thing to do.

Sam Claflin and Emilia Clarke in Me Before You

Both Jojo Moyes and Emilia Clarke, who plays Louisa, in interviews, have tried to convey that Me Before You is meant simply to be one story, complete unto itself, rather than a tract about disability and assisted suicide. While that may well be true, and they ultimately have the right to tell any story they choose, the fact that the end result plays more like a lengthy public service announcement for the assisted suicide organization Dignitas than an actual drama does undermine their argument.

If Me Before You existed in a vacuum their defenses might help them get by, but the fact is that when major films choose to display disability narratives, they tend to be inspiration porn (look how Christy Brown overcame his disability in My Left Foot and how brilliant Daniel Day Lewis is in contorting himself to pretend to disability), legal debates (Brian Clark’s Whose Life Is It Anyway?, from which Me Before You filches some repartee about the proximity of breasts to a man with paraplegia) or stories of spirits set free from their broken, damaged bodies (if Hilary Swank can no longer box, she has nothing left in her life and it’s only right that Clint Eastwood help kill his Million Dollar Baby).

Me Before You is really about how knowing Will has transformed Louisa’s life, since hers is the story that will go on and puts the selfless suicidal guy in a wheelchair up there with such other overplayed tropes as the magical black man and the wise Asian. Louisa is in fact a manic pixie dream girl. So the film is about two tired stereotypes and their stereotypical families. One family represents the coolly removed British aristocracy, who are so generous as to convert their stables as a private home for Will, rather than actually renovating their stately manor; part of their estate which also includes a castle, reinforcing the fairy tale elements of the story. The other family is salt of the earth working class. But make no mistake – Louisa is the heroine and Will is a device.

While we’re told Will experiences bouts of pain that causes him to scream in anguish, he faces nothing so agonizing on screen. Yes, we do see him fighting off pneumonia, but his other “challenges” in the film amount to: 1) having to have his chair lifted out of the mud by three passing burlymen because Louisa is an idiot, 2) grappling with the discomfort of a clothing sales tag that remains in his collar, and 3) having Louisa ladle hot soup into his lap. These are all played for laughs, and the last glosses over the possibility that while Will may not feel it, he may have sustained a burn. All of this is representative of the film’s effort to use disability as a plot device, without ever doing more than skimming the surface, oh so politely, of life with disability.

Look, I’m a middle aged guy who has no disability. So I’m not the target audience for this film. But I still want to speak out, among many other voices. At a Wednesday night screening in New York, the theatre was filled overwhelmingly with young women, and if this film manages to succeed, I worry that it will fetishize romantic supermodels in wheelchairs who serve to empower and enlighten young women before taking themselves out of the equation so those women can realize their true potential in life and love. Think I’m being harsh? Moyes wrote a sequel, providing further adventures for our Louisa, confirming that the story is indeed hers and not even hers and Will’s.

I also can’t presume to speak for people with disabilities, but they’re working hard to make their feelings about this film known, and you can look to places like The Chicago Tribune and Salon for more personal accounts. But as someone who advocates for artists with disabilities, and for truer portrayals of disability on stage, screen and television, I find Me Before You to be simultaneously dull and dangerous, because it both sugarcoats and homogenizes every element of its story to the point that both the disability and mortality at its core are rendered as negligible, beyond the extent to which they have an effect upon the emotions of the non-disabled protagonist.

As a film, Me Before You is pedestrian. As a story that deals in significant issues, it is at best clueless and at worst callously indifferent. As a statement about disability and assisted suicide, it is a Hallmark ad in favor of the latter. See it if you must, but try to pay attention to what it leaves out, namely the reality of life for countless people with disabilities. If anyone deserves to brandish the film’s marketing slogan (and hashtag campaign) “Live Boldly,” it’s them, not anyone in this bland contraption.

P.S. One small side note: Me Before You asks us, in its opening scenes, to believe that a Londoner walks out into a downpour in a bespoke suit without an umbrella. If nothing else I’ve written convinces you of the film’s lack of truthfulness, that certainly should.

For more information about the disability community’s perspective on Me Before You, visit Disbeat.

Howard Sherman is interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.

If you’re like me, someone deeply committed to the arts – in practice, in education, in media coverage, in every aspect of life – you’ve probably had the same fantasy I’ve had over the years. What, I often wonder, would the scenario for the arts be like if they had the same attention and resources as those afforded to sports, especially in high schools and colleges?

That scenario can be played out with serious thought, especially as we watch school arts programs being cut – just last week the Atlanta school system cut music teachers at the elementary level. But it can also lead to some laugh-worthy imaginings  – performance enhancing drugs for actors, anyone?

In the most sustained flight of fantasy I’ve seen surrounding this daydream, comedian Owen Weber has just released a video imagining The “thESPiaN” Network, covering theatre as if it was sports television. It’s executed with striking verisimilitude and real professionalism. That’s right, guys in suits at a desk saying things like, “You can’t blow opening night – the critics don’t give redos,” mentioning that a drama program gave up a “sixth round Fortinbras,” and declaring, “We’re getting wild now – Oscar Wilde!” I’m very amused.

Remarkably, Weber has released the video in four and eight minute version, and the it’s the long version that has my favorite sight gag, regarding a production of the Scottish play.

There are a couple of small things that bothered me as I watched the videos. Now I don’t know Weber’s other work (though clearly I’ll be checking it out), so I have no idea whether these are characteristic or anomalies. One is very likely intentional, and it’s a moment when an actress being discussed is briefly, fleetingly objectified not for her talent but for her looks. It’s very likely that this was meant to emphasize the “bro” culture of sports, even though, let’s face it, even ESPN has female sportscasters who would be very quick to shut down that sort of conversation about a female athlete.

