While the phrase “public domain” may hold little meaning for you (or make your eyes glaze over), January 1, 2019 will mark a significant milestone in that seemingly arcane distinction. That’s because at the beginning of the new year, creative works will once again begin to enter the public domain – that is to say that they will no longer be subject to copyright protection or restrictions – for the first time in 20 years.
Why the gap? Because in 1998 Congress enacted an extension on copyright protection (named for entertainer and congressman Sonny Bono, who fought for such legislation). So while works from 1922 have been in the public domain for two decades, it is only now that 1923 works move out of copyright. This means they can be produced, adapted, copied as anyone sees fit. If you’ve always wanted to create a radical modern retelling of Felix Salten’s Bambi, it’s all yours – provided you don’t accidentally incorporate elements which were unique to the Disney animated film, because those bits belong to Disney and they’re likely to vigorously protect their intellectual property.
While there have been various articles and web essays about what enters the public domain imminently, they have tended to concentrate on books, movies and songs – for example, you will no longer have to pay for the rights to “Yes, We Have No Bananas” going forward, should you be inclined to use it. You’ll also be able set Robert Frost’s “Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening” to a hip-hop track and not owe his estate a dime.
Condola Rashad in “Saint Joan” at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2018 (Photo by Joan Marcus)
When it comes to theatre, the most notable work – and it has been noted elsewhere – that will come into the public domain is George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. That means if Manhattan Theatre Club had just waited a year to produce the play, they would have saved, assuming a 6% author’s royalty, about $125,000 on their production. That said, Shaw’s Saint Joan is just one of many versions of the story, so keep your hands off everything from Jean Anouilh’s The Lark and Jane Anderson’s very recent Mother of the Maid.
This prompts the question: what other theatrical work is about to be up for grabs for all takers?
Certainly nothing as quite as classic as the Shaw work, although Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine is widely acknowledged as an important work by an important playwright, even if recent outings are few. There was a musical adaptation that found success a decade ago.
A flip through the pages of the venerable Burns Mantle Best Plays books for 1922-23 and 1923-24 is a great survey, and while the synopses that appear for most plays suggest there’s a lot that’s best left in the past, there are some plays that might be worth looking at again, either to produce on a budget (no royalties), or adapt for modern audiences. Mind you, there’s no racial or ethnic diversity to speak of in the mix, unless you count Hungarian, but of course now anyone can set that right. Maybe there are shows out there ripe for musicalization, with no strings attached?
Here’s a cursory sampling, in no particular order:
Will Shakespeare by Clemence Dane, which posited a love triangle in which Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe fight for the affections of one Mary Fitton, lady in waiting. It climaxes with a fight between Will and Kit which climaxes with (spoiler alert) Kit falling on his own knife. One can never have to many plays chronicling a life which went largely unrecorded by history.
Mary the Third was a mid-career work by Rachel Crothers, a highly successful playwright whose greatest success would nonetheless come with her last produced piece, Susan and God in 1937. Mary the Third looked at marriage across three generations of women in the same family.
Humoresque by Fannie Hurst was the story of a an up-from-the-slums violinist, and had already been a silent film based on Hurst’s short story. It was later considerably reworked by Clifford Odets and Zachary Gold into a film released in 1946, with the violinist now caught in a romance with his wealthy patroness, played by Joan Crawford.
My Aunt from Ypsilanti was “adapted from the French” and while the play seemed entirely negligible, you gotta love that title, the only Broadway show to ever use the place name Ypsilanti. Of course, titles can’t be copyrighted, so if no one stole this one by now, it’s unlikely to see a resurgence.
Swashbucklers weren’t reserved for the screen, and 1923 saw the stage debut of Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche. One Sheldon Stanwood played the French hero, later embodied in 1952 on the screen by Stewart Granger. No records survive (actually, just didn’t look) as to whether the title character did the fandango.
“Scaramouche”
Frederick Lonsdale was a successful writer of musical librettos, but it’s his plays that have lived on, including The Last of Mrs. Cheney and On Approval,which will come into public domain in 2021 and 2023 respectively. But his Aren’t We All? from 1923 was in fact his last show to be seen on Broadway, in a starry 1985 production led by Claudette Colbert and Rex Harrison.
The sharp-eyed might question the inclusion of Outward Bound by Sutton Vane, but while it premiered on January 7, 1924, the Best Plays book notes that it was copyrighted in 1923. This metaphysical mystery, a thematic precursor to the TV’s Lost (oh, right, spoiler alert), was sufficiently popular to yield two movie versions, first in 1930, with Leslie Howard reprising his stage role, and again with Paul Henreid in the Howard role in a 1943 version called Between Two Worlds (oops, again, spoiler alert).
“Outward Bound”
The same “Say, wasn’t that a 1924 show?” query might be applied to Beggar on Horseback by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly but once again, while it premiered on February 12, 1924, its copyright was 1923 – the same year as another collaboration by the duo, the musical Helen of Troy, New York, which had songs by the team of Kalmar and Ruby. Somewhat surprisingly, it’s the play which seemed to have legs, as it turns up now and again on various stages, though its last Broadway run was in 1970.
Ferenc Molnar had a solid run of hits between 1902 and 1941, including Liliom (which later became Carousel) and The Play’s The Thing (later adapted by Tom Stoppard as Rough Crossing). His 1923 fantasy of royalty, The Swan, translated by M.P. Baker, would become a film in 1956, starring Grace Kelly and Alec Guinness. It was one of two Molnar plays to debut on Broadway in October of that year, the other being the more tragically-minded Launzi, adapted by Edna St. Vincent Millay, about a young woman, rebuffed in love, who tries suicide, fails, is romantically rebuffed again, then acts as if she were dead, taking to wearing an angel’s wings.
