Aunt Maggie was one of my favorite characters in Ferrymen, the other being aunt Pat.
When she is first wheeled out on stage I could not tell if she was live or a mannequin. But once she came to life and started singing and had the young kids in her hand as she told those wonderful tales, she was the best actress on that very crowded stage.
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The real mystery of Broadway is how your critic could describe as a "glorious endlessly vibrant feast" such an ugly collection of familiar anti Irish stereotypes as malicious as "The Ferryman." In age so rightfully careful not to offend ethnic sensibilities and sensitive to cultural appropriation, this demeaning Celtic Minstrel Show was written by an Englishman who has lived in London all his life. Believe it or not, most Irish people are not drunkards, nor do we give whiskey to infants every morning, nor are we always at the point of bursting into rebel anthems and dancing, nor were all the Irish soldiers who fought for their country's freedom from Britain psycho killers! . . . Strange that Brendan Behan's great play "The Hostage" shows so much more sympathy for both sides--and he was a genuine IRA soldier, not a Broadway fake.
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@Red Allover Watching The Ferryman did not make me believe this show represented all or most Irish people. No more than The Godfather makes me think most Italians are gangsters.
It's fiction after all. But if you don't like the content of the play why don't you write your own play. Show the Irish people in a manner that you wish.
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@Cat, that's so interesting that you mention a classic like the Godfather, because standards could be different today. Even a classic like "West Side Story" (the new Spielberg and Kushner film) is finding itself under a microscope, according to the reports we've been reading, for example with how Puerto Rico is considered. The director and writer apparently never expected some of the issues they''d have to deal with.
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Such an original and entertaining piece!...Well done!..Would also love to know how they get the orchestra off stage and back into the pit after the Act 2 opening of MY FAIR LADY at LCT.
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I love this kind of article. I had been wondering a lot of these questions myself when I saw three of these shows last week.
My question is: Why did the director choose to make OKLAHOMA so bloody at the end? It's a glorious moment of happiness and optimism yet it looks like Quentin Tarantino suddenly walked into the theater and decided to film a scene from Natural Born Killers. I was really disappointed because it looked so gruesome and it took me and my daughter out of an otherwise outstanding and memorable show.
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I’m hoping someone might know the answer to this question: How is the fake blood removed after each performance of Oklahoma from both the unvarnished and unstained wooden stage and from the costumes made of white material?
My guesses: the costumes are disposable throwaways and the wood planks are lightly sanded and, since they are individual planks, eventually replaced when the sanding removes too much of the wood.
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@BB The wood was apparently treated so it could be cleaned.
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What an excellent article! Really interesting and while not discussing the shows directly makes me want to see all of them!
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@AJ, and I'm thinking what a treasure articles like this and the 30 minutes to Curtain that's also on the page now will be as a record forever with first-person looks at Broadway now. We have nothing like these going back, it seems, but these will be there for the future audiences. And sure, it's glamorous, but all the reality the world gets to see - that it's work, too - and sometimes a great part in a huge hit play makes you go outside in the real elements, no matter how severe the weather; or is anything more "real" at the Circle than that you actually reach a pinnacle role and play Curly - on Broadway - and you don't get your own dressing room.
Hoping "clicks" are good, so that maybe some of the other mysteries people have talked about will pop up, or maybe even other half-hour stories. Thank you for these!
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One more question: How could Mockingbird not have been nominated for Best Drama?
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@RRBurgh Who cares. Let it go.
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@RRBurgh
Maybe because there was nothing original or exceptional about it?
A re-write of a classic to fit a TV scriptwriter's idea of making history "right."
Give it a break.
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@RRBurghBecause Scott Rudin made regional theatres using a different script cancel their production and could only remount with the Sorkin script, which most companies could not afford to do, or were stopped too close to their show dates and had to completely cancel.
Basically not nominating TKIM is a rebuke of Rudin's money grabbing methods that hurt smaller local theatres.
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Aunt Maggie reminds me of a character from the David Lynch film "Eraserhead." The character was an old woman who sat in a chair in a kitchen and never moved. She had a lit cigarette and when the cigarette burned to ash another character handed her another lit cigarette. David Lynch weirdness at its finest.