My second observation is that the video is completely cast with Caucasians, and while everyone may have worked for nothing and Weber’s friends who were available for the shoot on any given day may have left him few options, I do wish that a video that will surely be making the rounds of theatre programs and theatre offices everywhere – and I’m contributing to that dissemination – better represented the diversity and inclusiveness of the arts. Quoting Jeanine Tesori at the Tony Awards, though she was speaking specifically to women at that moment, “You have to see it to be it.” Look, I know: comedy is no fun when it’s picked apart, but I can’t share these without mentioning that.

I wouldn’t be sharing these videos if they weren’t well-executed, consistently clever and at a few moments, laugh out loud funny. And the bottom line is, if there was a “Stage Center” on TV every night, I’d be watching it. And maybe some new ways of talking about the arts wouldn’t be such a bad idea at all.

Are you still grumbling about “tweet seats”? Oh, that is so 2013. Time to get with the program and start worrying about the newest development in mobile tech, which could have a vastly more significant impact on the live performing arts.

At this year’s SXSW Festival, a new app, Meerkat, saw a frenzy of adoption by attendees, so much so that Twitter moved to quickly curtail the app’s access to Twitter data. The reason for that draconian move came clearer yesterday when the app Periscope, which is owned by Twitter, was launched as a direct competitor to Meerkat.

So what do they do? Both apps allow you to stream live video from your phone. Now, instead of taking something so pedestrian as a photograph via Instagram, or so cumbersome as shooting a video and then uploading it to YouTube, anyone with an iPhone and a dream can relay what they’re seeing in real time to their connections on these services. This will of course result in streams from countless teens doing teen oriented things for the entertainment of other teens, but it will also turn everyone who wishes to be into an instant broadcaster into one. Yesterday, Periscope immediately became a source for realtime video of the tragic explosion and fire in New York’s East Village.

Of course, as I experimented with Periscope (I’ve loaded Meerkat, but not tried it yet), I realized how significantly this could have an effect on live entertainment. Now, anyone adept enough at manipulating a smartphone from an audience seat might well be streaming your show, your concert, your opera to their friends and followers. If they can do so with a darkened screen and sufficient circulation to keep the blood from leaving their upraised hand and arm, the only thing stopping them would be vigilant ushers, chastising nearby patrons and battery life. For however long they sustain their stream, your content is on the air – and unlike YouTube, where if you find it, you can seek to have it removed, this is instantaneous and so there’s no taking it back.

I should say that I’m not endorsing this practice, any more than say, a play about graffiti artists is exhorting its audience to go out and start marring buildings with graffiti. I’m just pointing out that there’s a big new step in technology which could serve to let your content leak out into the world in a way that’s much harder to control than before (while also offering many new creative opportunities for communication) – and since these apps are just the first of their kind, they and competing apps will be rolling out ever more effective tools to stream what’s happening right in front of you, just as cell phone cameras and video will continue to improve their quality and versatility.

Scared yet?

Some will quickly say, as they have from the moment cell phones started ringing during soliloquies and operas, that there should be some way to simply jam signals inside entertainment venues. But the answer to that remains the same: private entities like theatre owners cannot employ such technology (which does exist) because they would be breaking the law by interfering with the public airwaves. No matter that the photos, video and streams may be violating copyright. That kind of widespread tampering with communications wouldn’t be allowed – and if it ever were, it could very well have a negative effect on patrons’ willingness to attend.

The quality of streams via these apps would leave much to be desired (think of your stream also capturing the heads of those in front of you, and the couple on your left whispering about their dinner plans). They’d hardly capture the work on stage at its best, but if your choice is $400 a ticket for Fish in the Dark or a free, erratic stream, you just might choose the latter.

Movie companies have been fighting in-theatre bootlegging since the advent of small video cameras, and one hears stories about advance screenings with ushers continually patrolling the aisles in search of telltale red lights (sometimes wearing night vision goggles) and assorted laser and infrared technologies designed to mar the surreptitious image capturing. But does that seem desirable or even feasible at live theatres?

I’m not shrieking about this problem because I expect plenty of others will. That said, I’m also not about to just instill fear in your hearts and run away. Having just chastised others for enumerating arts problems without offering ideas on how to address them, here’s my thought on how to try to stave off the onslaught of Meerkat and Periscope and their ilk: we have to solve the issues that are preventing U.S. based organizations from cinecasting on the model of NT Live.

Yes, the Metropolitan Opera has built a strong following for their Met Opera Live series. But we’re not seeing that success translate to other performing arts in a significant way, with theatre the most backward of all. I know it may seem counterintuitive, but if people have the opportunity to access high quality, low cost video of stage performances, they’re going to be considerably less interested in cheap live bootlegs in real time. It won’t stop the progression, but it will offer a more appealing alternative.

Video is now in the hands of virtually every person who attends the theatre, the opera, the ballet and so on. Short of frisking or wanding people for phones and having them secured in lockers at every performance space (can you imagine?), the genie is out of the bottle. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not keen on the ramifications of these advances either, but there’s no point in damning reality. The question now is how do the arts respond – by seeking to police its audiences as if attending a performance resembled an ongoing TSA checkpoint, or by offering alternatives that just might make the newest developments unappealing or irrelevant?

But the field, commercial and not-for-profit alike, needs to get a move on, because even if this is the first you’ve heard of Periscope and Meerkat, it won’t be the last. Just wait until smartphones can record and stream in 3D.