Not to be outdone by Kaufman & Connelly and Molnar, George M. Cohan wrote two shows that premiered in 1923, doing the book, music and lyrics for The Rise of Rosie O’Reilly, which gave Ruby Keeler her Broadway debut, a musical, and The Song and Dance Man, a play. Just to one up the competition, Cohan starred in the latter piece – and the two shows opened in the same week, the former on Christmas and the latter on New Year’s Eve.
Cervantes’s Don Quixote predates concerns like copyright, so the material has actually long been available for free use. But for those who have grown tired of Man of La Mancha, they might want to delve into some archive and find out if there’s anything to be salvaged from Sancho Panza, the 1923 musical by Melchior Lengyel, with a score by Hugo Felix, which seems to have emphasized the wrong character, no doubt contributing to its brief run. Even 95 years ago, marketing mattered.
Years before Hedy Lamarr worked her white-washed wiles on Walter Pidgeon, Annette Margulies embodied the “native girl” Tondeleyo in the potboiler White Cargo, itself adapted from a novel called Hell’s Playground by Ida Vera Simonton. A British film of the play preceded the Lamarr version, and faced censorship for sensual content, even in the pre-Production Code days.
Those with forethought may have already been working on resurrections or revivals of some of these works, but have kept silent until the copyright fully expires at 12:00 am on January 1. But if we’ve had dueling The Wild Partys and both a play and musical called Hamilton, who’s to say there might not be multiple Aunts From Ypsilanti in our future. Dramaturgs and literary managers, playwrights and composers, artistic directors: start your engines. The new year will be here before you can say “Scaramouche”!
Update, December 31, 2018: Subsequent to the publication of this post, I was contacted by Glenn Fleishman, who wrote the excellent Smithsonian piece linked above. According to his research, while Saint Joan debuted in 1923, it was not copyrighted until 1924. So if this Shaw play is on your theatre’s schedule for 2019, you may want to delve deeper into its copyright history before deciding not to pay royalties on it.
There are many who remain upset with the owners of the Hotel Edison for their ejection of the Edison Cafe several years ago, and you can count me among them, because along with the cafe went the best chicken soup I’ve ever had, a balm on days when it was cold out or I had a cold.
But now I have to tip my hat to those same owners, who, in the process of renovating the hotel, haven’t taken the corporate, pre-fabricated route, at least so far as the deco-ish lobby goes. Indeed, on this post-Tony Awards morning, when many Times Square denizens are still rousing themselves, there’s an artist in the passageway that connects 46th and 47th Streets through the Edison, painting new murals that evoke the bygone days of Times Square, at the turn of the 20th century, in the 1940s and in the “bad old days” of the 1970s (as seen thought the eyes of a motorist cruising 42 Street).
I would have liked to see more varied representation of people of color in the images, since they were far from absent in Times Square over the years. The objectification of women in several images, while perhaps true to the eras portrayed, perhaps need not have been quite so foregrounded. Al Jolson in blackface, while certainly accurate, perpetuates a discredited practice.
Yet it is a pleasure to see artwork in progress, not just a digital print-out being pasted to a wall. I made a point of telling the artist, Arnie Charnick, that his work was exciting, since we so rarely have that opportunity to express our appreciation directly to any artists, but I must confess that his mumbled reply was inaudible to me. No doubt his head was filled with thoughts of the work at hand, and a passerby snapping pictures with his iPhone was one of what is assuredly many distractions as he works so publicly.
Nonetheless, if you like seeing public art in progress, hustle to the Edison and take a look over Arnie’s shoulder. The art is handmade, and the hands are still making it.
Update, June 12, 2018: Apparently I was not the only person concerned about the representation people of color in these works. Subsequent to this post going up at 10 am on June 11, the artist removed the words “Place Trash Here” from a trash can visible in the lower left of the 1970s image, which depicts a black man in the can. The Daily Newswrote about the complaints of hotel staff members which led to this alteration. My intent was not to precipitate censorship of the work, only to express my own response to it, but works in progress are not yet set in stone, or paint, as the case may be.
Hotel Edison lobby mural of the turn of the century by Arnie Charnick
Hotel Edison lobby mural, of the 1970s, by Arnie Charnick
December 26th, 2016 § Comments Off on Times Square Weirdness: 2016 In Review § permalink
Given that it was merely a stray amusement that became a popular offshoot of my photography hobby, “Times Square Weirdness” went worldwide this year with my discovery of Mike Hot-Pence (aka Glen Pannell), who used his resemblance to the Vice-President-elect to raise funds for progressive causes. Profiles everywhere from the Washington Post to People magazine to BuzzFeed all got their start on this site, and while the inspired idea was 100% Glen’s, it was my photos and blog post that caught the media’s attention – until such time as the media just keep feeding upon itself. And I should say that both Glen and his causes were really far from weird.
Most of the year was my usual array of motley Elmos and Elsas, Cookie Monsters and Hulks, Olafs and Spider-Men. None are ever posed, none are paid, all are images captured when going from one place to another in Times Square, not the result of hours-long stakeouts. This is but a small sampling.
For those unfamiliar with “Times Square Weirdness,” my series of photos of the odder denizens of Times Square, shared frequently on my Facebook page, you may be surprised to learn of my familiarity with the Elmos and Spider-Men that people The Crossroads of the World. One by-product of this frivolous pastime is that whenever a new “character” appears, I note it almost immediately and, whenever possible, record it for posterity.
Today I was surprised to encounter a nattily attired, white-haired gent calling himself “Mike Hot-Pence,” playing off the name of our Vice-President-elect, to whom the man bore a strong resemblance. He was, according to the sign on his back and the jar in his hand, collecting funds to support Planned Parenthood, an act of admirable yet relatively subtle political theatre.
The name, you ask, why the name? Oh, I neglected to mention: he was nattily attired from the waist up, but wearing only tight, bright blue shorts on a day that was in the mid-40 degrees.