P.S. Last week when I saw the Radio City Spring Spectacular, there was a caution against flash photography – not all photography, just flash. There may well have been a warning about video, but all it would have taken was a fake Twitter account and one of these apps to start sharing parts of the show with you as an untraceable scofflaw. Just imagine if I had activated Meerkat a bit sooner.

In case you haven’t heard, Caucasian actors are being victimized by casting practices at the television networks. They, after holding primacy on screen since the earliest days of television, may – horrors! – have a few less opportunities to secure roles in new television series this year because of an effort by the networks to produce stories about characters who may not be Caucasian and to seek more actors of color for television series for roles that may not have been written with actors of color in mind.

The mass media and trade media have spent months trumpeting television’s overdue commitment to diversifying stories and casts, so it was inevitable that someone might turn up to take issue with this “corrective” action. Nellie Andreeva of Deadline has stepped up to the plate, posting an article last night headlined “Pilots 2015: The Year of Ethnic Castings – Long Overdue Or Too Much Of A Good Thing?”

The article – or is it an essay, or perhaps an op-ed – attempts to tread a careful line. Launching with that equivocating headline, it’s quick to bring out a positive view of the casting practices it asserts are underway:

“The change is welcomed by talent agents who no longer have to call casting directors and ask them if they would possibly consider an ethnic actor for a part, knowing they would most likely be rejected. “I feel that the tide has turned,” one agent said. “I can pitch any actor for any role, and I think that’s good.”

But Andreeva immediately undercuts that view with an opposing perspective, in this case not attributed to anyone, even anonymously, so presumably the view of Andreeva herself:

“But, as is the case with any sea change, the pendulum might have swung a bit too far in the opposite direction. Instead of opening the field for actors of any race to compete for any role in a color-blind manner, there has been a significant number of parts designated as ethnic this year, making them off-limits for Caucasian actors, some agents signal.”

Andreeva follows up her opinion by citing two more unnamed talent agents (or is it a single person quoted twice) invoking stories about how white actors are being marginalized by the new practice.

“Basically 50% of the roles in a pilot have to be ethnic, and the mandate goes all the way down to guest parts,” one talent representative said.

“In one instance, after a number of actors of different ethnicities tested for two roles in a pilot this year, two Caucasian actors ended up being the top choices for the two remaining regular parts. However, because of a mandate from the studio and network, one of the roles had to diverse, so the pilot could only cast one of the top choices and pass on the other to fulfill the ethnic quota. “They need to say the best man or woman wins,” one rep suggested.”

Andreeva goes on to note both multiple shows where the original Caucasian protagonists have been changed to black, as well as true-life stories about Caucasians which have been adapted to star or include actors of color. Indeed, in the case of Broad Squad, a show about the first women to graduate from Boston’s police academy in 1972, Andreeva helpfully shows us a photo of that all-Caucasian class alongside her observation that the show’s pilot features a racial mix that more closely matches Boston’s current racial makeup today. In doing so, she’s invoking the historical inequality of the races 40+ years ago in order to question the portrayal of racial diversification today. The show isn’t a documentary.

In the false balance that runs through the article, in her 14^th paragraph of 19, Andreeva gives with one hand, only to snatch away a positive view of the situation immediately thereafter:

“A lot of what is happening right now is long overdue. The TV and film superhero ranks have been overly white for too long, workplace shows should be diverse to reflect workplace in real America, and ethnic actors should get a chance to play more than the proverbial best friend or boss.

“But replacing one set of rigid rules with another by imposing a quota of ethnic talent on each show might not be the answer.”

By invoking “quotas” when talking about Caucasian job losses (which she has in no way demonstrated to actually be the case beyond the statements of two anonymous figures), Andreeva is employing the sort of language that in ugly political races is referred to as a “dog whistle,” not necessarily perceptible to the average reader, but red meat to those who secretly – or not so secretly – harbor reactionary, questionable racial attitudes and bemoan the loss of absolute Caucasian primacy in America.

Through my role at the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts, I can attest to the fact that television networks are absolutely seeking to diversify the stories they tell. In our nearly 30 year history of advocating for diversity in race, culture and ethnicity in film, television and theatre, we’re often consulted on these issues, and have been continuously by the networks and other entertainment sources. They haven’t advised us of any quotas they’re trying to fill, but they’re also not solely focused on race; the number of calls seeking to tap our database of artists with disabilities has also seen a marked increase.

Andreeva treats efforts at diversity as a trend, a response to successful shows with actors of color in lead roles (How To Get Away With Murder), and shows that focus on stories about non-Caucasian principals (Empire, Black-ish, Fresh Off The Boat). To be sure, no one can accuse the entertainment industry of not seeking to recreate success through imitation, but their commitment to diversity seems to go deeper than that. Yet Andreeva doesn’t fully address to economic imperative of doing so: the fact that America is on a rapidly accelerating pace towards seeing Caucasians as only 50% of the population within the next 30 years. The networks are, for once, ahead of the curve, rather than following it.

By noting that only 13% of the American population is black, Andreeva appears to be using statistics to bolster her suggestion that the networks are overcorrecting when it comes to diversity. The fuller demographic data lends credence to producer Shonda Rhimes’s suggestion that even using the term “diversity” is outdated, and that “normalize” more accurately portrays what’s underway. And a recent Associated Press article points out that even with new efforts, diversity progress remains unequal.