Within 90 minutes of posting my best photo of Mr. Hot-Pence on Facebook, a mutual friend revealed H-P’s true identity: Glen Pannell, a graphic designer, actor and activist. As the photo spread quickly, I disovered other mutual acquantances. Consequently, I am pleased to offer the very first interview (conducted via e-mail) with Pannell about his new persona, on his very first day in character.
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HES: When did you become aware of your resemblance to Mike Pence? And when did you first find out who Mike Pence was?
Pannell: Shortly after the Republican convention over the summer, a few people remarked on my resemblance to Pence. My sister joked with me about it, a friend posted on Facebook, somebody at work made a comment – it all seeemed to happen at the same time, and then more and more people started asking, “Do you know who you look like?” I think I was aware of the resemblance too, but I become more fully conscious of it the more people called attention to it.
I have family in Indiana so I knew that Pence was governor. But it wasn’t until he signed the anti-gay Religious Freedom Bill last year that I really started paying attention to him. I’m gay so that made me sit up and take notice. And it’s those kinds of policy decisions that are energizing my activism now.
HES: How did you conceive of your alter-ego, Mike Hot-Pence? Did you come up with the name yourself?
Pannell: I did come up with name myself! A friend suggested I dress as Mike Pence for Halloween. But a straightforward Pence costume seemed a little lazy. I was also concerned that people might take it as an endorsement of the Trump-Pence ticket. So I decided to have some fun with it and dress as “Sexy Mike Pence.” Once I decided on jacket and tie for the top half and short shorts for the bottom half, the “Hot-Pence” moniker popped into my head. And that’s the origin story of Mike Hot-Pence.
HES: It’s already pretty chilly out. How long do you see yourself seeking funds in Times Square?
Pannell: I’m a wimp about the cold so I’d like to look at some other locations, preferably indoor, so that MHP makes it through the winter months with all his fingers and toes intact. But I won’t let the weather stop me. It may just mean layers and lots of coffee. I found on my first outing that Times Square has some other challenges regardless of the weather. There are a lot of costumed characters competing for attention, all in their Designted Activity Zones, so breaking through that noise and getting people to pay attention is tough.
HES: In addition to Planned Parenthood, are there other charities you want to use the character to raise funds for?
HES: I read on Facebook that some people may have been less than gracious to you in this persona. Are you concerned about people not caring for your persona, especially since it seems to be getting lots of traction very quickly?
Pannell: I can only control what I put out there, not how people receive it. I’m trying to provide as much transparency for the fundraising part of it so that people know it’s legit. 100% of the money I collect goes to the charity. Some people might not care for it or may think I’m being opportunistic. Yes, I am being opportunistic! I’m using this opportunity to raise money for people that will really need it over the next couple of years. I do promise to heed Michelle Obama’s words, “When they go low, we go high.” And that was tested on my first fundraising outing. Even with the short shorts, Mike Hot-Pence is a classy guy at heart.
HES: If you could say one thing to VP-elect Pence, what would you like to ask or tell him?
Pannell: Just one? I’ll keep it short: You have to represent all people, not just the ones that look like you. And me.
Follow Mike Hot-Pence on Twitter. He’ll keep everyone posted there about his appearances and the funds raised.
“I knew y’all would come. It’s the rest of the world I couldn’t have anticipated.”
Lin-Manuel Miranda (all photos by Howard Sherman)
That was what Lin-Manuel Miranda admitted about his extraordinary recent success with the musical Hamilton to some 200 high school drama teachers in a session on July 7, just two days before he was to leave the cast of the show. He was speaking at the Broadway Teachers Workshop, an annual summer program for theatre teachers from around the country, in a wide-ranging discussion that took him from elementary school to the present day. While questions came to Miranda at first from the moderator Patrick Vassel, the associate director of Hamilton, the session was predominantly Miranda responding to questions directly from the teachers.
For the benefit of all of the teachers (and students) who weren’t there, here are some highlights from Miranda’s remarks, slightly condensed and edited for clarity. Among the material not included here are any topics covered in my prior interviews with Miranda, both for Dramatics magazine and this website.
On being a teacher post-college
When I was about to graduate Wesleyan in 2002, I called Dr. Herbert [Miranda’s high school mentor] and said, “I have a BA in theatre arts, can I come substitute teach at Hunter for a living?” He said, “I’ll do you one better we actually have a part time English position.” So I taught seventh grade English my first year out of school.
There’s nothing better than the people who taught you becoming your friends suddenly being on the other side of that divide So that was enormous fun. And I loved it, I loved my students. I had two seventh grade English classes and I still follow them and they’re still in touch.
They offered me a full-time position at the end of the year and I could kind of see the Mr. Holland’s Opus life ahead of me and I said, ‘I’ll kick myself forever if I don’t even try to work on this musical I’d already been working on called In The Heights.’ I’d already met Tommy [Kail, Hamilton’s director], we were workshopping In The Heights in the basement of the Drama Book Shop while I was teaching. I basically quit teaching part time to be a professional sub, which is much more precarious because you don’t know if you’ll make rent month to month. But it’s much less draining, so your time is free to write.
Lin-Manuel Miranda
So I really was a professional sub until In The Heights opened on Broadway. Elementary school Spanish, physics, science – in the physics classes I’d be like “who wants a song”? I didn’t know what I was talking about. But it was enormously life-changing and it’s in the DNA of everything I do now.
A huge impulse from Hamilton is that impulse to teach. Because what you learn when you’re a teacher, in a lot of ways it’s different from being a performer. You go into being a performer because you get that itch that only applause can scratch. What you realize when you’re teaching is tactually the best moments when you’re a teacher is when you’re laying back and the kids are making the connections for themselves and all you do is keep the ball in the air. You watch them make the connections with each other and my best teachers always did that. You’ll know when those neurons are firing and things are happening and you just get to watch it. They’ve got the information and they’re making the connections, they are debating.
So that was enormously useful as well, because I think the best actors know how to listen. They don’t just scratch that itch that applause provides, they listen to their fellow castmates and they hold them up. They realize they’re twice as strong when they are in an ensemble than when they’re center stage and in the spotlight. Those are the lessons I’ve learned from being a teacher and a performer and they’ve been essential, really essential.
On his earliest musicals and the influence of mixtapes
I wrote four musicals in college. Only one of them was In The Heights. I wrote another one called On Borrowed Time, which was my senior thesis, which if I have my way you’ll never hear. I wrote a jukebox musical called Basket Case; I wrote the book and it was all 90s songs. It was about a school shooting and it started with “Jeremy” by Pearl Jam and it ended with the shooting to “Black Hole Sun” by Soundgarden. In it was “Barbie Girl” and Destiny’s Child.
It actually came as a result of listening to mixtapes of music I liked in the car. They were starting to form the spine of a story in my head which is sort of how I write scores. I’m really grateful that I was a teenager in a time when to impress a girl you made her 90 minutes of cassette music and that’s an art form unto itself, is it not? Draw the cover art, you have a rise and a fall, you can put in skits. It’s not like a CD, they have to listen to it in the order in which you have arranged it. That is a musical score. It’s usually the musical score of, ‘Why don’t you like me?’
But it’s also a way of making friends, a way of showing of your tastes, or a way of getting a friend into music that they don’t really know about, My knack for eclecticism in music is born of the mixtape era.
On student audiences at Hamilton
Lin-Manuel Miranda at the Broadway Teachers Workshop
To an insane degree, the best shows are the student shows, because they’re prepped. They know what they’re coming to see. You don’t realize how much life has beaten you up until you see a bunch of kids see a show. The things they react to wouldn’t occur to you to react to.
There’s a moment where an American spy passes another spy a letter and a redcoat comes and just twists her neck and pulls her away. It’s not on the album, it’s a physical moment, it’s just before “Right Hand Man.” Adults watch and they go, ‘oh, this is a transition, it’s a stage transition, this is information we needed to know.’ When kids see that moment they go “OH!” Honest. Life hasn’t beat them up yet, they can actually be surprised and afraid and annoyed. It’s such live ammo to have an audience of students but it’s so much more rewarding because they’re there for all of it.
They’re there for Anthony being gorgeous because he’s gorgeous, so when he says “Let’s strip down to our socks it’s like, “Aaah!” – ten kids just started puberty. Twenty girls just started puberty and ten guys just figured something out. ‘Oh. Oh this. I know this about myself now.’ The inverse is true for Jasmine. Jasmine did one of our video Ham4Hams and the overwhelming comment was from teenage girls saying, “I’m so gay, I’m SO GAY.” That’s because they’re in love with her.
All this is to say the student matinees are just thrilling because the reaction is completely unguarded. When our characters pass away there are honest to god hitching sobs. We get that from adult audiences too, but its harder to get to you. It comes unbidden from these kids.
The enthusiasm during the rap battles, holy crap! Rap battles are the lingua franca of these kids. I mean there’s YouTube channels devoted to rap battles, Wilmer Valderrama telling “Your mama” jokes on MTV, so to see the founders snapping on each other, it’s revelatory to them and they’re getting the food of what they’re fighting about almost in spite of themselves. We really tried, we’re threading the needle of, “This is what the debt plan is really about.” This is what they’re for and this is what they’re against – and also ‘I’m going to put my foot up your butt.’ Oh! It is that thing of being able to fly in both directions, therefore all of it, if one thing doesn’t get them, something else will.
If we start from the point that these founders are human and what we’re trying to uncover is as much humanity [as we can] in two hours and forty-five minutes, what does that mean about the rest of your history textbook? It’s the beginning of a discussion and that’s very exciting. It’s not ‘we spoon feed you a musical and you love history.’ This musical unlocks that history is written by the victors and so what does that mean for history, what does that mean in your mind.
On failing and learning from failure
Lin-Manuel Miranda
There is so much liability for a teacher. There is so much you’re not willing to go out on a limb on, because you don’t know what’s going to come back to you. I felt very lucky that I found teachers that were willing to show up and be present so we could have a student run musical. That’s huge.
I learned how to corral a group of kids when you couldn’t hire them or fire them. If someone missed rehearsal, what could I say? “You’d better come back or…you just really need to come back!” You learned how to get everyone involved in something and do it for the sake of it, as opposed to for a grade or for cool points. It’s about making a great thing and learning to inspire your peers. I think probably half the things I did were probably artistic failures, but they were met with support and I think that’s the sort of important thing.
That’s how we figure out who we are and what we like and what we respond to. One of the great lessons I took away from film and theatre is to watch everything critically. If you’re in a show and you hate the show, don’t turn your brain off. ‘Why isn’t this show working?’ I find myself often imagining my own scenes on the ashes of a failed show that is happening in front of me in real time. ‘What about this isn’t working? Is it the performance, is the set distracting you from the performance, is the set too much for the plot?’
Continue to think critically when you’re watching any piece of art, because even if you say, “I wish I had those two hours of my life back,” you’ll know a little bit more about your taste, about who you are as an artist, about what you respond to. So it’s never really a waste of time. I think that’s a good perspective to have both when it’s creating things that don’t work or seeing things that don’t work.
On policy makers, politicians and the arts
Lin-Manuel Miranda
What I am finding is Hamilton has become a Rorschach test for our nation. Every candidate has been compared to every character in my show. Depending on which way you lean, either Trump or Hillary is Burr, and that’s OK, that’s fine. It’s good for us to have shared things to discuss. That is one of the places where the arts help us, to have water cooler moments in a time when everybody curates their own reality, right?