Andreeva also fails to note that, with the expansion of scripted series on cable and on streaming services, there are more television series now than ever before, presumably resulting in more acting jobs than we would have seen only 30 years ago when the networks still retained their dominance. So it’s not hard to extrapolate – and I freely admit I’m guessing here – that on a net basis, Caucasian actors aren’t losing work, but that in an expanded marketplace, actors of color are now afforded more opportunities than before because there’s increased “capacity.” Additionally, is she unaware of the ingrained inequality of the entertainment industry, so recently on display through the Academy Award nominations?

Those of us who believe that diversity, that normalization, in the entertainment industry is essential and overdue may hear “dog whistle” language just as loudly as those it’s designed to reach. That’s why Andreeva’s article, with its false balance, can’t be given a pass in the daily avalanche of Internet content. We’re still a long way from seeing the reality of America’s multiculturalism fairly represented on TV, or on film or in theatre. So when we hear a whistle, we have to sound the alarm.

Howard Sherman is Senior Strategy Consultant at the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.

One of the great pleasures of a long holiday period, with one’s office is closed for an extended time, is the freedom to go exploring, be it in life or online, guilt-free (or at least relatively so). That’s exactly what happened when I spotted a single tweet from the New York Post’s film critic, Lou Lumenick, who I’ve found to be a terrific and entertaining source of film knowledge and trivia. Lumenick’s timing, of course, is particularly apt, as the tweet led to a complete online video of Meryl Streep as Alice (of Lewis Carroll’s invention), just as Streep is onscreen right now in another updating and revision of children’s tales, Into The Woods.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90Y15Crljk4

This particular Alice in Wonderland adaptation, written by Elizabeth Swados and produced by Joseph Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival, was far from unknown to me (though I’d not seen it onstage), but I had long forgotten that it had been recorded for television. Now this isn’t some obscurity from Streep’s pre-stardom days, but rather part of her initial rush of fame, following (among others) Manhattan, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Deer Hunter and Kramer vs. Kramer. But in addition to preserving one of Streep’s early stage performances, it saved those of a number of up-and-coming actors, including Deborah Rush (sexy and hilarious the following year in Noises Off), Mark Linn-Baker (who I had first seen in his student days at Yale), Debbie Allen (already seen in the films Fame and Ragtime) and the great, lost-too-soon Michael Jeter. How wonderful that the whole program is online (legally, I hope).

For once, the column of suggested videos that came up alongside the main screen on YouTube was actually a great predictor, because it tipped me that another Alice in Wonderland which had originated on stage was also online. Though it had lasted only weeks on Broadway in 1982-83, a revival of Eva Le Gallienne and Florida Friebus’s 1932 Alice version made it to TV as well, starring its original stage Alice, the then little-known Kate Burton, in the title role. While one can look back at the stage cast and be impressed – it included Edward Hibbert, Nicholas Martin, a young Mary Stuart Masterson and Le Gallienne herself – the TV cast was even more remarkable. Eve Arden, Kaye Ballard, James Coco, Andre de Shields, Colleen Dewhurst, Andre Gregory, Geoffrey Holder, Nathan Lane, Donald O’Connor, Maureen Stapleton and, most significantly and poignantly, Richard Burton, were all in the PBS version.

As it turns out, there was something in the air in the early 80s when it came to Alice in Wonderland, because yet another adaptation, this one wholly original to TV, turned up in 1985, melding stage and screen stars in a production that may have been made for TV, but still felt very theatrical. The cast included Red Buttons, Sid Caesar, Carol Channing, Imogene Coca, Sammy Davis Jr., Sherman Hemsley, Roddy McDowell, Robert Morley, Anthony Newley, Donald O’Connor (again, albeit in a different role) and Martha Raye; Scott Baio, Telly Savalas, Ringo Starr and Ringo Starr were also along for the ride. The musical staging was by Gillian Lynne (perhaps best known for her choreography of Cats), with songs by Steve Allen; the script was by playwright Paul Zindel and, curiouser and curiouser, it was produced by the master of disaster Irwin Allen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhXNgdlpegA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cufnyyEXX9g

Once my explorations had begun, I couldn’t stop. I was quickly led to a 1972 film version of which I was unaware, from England, which had yet another heavyweight roster of stars, with that special British cachet and, yet again, significant stage credits, as well serious comedy chops. Among those appearing in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland were Michael Crawford, Michael Hordern, Roy Kinnear, Spike Milligan, Dudley Moore, and Peter Sellers. The production looks, once again, rather stagey and the transfer to video is decidedly shaky; though the IMDB notes it as a film, I can’t help but think that it might have had TV roots in the UK, given the look of the production.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aT6BLVBta9Q

Rather more recent was the 1999 Alice in Wonderland, produced by Robert Halmi Sr. and Jr., part of a series of big fantasy TV movies they were creating at that time. While I recall not being too fond of it, having found all of the Halmi projects overblown, it has another noteworthy, largely British cast, and a screenplay by the great and too-often overlooked playwright Peter Barnes. In this fantasy mix were, among others, Simon Russell Beale, Robbie Coltrane, Whoopi Goldberg, Ben Kingsley, Christopher Lloyd, Miranda Richardson, Martin Short, Peter Ustinov, and Gene Wilder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKVlqQnkzok

There are, frankly, countless adaptations of Alice in Wonderland, for the stage, for film and for television, both live action and animated, and sometimes a mix of both; this foray is hardly comprehensive. But as one more demonstration of how Lewis Carroll’s tale proved to be (Cheshire) catnip for television, here’s an example from the very early days of the medium – even though in 1954 it comes from the seventh annual presentation of this particular version. With a cast including Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Art Carney, and Arthur Treacher, it’s very primitive, and I can’t help but wonder who appeared in the earlier versions, since technology allowing for “repeats” had yet to come into vogue.