I think what we’re finding with social media is we have some shared moments but actually they allow us to go into our own windows and take our lessons from that. I’m always grateful for the way the arts can engender empathy. That’s the biggest thing that we can do that a politician, unless they’re really good, can’t do. We can let you into someone’s life and make you feel like you spent a hundred years with Eliza Schuyler Hamilton and been in her world, and that’s going to change you somehow, in a good way or a bad way. That’s what the arts can do.
Music is our secret weapon. It sneaks in past your defenses, it doesn’t matter who you vote for. If you’re not crying at the end of Hamilton or at the end of The Color Purple, you’re not a human. [The arts have] the ability to engender empathy and to see world views beyond our own. When you can’t shut out people as the other, that what the arts can do that nothing else can do.
On writing Hamilton
Lin-Manuel Miranda
I think a part of me is always trying to write the ideal school show. So much of my life, from elementary school, was “What’s going to be the school play.” So there’s a part of me that’s always trying to answer that calling in my work now. That’s my ideal for what a great show is.
The watchword, the phrase I went by is “The personal is political.” It’s not enough to have a song about the debt plan for the capitol, how does it advance our story, how does it advance our characters. If it doesn’t it goes. We get away with all of the information that’s sneaking into your kids’ brains because Burr is like, “Everyone’s in that room, why can’t I be in that room?”
If the personal is political you can get away with anything. That’s the fun of it. It’s making sure you as long as you’re moving the story along, we can feed in as much stuff as we want, they won’t even know they’re learning. They just want to know what happens. We had to be very ruthless about that.
On the big takeaway from Hamilton
What’s the proverb? “May you live in interesting times.” I don’t know that it gets more interesting than right now. I don’t know if that’s a blessing or a curse. To be honest, it vacillates every day. I think that your kids are going to look to you to make sense of all this. We’re all trying to make sense of it. That’s an enormous responsibility, but it’s also an enormous gift.
We get 1,360 kids to see the show a few times a year. They’re not all going to become theatre teachers, they’re not all going to write musicals or songs. But what they do have to reckon with when they see Hamilton is that Hamilton made the most of his time, he made the most of his less than 50 years on this earth.
Charge your kids with that, the notion that life’s a gift, it’s not to be taken for granted, it’s not to be taken lightly You’re born with gifts and you’re born with an honesty that can never really leave you. What are you going to do with your time? What are you going to do with your time on this earth?
I remember being a teenager and thinking, ‘We have so much time, we have time to kill.’ Man, what I would do to get that time back. I think the continuing awareness that being here is a real gift, that whatever is happening in the world, make the most of it and sink your teeth into whatever you’re doing. That’s your biggest charge and the rest flows from there.
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Disclosure: I presented four sessions on censorship in high school theatre at the Broadway Teachers Workshop in 2015, for which I received a $600 honorarium. BTW did not solicit this post, but agreed to my attendance at my request.
My memory of the moment is quite vivid, if inevitably inexact. It happened 41 years ago, in the early afternoon, in Mrs. Winkler’s seventh grade science class at Amity Junior High School, as we were doing a “unit” on Ecology. In order to brighten our study of the physical environment, Mrs. Winkler announced one day at the start of class that she wanted to play us a song, and proceeded to put a black vinyl disc on the industrial weight turntable, the cover of which doubled as a speaker. The song she played was a savagely funny cri de coeur about how America’s cities and resources had been ruined by the scourge of pollution, from the perspective of a someone warning a foreign visitor about coming to America.
That was the day I first heard, and heard of, Tom Lehrer.
Not long thereafter, at a garage sale, I would discover a 10 inch, 33 rpm record, “Songs by Tom Lehrer” (on Lehrer Records), which I immediately seized and paid, I imagine, 25 cents to possess. Lehrer joined Allan Sherman and Stan Freberg among the small coterie of singing comedians to whom I became devoted, committing their songs to memory and happily singing them acapella for friends who had no earthly idea where I’d found these strange but funny tunes. After all, Sherman died in 1973, Freberg had shifted from comedy into advertising, and Lehrer’s U.S. fame had peaked on That Was The Week That Was, a short-lived TV precursor to The Daily Show back in 1964 (where he once took on the decimal system on the original British version of the show).
While Lehrer was a genuinely formative influence, who is rarely far from my mind, I think of him specially today because April 9, 2016 marks his 88th birthday. With Sherman gone for than 40 years and Freberg having passed just last year, Lehrer is the last surviving member of my own sung comedy superteam, and while it’s quite clear that there is nothing Lehrer would like less than to be celebrated for work he largely stopped doing 50 years ago (this BuzzFeed piece from two years ago explains), and even further back, it’s hard to restrain oneself.
This, of course, is the challenge of being a Tom Lehrer fan. While much of the work is evergreen, the majority of it was written in the 1950s and first half of the 60s, and Lehrer largely stopped performing by the time 1970s rolled around. Some have written that Lehrer’s withdrawal from performance was because he is – as a mathematician by training and primary trade – a perfectionist, and that he took no pleasure from concerts because he was determined to reproduce his recordings. Others have suggested that what was daring and ribald in the 50s ran smack against the counterculture of the late 60s, which Lehrer didn’t care for.
In any event, to the dismay of fans of funny, topical songs, Lehrer refocused himself on teaching. The result for comedy geeks was that he became, almost, our J.D. Salinger. Although he hid in plain sight, his students knew better than to discuss his performing fame; though almost no new work appeared, it was clear that he had not shunned his piano and verbal repartee, as the occasional song slipped out, or the odd public appearance. He gave a rare interview to National Public Radio in 1979; he spoke with The New York Times in 2000. Perhaps his last burst of general public fame came when the producer Cameron Mackintosh brought the musical revue Tomfoolery, comprised of Lehrer’s songs, to the stage in London and later New York. But that was in the early 1980s, almost two generations ago now, so Lehrer fans can even be nostalgic for that moment of nostalgia.