For all that I found in my admittedly cursory search, there’s one more TV Alice in Wonderland that YouTube didn’t serve up to me – a 1955 Hallmark Hall of Fame version of the LeGallienne and Friebus script for NBC, with Le Gallienne, Tom Bosley, Maurice Evans and Elsa Lanchester, among others. If you happen to find it, do let me know. In the meantime, I trust the various incarnations above will be more than enough for a satisfying journey, like mine, down the rabbit hole. Happy new year to all!

Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game

As prestige movies open pell-mell in the next few weeks, and Oscar campaigns already underway blaze into full public awareness, one of the contenders will surely be The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley. It tells the story of Alan Turing, the British mathematician who is widely credited with breaking the Nazi’s “Enigma” code and whose name is regularly invoked in discussions of artificial intelligence, specifically over how or whether we might one day create a machine whose thoughts are indistinguishable from those of a human.

Alan Turing

As with any major film, especially one with Oscar hopes, there will be a near-avalanche of stories about the film: its director, its stars, its writer – and the man who inspired it. I don’t want to give much away for those unfamiliar with the tale, but Turing’s life truly encompassed World War II intrigue, intellectual triumph, reprehensible bias, persecution and injustice, and great tragedy. There’s going to be a cottage industry of stories on Turing – paeans, revisionist history, alternative views, and so on, right up through Oscar night.

For many, this may be their first encounter with the Turing story and they’ll be drawn in by the considerable glamour and talent of Cumberbatch and Knightley (I haven’t seen it yet, so I’m going solely on the advance word and promotion). There’s a cautionary part of the story that’s well worth being told many times over.

Broadway logo for Derek Jacobi in Breaking The Code

But for theatregoers with moderately long memories (I count myself among them), The Imitation Game will come as something less than a revelation historically, because the West End and Broadway beat the movies to the punch almost 30 years ago, with Derek Jacobi as Turing in Hugh Whitemore’s play Breaking The Code. Like The Imitation Game, it was based on Andrew Hodges’s book Alan Turing: The Enigma.

Breaking The Code played for six months in New York 1987-88, following on the heels of Jacobi’s triumphant performances in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s repertory of Cyrano de Bergerac and Much Ado About Nothing (both opposite Sinead Cusack); I was fortunate enough to have seen all three, and it cemented my deep admiration for Jacobi as one of the finest actors of his generation. As for the play, while I long believed that it was Jacobi who truly made the experience remarkable, and unrepeatable, I saw the show years later at the Berkshire Theatre Festival with Jamey Sheridan in the Turing role, and to my surprise I was once again fascinated and deeply moved.

Now of course vastly more people see most movies than see a play, but as Imitation Game launches, I was thrilled to discover that Jacobi’s performance has been preserved, in a 1996 BBC adaptation of the play by Hugh Whitemore, available online in its entirety.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S23yie-779k

While it is an adaptation, not simply a film of the play, the TV version will give us a chance to see two portrayals of one man by two superb actors, refracted through the views of different writers and directors – and societal growth and change regarding LGBTQ life and rights – at an interval of 30 years.

I anticipate that this October will be the month of “freak,” and not because of Halloween. Though that won’t help.

Because the media can’t resist trend stories, and any three or more items with a common link can constitute a trend, the confluence of the AMC series Freakshow; the new season of American Horror Story, entitled “Freak Show”; and the Broadway musical Side Show, with its opening number inviting audiences to “Come Look at the Freaks,” will prove irresistible. However, they may also engender more frequent use of the word “freak” to apply to people with disabilities, bringing into vogue a term used far too often to marginalize those who don’t match up with what is far too often termed as “normal.” What, after all, is normal anyway?

“Freak” is a particularly ugly word when applied to a person with a disability, since it is not only designed to clearly label them as being something other than the prevailing “standard,” but it has been layered over centuries with implications of fear and horror and objectification. Many people went to see side shows in order to gaze with at best fascination, but often with superiority or revulsion at people who, in some cases, could find no other employment (and developed extraordinary skills to combat that) and for whom medical treatments and assistive tools were unavailable. That connotation lingers.

Part of the challenge that’s barreling towards us in the next month comes from how these works are advertised. The deeply unsettling ads for American Horror Story, whether in TV or on subway signage, are determined to link “freak” with “scary” and “strange.” In an effort to recall the very side shows in which John Merrick was displayed, the pending Broadway revival of The Elephant Man already has theatre signage imploring passers-by to “Behold an extraordinary freak of nature.” And how many people may come out of Side Show humming the often-sung and whispered, “Come look at the freaks/Come gape at the geeks/Come examine these aberrations/Their malformations/Grotesque physiques/Only pennies for peeks”? It’s quite possible that more people will see or hear the word “freak” than will actually see the shows that contain or employ them, reinsinuating the term back into common parlance, devoid of context or understanding.

Each of these examples may be very different works – one a reality TV show, one a fictional horror fantasy, one a Broadway musical – but they’re all rooted in the setting of a circus or carnival sideshow or, as they were often known, freak show. The side show has proven a rich location for tales of fiction and fact for many years, from William Lindsay Gresham’s noir Nightmare Alley to an early and rare Spalding Gray monologue In Search of The Monkey Girl to Katherine Dunn’s family saga Geek Love. The legacy of Tod Browning’s film Freaks lingers after 80 years, along with the debate over whether it was utter exploitation, or something more.

This is not to suggest that we can entirely eradicate “freak,” but that as these depictions proliferate, we should be thinking about the context in which they’re used. In the various accounts being told, it would be dishonest to pretend that “freak” was not a common term for people with disabilities. Within each work, it’s an accurate term (although in its out of town run at The Kennedy Center, I noticed Side Show’s careful use of “disabled” at one point, anachronistically but diplomatically), no different than the term “crippled” in Martin McDonough’s The Cripple of Inishmaan, which played on Broadway in the spring.

Daniel Radcliffe and Sarah Greene in The Cripple of Inishmaan

But Inishmaan is also the example that provokes my concern about “the fr-word” this fall. While in Ireland in the 1930s, no one was stopping to find a more proper term for the boy they all called, to his own frustration, “Cripple Billy.” But when the show was discussed or written about, the term was used over and over again, with some critics seemingly of the opinion that since it was spoken so often in the play, they could use it in their own writing. But those critics were writing in 2014, not 1934, and their language should not have been the language of the play except when making direct quotes.

Just like the language regarding race, the best term for discussing those who have disabilities has been evolving. Terms like “handicapped” and “differently abled,” which were seen as proper not so long ago, are now problematic; for comparison’s sake, think about how terms like “Oriental” or “Negro” seem today. Worth remembering is that the long-prevailing language was imposed upon minority groups without consultation or consent; now it’s incumbent upon us to employ the preferred terms that groups choose for their own self-definition.

That’s not to say the word is never to be uttered. Beginning in the 1960s, the counterculture embraced “freak” specifically to define themselves as outside of conventional society, but the term was usually dissociated from physical attributes and was more of a state of mind; we began to hear about “freak flags flying” from groups that assiduously wanted to be perceived as outside the mainstream. There are nouveau side shows in a number of places, including Coney Island and Venice Beach, but on recent looks, their bills of fare were just as apt to favor people who displayed outré body art or performed stunts than those with disabilities, and in every case the performers are there under their own agency.

Indeed, just as LGBTQ activists embraced the derogatory “queer” as an emblem of their own efforts at acceptance, and to confront those who sought to suppress them, there are those in the disability community who proudly call themselves “freaks” or “crips,” and those names are often claimed by performers with disabilities as well. But no differently than someone straight should call a member of the LGBTQ community “a queer,” no one should think that they have the right to label someone with a disability “a freak.” Those individuals can self-identify as such, but it doesn’t cut both ways.

As Christopher Shinn wrote so eloquently for The Atlantic, disability is not a metaphor. I would add to that sentiment that “freak,” when applied to a person, is not a title of mystery and wonder. It’s a slur. So see these shows according to your own taste. But think carefully about how you’re going to talk about them afterwards.

This essay appeared in a somewhat different form as part of The Guardian’s op-ed section, “Comment is Free.” Click here for that edited and condensed version.

The arrival of a new movie trailer online is received with a level of excitement and scrutiny that once waited for the film itself; even photos get analyzed in depth, as the recent hubbub over the first image of Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman has proved. So it’s no surprise that the theatre fan community went into a frenzy over the first full trailer for Disney’s film of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into The Woods; after all, superhero movies now arrive like clockwork, while movie musicals, though more common than in the 70s and 80s, are still infrequent events. That dearth caused a previous bit of alarm and umbrage over Into The Woods, when Mr. Sondheim suggested there might be some plot changes.

Almost as quickly as the Into The Woods trailer appeared, my social media feeds were filled with an anguished refrain: where are the songs? Yes, the core audience felt betrayed, even though I suspect every person who was moved to write already knows the score by heart.

What those of us who love theatre in general, musicals in particular, and Sondheim most of all have to remember is that, sadly, we are not representative of the majority of moviegoers, and movie marketers have to throw a wide net. Those of us who flock to watch the trailer of Into The Woods are already committed to seeing it, no matter how much we may want to grouse about it. The film studios are trying to reach a much wider crowd, for whom the sight of stars singing may be off-putting, strange as such a thought may be to those of us who are ready to belt out a show tune at the slighted prompting. It’s also possible that we’ll get a more representative trailer as the film draws closer.

Minimizing the musical theatre connection has certainly been true for movie musicals for some time. It’s almost as though marketers are trying to slip the fact that people sing past potential audiences. Unlike Into The Woods, which does seem more like a moody tour of the film’s production design than anything, music is prominently featured in countless trailers, even for non-musical films, and sometimes with music that isn’t ever heard in the film. But when it comes to seeing people sing, let’s keep that quiet, shall we? We can hear singing in trailers, and see people moving their lips, but not in sync. Take a look at the trailer for Hairspray as an example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ53mRO80c0

Dancing, apparently, isn’t so problematic. The Dancing with the Stars effect has probably only increased its appeal. Another example is Mamma Mia! which looked as if it was a romantic comedy with a bunch of Abba songs on the soundtrack, rather than a story told using Abba songs. One can understand why they wouldn’t have wanted anyone to see and hear Pierce Brosnan warbling, but the sight of master thespian Meryl Streep going to town on some Swedish pop might have added some appeal in its very incongruity.

Maybe Paramount knew the theatre purists were already on edge when they cut the trailer for Sweeney Todd, given the relative musical inexperience of the main cast (which many feel lived down to their expectations), which keeps vocals to a minimum. Despite that, more than most musical trailers, Sweeney actually gave us a real look at a bit of a song, “Epiphany,” spoke-sung by Johnny Depp (although we were halfway through the trailer before it was deployed). However that could easily be recognized as a fantasy sequence and seemingly not the style of the whole film. Overall the trailer hewed closer to the Hammer Films homage that director Tim Burton had appropriated for the Grand Guignol tale, and maybe a few Fangoria devotees were lured into a musical they’d have avoided otherwise.