It may be the very last thing he wants, but today I’ll place a candle in a cupcake and wish for the continued health of Tom Lehrer, hoping, as I do every day, that he might one day be revealed to have been writing songs all this time, and shares them with us, even if not in performance, then at least as sheet music, the better to celebrate him with. Even if he doesn’t want us to do so.
P.S. Did I mention that Lehrer went to summer camp with Stephen Sondheim? Just wanted to toss that in. The verbal dexterity on the swim team that summer must have been quite something.
* * *
Whether you’re a Lehrer devotee or newly curious, I recommend watching this mid-60s live show from Copenhagen, in which he performs many of his best known songs for a relatively reserved college crowd.
While the Copenhagen concert has yielded an array of YouTube clips, much lesser seen is a short performance Lehrer gave for one of his teaching colleagues, stocked with an array of unrecorded songs, heavy on mathematics humor.
Strictly for the fans, here’s a decidedly odd industrial clip of Lehrer singing the praises of a new Dodge car.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3htMuJhz5Y
If you’d like to introduce younger kids to Lehrer, paving the way for them to discover his more transgressive work when they get older, here’s a bit of educational material from TV’s The Electric Company.
While “cover” versions of Tom Lehrer tunes are rare, here’s the late British comic Marty Feldman having his way with “The Vatican Rag.”
Of course, there’s also Daniel Radcliffe singing “The Element Song.”
I’ll wrap this up with what may be one of Lehrer’s last released songs to date, which is simply the best Hannukah song ever written.
March 11th, 2016 § Comments Off on 30 Years Before “Hamilton,” US Politics Were Rapped on NYC Stage § permalink
The achievements of Lin-Manuel’s Hamilton are significant and expansive, so much so that I need not add to the proliferation of reviews, essays, parodies, think pieces and so on engendered by his landmark work. However, I feel that, in light of my increasingly senior status and the years of theatre history stashed in my head, I must point out that Lin was not the first to merge rap and American politics on the New York stage.
Travel back with me over 30 years, to an Off-Broadway venue in Greenwich Village known as The Village Gate. A cabaret theatre, it was home a number of acclaimed revues in its day including Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris in the 1960s, National Lampoon’s Lemmings (with Chevy Chase and John Belushi) in the 1970s and Tomfoolery in the 1980s. Closed in 1994, today the building that housed The Village Gate is, last I noticed, a CVS pharmacy.*
“Rap Master Ronnie” on vinyl
But for a very short time in 1984, thanks to composer Elizabeth Swados and lyricist Garry Trudeau (yes, of Doonesbury fame) then-President Ronald Reagan could be found on stage rapping away, while he was simultaneously in residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The opus that provided this platform? An hour-long revue called Rap Master Ronnie, with actor Reathel Bean in the title role.
An off-shoot of the Broadway Doonesbury musical that Trudeau and Swados had created just the year before, in truth Rap Master Ronnie had only a single rap number, the title tune (which then-Times critic Frank Rich cited as a high point). But while its musical styling wasn’t really beatbox-based overall, the show did interrogate Reagan’s presidency pointedly and musically in the weeks leading up to the 1984 election (which would ultimately see Reagan win a second term).
”I don’t know if there’s anything artistic being done about this election – it is either being ignored or given up on,” Mr. Trudeau observed. ”It didn’t seem right to me to let it go without trying to say something. The piece is enormously challenging because, as everybody knows, Reagan has proven unusually resistant to frontal assault. That’s a very difficult target to take aim at.”
It’s an interesting statement to read in an election year 32 years later, no?
I digress. I also admit to making the Hamilton link in perhaps my BuzzFeed-iest ploy for attention, just to lure you in to learn of largely forgotten bit of theatrical agitprop, that has nevertheless left one wonderful artifact: the music video version of the title track of Rap Master Ronnie. So I apologize for making you wade through everything up until now, and invite you to see a rapping political figure from days gone by – when everyone’s friend and role model Lin-Manuel was but two years old.
More trivia: Rap Master Ronnie’s limited run at The Village Gate was succeeded by another musical about a politican, Mayor, which portrayed then-NYC mayor Ed Koch in a decidedly more lighthearted lampoon. It was created by composer and lyricist Charles Strouse and marked the first significant credit for a young writer named Warren Leight, who would go on to win a Tony for Side Man and has been steering the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit franchise for several years. But again, I digress.
* Update: I am informed by reader Rafael Gallegos that the one-time Village Gate is now the nightclub Le Poisson Rouge. I swear it was a pharmacy for a time, but this shows you the last time I sought either medication or entertainment on Bleecker Street.
If the location of your office compels you to visit Times Square regularly, you are confronted at least twice a day (going to work and on your way home) by a crush of people, gaping tourists, perpetual construction and, of course, by opportunists dressed as cartoon characters, Marvel and DC superheroes, Star Wars figures and, here and there, barely dressed at all. The common reaction to all of this is to keep one’s head down and push through, muttering about the madness, wondering where all the people have come from and why they won’t get out of the way, and even entertaining a small incursion on the first amendment that might rid the pedestrian plazas of the tip-seeking fictional personages.
As someone who works in Times Square, I have taken an alternative perspective. I have elected to find it all very funny.
As a result, instead of looking away from the costumed hustlers, I look right at them, because at times this third-rate cosplay can offer some truly absurd tableaux. With my iPhone in hand, I record these bits of urban incongruity, posting them to my Facebook page as “Times Square Weirdness, my continuing series.” Instead of rushing across Times Square with my head down, I walk to my assorted destinations with a surveying gaze, my camera at the ready, hoping to catch Dora The Explorer dancing with Mickey Mouse, while three Spider-Men look on.