It’s not that we don’t get a few glimpses of people singing in some trailers, but in the quick-cut style that brings them flash and energy, there is a certain “blink or you’ll miss it” quality, even when the making of music is central to the plot, as in the Dreamgirls trailer, where one would think performance footage of a superstar like Beyoncé would actually be a plus.

The incongruity of Eddie Murphy singing may be why we saw a bit of exactly that in Dreamgirls, and the same rationale may have applied to Depp in Sweeney, as well as Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renee Zellwger as the merry murderesses in the trailer of Chicago. For Zellweger, the singing was new; for Zeta-Jones it was part of her professional background, but before she became a star. Perhaps singing from people we least expect to sing has marketing value.

Mind you, this fear extends to movies that aren’t musicals but tell musical stories and in which the main characters are known to us precisely because they’re singers. The flash of the trailer for the just-released Get On Up, about James Brown, gives us glimpses of his energetic performances and we hear his music along with narration and dialogue, but lips actually moving along with the songs go largely unseen. Of course, given the subterfuge with which actual musicals are being marketed, I can’t help but wonder whether some audiences see this and think, “Uh, I dunno. I think they’re trying to slip one of those durned musicals by us.”

As much as we purists might be desperate to see musical scenes as quickly as possible, we can be fairly sure that the film itself will be a musical, even if it has been adapted and altered from its stage version. The example of Irma la Douce, one of the very few musicals to be adapted for the screen without the songs, is unlikely to recur.

So what about original musicals for the screen? To be fair, original live action film tuners are scarce, except for animation, where, since Disney’s The Little Mermaid, a mini-song score seems de rigeur. But is that a selling point? On the basis of the trailer for Frozen, which ultimately drilled Idinia Menzel’s “Let It Go” into the brains of millions of kids and their parents worldwide, even Disney wasn’t sure that the massively successful score was going to bring in the crowd. The film seemed to be the story of one girl, one boy and one talking snowman. However, to be fair, even though they hid it, the word got out about the exceptional songs.

The trailer for Les Miserables did show us Anne Hathaway as the doomed Fantine singing “I Dreamed A Dream,” in fact it’s all we hear as we watch that trailer – all of the other visuals that are laid over it could easily come from a non-musical. No warbling Wolverine here. Perhaps, to the handful of people in the world who have managed to escape any knowledge of the stage musical, this one song could be an isolated case. But this trailer more than any demonstrates the marketing tactic that prevails: don’t make it look too much like a musical in the hope of capturing some people who may not like musicals, and as for the core audience, we’ll throw ‘em a bone.

I wish I could recall which Twitter wit I read who compared movie trailers without songs to foreign film trailers without dialogue, since I would like to credit them for that very astute observation. But it’s worth noting that foreign films are financed and produced abroad, then picked up for distribution over here; the Hollywood studios shoulder vastly greater risk when they release musicals. While I’m fairly grouchy about the studios these days, with the endless remakes, sequels and films from dystopian young adult novels (thanks Mark Harris for that), I really am willing to give them a lot of leeway on musicals, to a degree on how they adapt them, but certainly on how they sell them. For perspective: if a musical sells 600,000 tickets in a year, it’s a smash; if a movie musical sells 600,000 tickets in its first week, it’s a disappointment. And after all, if a trailer whets our appetite for a movie musical, we can always fire up the iPod, or our Sondheim channel, and listen and sing along to our heart’s content until the movie comes out. After all, haven’t we been doing that already?

Incidentally, we’re getting two musicals this Christmas. In addition to Into The Woods, everybody’s favorite orphan is back, and on the basis of the trailer, while it’s hard to know what’s been done with the story and most of the score, at least we know it will still be a hard knock life tomorrow, though we may not be entirely sure of who’s singing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrxc8rS2W2E

Based on the commentary I was seeing in online articles and social media comments yesterday, someone had just painted a mustache on the Mona Lisa. No one seemed to care that Da Vinci had decided to it himself.

I’m referring to the outpouring of dismay over the news that some changes had been made to the storyline and score of Disney’s upcoming film of Stephen Sondheim’s Into The Woods. Mind you, no one has seen the film as of yet; the response resulted from a New Yorker “Talk of the Town” piece in which Sondheim spoke of the changes, and more to the point, from online articles based on that story which extracted out the specifics of the pending changes without the full context of the original report, which regrettably is behind The New Yorker’s paywall. Therefore it’s the secondhand reportage which seems to have reached the widest audience and sparked a healthy flurry of unhappiness.

I for one would like to state that I’m shocked – shocked, I say – to find that the creative and commercial forces behind the film adaptation of a stage work have mandated changes in the original material (for those immune to written sarcasm, I mean to say that I’m not remotely shocked). The litany of stage material (or for that matter books, true life stories and even prior films) that has been slightly altered or radically reworked for movie consumption is endless. But even minor changes become the fodder for endless online investigation, interpretation and instantaneous outrage, the currency of so much digital derision by the faithful. And it’s not even an online phenomenon – I remember the furor that arose when Tim Burton had the temerity to cast Michael Keaton as Batman in the 80s, even for what was a major reworking of material that had been reduced to camp 20 years earlier on television.

That Disney might want to homogenize some of the spikier elements of Into The Woods should have come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the company’s brand, which has a long history of altering fairytale stories, from Snow White and Sleeping Beauty to Once Upon A Time and Maleficent. Yes, I am one of the many who revere Sondheim’s work, and the man, but just as the removal of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” from that film adaptation didn’t ruin the story on screen, I’m at least willing to wait to see Into The Woods before I critique its choices, whatever the rationale. And let’s face it, after almost 30 years, it’s not as if film companies were fighting for the right to bring the material to the screen.