Were I a parent on holiday with children in tow, I’d likely take a less indulgent view of the situation. I have even gone so far as to offer a practical plan that might at least reduce the costumed populations (with no constitutional breach whatsoever). But in the meantime, I choose to find the whole thing deeply ridiculous and while I will not ever offer even $1 as a gratuity, and while in turn many of the “characters” quickly lift their cut-rate visages to foil my photos, I’ll chronicle Times Square Weirdness for as long as it lasts.
I should note that for all of the Elmos, Olafs, Minnie Mice and Spider-Man who appear daily (and even form packs), some characters (or costumes of said characters) appear only once or twice, never to be seen again. I guess some people decide it’s not really for them. I often wonder what happens to the costumes. But I try to save their appearances for posterity.
Brian D’Arcy James, Andrew Rannells and Jonathan Groff perform at Ham4Ham
If you’re a dedicated fan of the musical Hamilton, or if you follow me on social media, you may well have come across the streetside #Ham4Ham show videos I’ve been sharing since late July. As I write, they’ve collectively been viewed on YouTube about 890,000 times – and that doesn’t include views of the same videos that have been uploaded directly to Facebook. So without doing a careful count, I can truthfully say the videos have been seen over 1.1 million times.
As a result, I have been labeled a Hamilton “superfan” on social media, and I’ve been interviewed by a handful of media outlets. I’ve been credited as “Ham4Ham documenter” in Entertainment Weekly. I even get recognized by people in the crowd when I show up to record the shows. But I’ve also found that there’s a lot of curiosity and outright confusion about what I’m doing there, so I’ve decided to satisfy the questioners and settle any uncertainty by asking myself questions I’ve actually been asked about my continuing presence at the #Ham4Ham shows – and a few no one has asked.
Why do you do it?
I started recording the shows in late July, before there hadn’t been much press specifically about #Ham4Ham shows, because I thought it would make for a blog post at some point, and also be material for my weekly column in London’s The Stage newspaper. That said, both the blog post and Stage column mention ran in early August.
But it’s now December. Why are you still showing up?
During previews, #Ham4Ham shows were happening daily, sometimes even twice a day. In the final weeks of previews, I was trying to get there pretty consistently, in the hope of coming up with a few great videos. But once the regular run began and Ham4Ham dropped to twice or perhaps three times a week, I found it had become a habit and, being a creature of habit in many things, I just keep going.
How do you manage to get to every one?
I don’t. I’ve missed dozens. I didn’t go for the first two weeks, and I’ve had week-long trips to California and England, as well as assorted conflicts. Because I do in fact have to work, and have a personal life, I’m not there all the time.
So how many times have you been to #Ham4Ham shows?
But there are only 42 videos online right now. Why are you holding out?
That’s because I screwed up the recording once, on Halloween. I managed to start recording and accidently hit stop, without realizing it, about halfway through. I felt like an idiot. Fortunately my friend Laura Heywood (aka BroadwayGirlNYC) was also there that day, so there’s still good video readily available.
Do you work for the show?
Absolutely not. I’m doing this entirely on my own. In fact, I’ve decided that if anyone connected with the show ever calls me and specifically asks me to record something, I’ll stop altogether. I am not part of the show’s marketing and communications plan. If I shoot a video, I know full well that they may use it, but so can anyone else.
Do you know what the performance is going to be before it happens?
The night before Thanksgiving, I did an interview with Lin-Manuel for Dramatics magazine (look for it in February or March) and he did tell me what he had planned for that weekend. Once Lin tweeted me to say that he wouldn’t be at the show but that there would be “a lot” of people performing. That turned out to be the Broadway Inspirational Voices. But other than those instances, I don’t know anything more than what anyone can learn from reading Lin’s Twitter feed.
How can we believe you?
If I knew what was going to happen, I would have been in a much better position when Alexander from the Big Apple Circus did his juggling act. The only reason that turned out reasonably OK is because of camera zoom.
What kind of equipment do you use?
My iPhone. That’s it. I have a really nice DSLR that shoots video, but I’ve never learned how to use the video function. So I’m going the simple route.
Why won’t you use an even better camera if you have one?
Maybe I’ll try to learn how it all works during the holiday break. But you have to understand, I’d been shooting #Ham4Ham videos for a couple of weeks before I realized I ought to figure out how to get them off of my phone. I’d never posted to YouTube prior to that. It took me even longer to discover how to upload HD video. But let’s hear it for the iPhone.
How many times have you won the lottery?
Never. I don’t usually enter. I’m there for the Ham4Ham show. I’ve only entered a couple of times, when I’ve had friends in tow.
But you have seen Hamilton, right?
I’ve seen it twice, once at The Public and once on Broadway. I’d enjoy seeing it again, no doubt. Maybe for my birthday (hint, hint). And my eldest niece is dying to see it, so maybe I can figure out taking her.
Do you have any advice for people who want to shoot their own videos at Ham4Ham?
Always shoot horizontally – vertical only looks good on your phone. Hold your phone or camera with two hands, to keep it steady – you’d be surprise how hard it is to hold steady for four or five minutes. Get there about 45-50 minutes ahead of time for a decent spot – but remember that people are shooed off the sidewalk, so plant your toes as close to the curb as possible. Don’t sing along, laugh hysterically, scream Daveed’s name excitedly, and so on, because you’ll likely shake your camera in the process and you will be the loudest thing on your video.
Are you doing this to build your social media profile?
I admit that I’d love it if more people learned about my advocacy work as a result of this, but my sense is that people are watching because of Hamilton and not many find their way to my actual work. Sigh.
Have you monetized your YouTube stream?
No. I don’t own the rights to anything in the videos – the performances, the song rights, etc. I shouldn’t even try to profit from them.
Do you hear much from fans?