What frustrates me much more in this scenario is the way in which the details of changes have been excised from their context in The New Yorker. Sondheim’s revelation came out of a conversation with high school teachers which touched upon some of the problems they face in trying to produce challenging work at their schools, by Sondheim and others. While reporter Larissa MacFarquhar is glib about opposition to Sweeney Todd (“the teachers were smut and gore idealists”), she does report on the portion of the conversation specific to Into The Woods. In particular, she relates how the teachers told stories of opposition to elements of infidelity and sexuality in the Sondheim-Lapine piece, and how Sondheim compared the attitudes of school administrators to those of Disney executives. (I asked the organization that arranged the conversation, the Academy for Teachers, whether a recording of the full session had been created, but founder Sam Swope said they had none, that the New Yorker account was accurate and that the censorship discussion was only a small part of a wider-ranging talk.)

When a teacher explains that she must always present bowdlerized versions of musicals (please look up that odd word if you don’t know it), the article reports:

“Can you let them read the original and then discuss why, say, Rapunzel is not allowed to die in the adulterated version?” Sondheim asked.

“We do that, but they just get angry. They feel censored–they don’t feel trusted.”

“And they’re right,” Sondheim said. “But you have to explain to them that censorship is part of our puritanical ethics, and it’s something that they’re going to have to deal with. There has to be a point at which you don’t compromise anymore, but that may mean you won’t get anyone to sell your painting or perform your musical. You have to deal with reality.”

Now I’m not entirely comfortable with Sondheim’s conflation of censorship with marketplace realities, since censorship is performed unilaterally by people in power against those without influence, whereas creative alteration in a commercial setting results from negotiation – and money is at the root of the decisions on all sides. Into The Woods wasn’t taken unwillingly from Sondheim – he sold it. I trust that he has safeguarded the essence of the show. But I agree that the impulse to homogenize for the marketplace does indeed come from a puritan ethic, as does school censorship, both cases where adults take a patronizing view of what young people can handle – though in the case of a Disney film, they’re trying to reach audiences much younger than the participants in high school theatre programs in a big tent effort.

It is the stage alteration in schools that perpetually worries me. In cases when creators or rights holders have authorized “junior”or “school” versions of stage works, they are active participants in the excision of “challenging” material,” and while perhaps that’s also a market-driven decision, I like to think that it also occurs in the best interests of allowing to students to take on work which would otherwise be wholly off-limits in a school setting. Regardless, I worry about the academic gatekeepers who mandate these changes, which may vary from school to school or state to state, and in far too many cases are done at the school level without any approval from the licensing house or creator. That’s where censorship is truly taking place and insidious. It’s where the idea that anyone can alter a stage text at will is born, much to the consternation of authors, and their representatives at the Dramatists Guild, in the U.S.

As Sondheim notes in the New Yorker piece, “If you look at most plays, it’s like the sonata form in music–if you screw around with that, you’re taking your life in your hands.”

It is clear in the article that Sondheim is an active participant in the film of Into The Woods, whether his resulting choices are grudgingly mercenary or willingly collaborative is hard to assess. Regarding the removal of the Baker’s Wife’s liaison and the song “Any Moment,” the article reports one educator’s distress and Sondheim’s acquiescence.

“Stick up for that song!” a teacher called out.

“I did, I did,” Sondheim said. “But Disney said, we don’t want Rapunzel to die, so we replotted it. I won’t tell you what happens now, but we wrote a new song to cover it.”

As with any adaptation of a prior work, changes are inevitable. Fortunately, the new version doesn’t change the source, and in the case of Into The Woods, Disney’s film won’t yield a whole new stage text. I do worry that schools will interpret the screen revisions as permission to alter their own productions, which is in fact illegal; I’ve been struck by how often opposition to Sweeney Todd has arisen from the film’s gouts of bloods, which suggest that gore is essential to the show, when even John Doyle’s Broadway revival dispensed with obvious blood-letting, so the films do suggest a template to the public. What is very likely to occur from the Into The Woods film is that people beyond the core fan base for musicals will be introduced to the genius of Sondheim and, perhaps, that even more schools will do the show – according to the approved text.

It may be fun join in online outrage, but it’s an impotent act in a case like this. The film will be what Disney wants it to be. Why not put those efforts to better use, and direct them to supporting live theatre and making sure that the teachers whose genuine concerns sparked this kerfuffle have the opportunity to tackle brilliant and challenging work with their students, their schools and their communities. That’s where your voice can make a difference, in advancing the cause of arts education and in the battle against true censorship whenever it arises.

Addendum, June 23, 2014: One week after The New Yorker article came out and five days after the online furor began, Stephen Sondheim released the following statement about changes to Into The Woods, which largely negates the cuts he said would be happening. It reads:

An article in The New Yorker misreporting my “Master Class” conversation about censorship in our schools with seventeen teachers from the Academy for Teachers a couple of weeks ago has created some false impressions about my collaboration with the Disney Studio on the film version of Into the Woods. The fact is that James (Lapine, who wrote both the show and the movie) and I worked out every change from stage to screen with the producers and with Rob Marshall, the director. Despite what the New Yorker article may convey, the collaboration was genuinely collaborative and always productive.

When the conversation with the teachers occurred, I had not yet seen a full rough cut of the movie. Coincidentally, I saw it immediately after leaving the meeting and, having now seen it a couple of times, I can happily report that it is not only a faithful adaptation of the show, it is a first-rate movie.

And for those who care, as the teachers did, the Prince’s dalliance is still in the movie, and so is “Any Moment.”