I see a lot of people posting how happy the videos make them. The most frequent comments seem to be a variant of people either “dying” or “dead” as a result of watching. I’d just like to say that I have an alibi, and no jury would convict me.
Do people say anything to you directly?
People have been unbelievably warm and appreciative in writing to me about my videos. It’s lovely.
But c’mon, why do you really keep doing this? You’ve ducked the main question.
When I wrote the blog post that was the reason I started, I wrote about the extraordinary generosity of Lin-Manuel in creating the Ham4Ham show, which is entirely his doing. It’s not part of the production’s marketing plan, and given how the show is selling, they hardly need more promotion. I’ve kept this up because I’m not a performer myself (anymore), but if Lin, the Hamilton company, and people from many other shows can be kind enough to offer this up, it seems the least I can do is to try to preserve these one-of-a-kind moments for posterity, and help them to be seen by more than just the crowd on 46th Street. This is my act of generosity, and I like to think that these videos will be watched for a long time to come. Just like Hamilton.
* * *
Counting down my top five #Ham4Ham videos to date on YouTube (keeping in mind that these are just from those I’ve recorded, and other videos by various other people have even more views than some of these – plus views of direct uploads to Facebook aren’t counted):
The fast story is this: Belvoir Street Theatre, a well-known and respected Australian theatre company is producing a play, Seventeen, in which a group of elderly (and acclaimed) actors play 17 year olds. The director of the show wanted to use “Shake It Off” as a choreographed number at the show’s climax. But going through normal channels, the music publisher had denied the company the rights, for reasons unknown.
Five days before opening, all conventional efforts exhausted, the company resorted to trying to reach Swift on social media and in what may be a first, she granted the rights via Twitter just hours ago. While I suspect there are some contractual details to be worked out beyond “Permission granted,” presumably the tweet from Swift gives Belvoir Street enough comfort that they can proceed. While news reports indicate that alternate music and staging was being prepared, now everything can continue according to the theatre’s and the production’s original plans.
It is, as I say, a happy ending, and having the reigning queen of pop music as your deus ex machina is quite the capper. But I would caution others who want to try this approach not to count on a recurrence: music licensing (or the licensing of any copyrighted material) via social media is not, in my estimation, going to become the new normal.
The fact is, Belvoir Street got lucky. To be sure, they waged a heck of a campaign, with people like Tim Minchin tweeting support and online pleas like “Please @taylorswift13 help these seventy-year-olds Shake It Off!” making the case on emotion, rather than business grounds. And, of course, Swift seems to be very personally involved in every single aspect of her career, including her social media feeds, so she and her team actually saw and considered the request, having undoubtedly known nothing of the original denial.
Just don’t try this at home with your show, whether it’s a fringe production or at a resident company like Belvoir Street. There are lots of artists who have people paid to monitor their social media (as I’m sure Swift does as well), but they’re not necessarily as shrewd or as generous as Taylor. They also have people paid to monitor unauthorized use of their words and music. Proceeding deep into rehearsals with material you don’t have rights to can easily bring heartache, and while that might merely be more song fodder for Swift, it can be unsettling to a production and possibly even expensive for a company when last minute changes need to be made.
There’s no question that pop music added to plays can enhance a production, without turning it into a jukebox musical. I vividly recall the Steppenwolf production of Balm in Gilead which interpolated now-vintage Bruce Springsteen recordings so brilliantly, and Trinity Rep’s All The King’s Men which made Randy Newman’s songs from his Good Old Boys album seem as if they’d been written expressly for the show. I can’t say whether the music was properly licensed in either of those cases – both are over 25 years old and my Playbills are in storage – but even if they weren’t then, I can’t imagine these shows getting away without the rights agreements now.
So the story here is not so much that Belvoir Street dodged a bullet, but that Taylor Swift deflected it. While she may seem to be omnipresent these days, she can’t actually be everywhere, and other artists and songwriters may not be quite as magnanimous. So when it comes to using existing songs, it may be like you’ve got this music in your mind, saying it’s gonna be alright, but that’s not necessarily the case. When it comes to copyright, you just can’t shake it off.
Howard Sherman is the director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at the New School for Drama.
HES: When did you become aware of your resemblance to Mike Pence? And when did you first find out who Mike Pence was?
My memory of the moment is quite vivid, if inevitably inexact. It happened 41 years ago, in the early afternoon, in Mrs. Winkler’s seventh grade science class at Amity Junior High School, as we were doing a “unit” on Ecology. In order to brighten our study of the physical environment, Mrs. Winkler announced one day at the start of class that she wanted to play us a song, and proceeded to put a black vinyl disc on the industrial weight turntable, the cover of which doubled as a speaker. The song she played was a savagely funny cri de coeur about how America’s cities and resources had been ruined by 
Not long thereafter, at a garage sale, I would discover a 10 inch, 33 rpm record, “Songs by Tom Lehrer” (on Lehrer Records), which I immediately seized and paid, I imagine, 25 cents to possess. Lehrer joined 
While Lehrer was a genuinely formative influence, who is rarely far from my mind, I think of him specially today because April 9, 2016 marks his 88th birthday. With Sherman gone for than 40 years and Freberg having passed just last year, Lehrer is the last surviving member of my own sung comedy superteam, and while it’s quite clear that there is nothing Lehrer would like less than to be celebrated for work he largely stopped doing 50 years ago (
In any event, to the dismay of fans of funny, topical songs, Lehrer refocused himself on teaching. The result for comedy geeks was that he became, almost, our J.D. Salinger. Although he hid in plain sight, his students knew better than to discuss his performing fame; though almost no new work appeared, it was clear that he had not shunned his piano and verbal repartee, as the occasional song slipped out, or the odd public appearance. He gave 
Not all of Lehrer’s material still plays today: in this era when space exploration has been minimized, a song about 
