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url 2022-12-06 18:56
ĊIKLU as a youth-for-youth stage production at Malta Manuel Theatre
Tree of Life - Nataša Pantović Nuit

 by Nataša Pantović

It perhaps takes a special kind of courage to perform at Malta’s National Theatre, Manuel Theatre, built in 1731 by the Knights of St. John, in one of the oldest working theatres in Europe, as a young 18-25 year old artist staging a Maltese production. There they are, handling a space and expectation of audience that has seen arguably the greatest shows of Malta, but still working with amazing 'but we think we can make an extraordinary piece of music theatre...’

Manuel Theatre 9th April 2022 Dancers

Manuel Theatre 9th April 2022 Dancers Opera Ciklu, Photography by Karl & Camille Fenech

Introducing tales from 21st Century women, set to lyrics, music and dance highlighted contemporary social issues. Without using the obvious, subtly but significantly tweaking the story interpretation, reunited with the nuclear family in the production. Led by their teacher’s motto: “There is nothing more beautiful than giving your soul to the audience:” the performers were able to zoom in and out and tell a bigger story of individuals and about community

We were invited to join a 70 minute journey through various life struggles as the young cast of opera singers and dancers experimented with contemporary youth opera and dance, inviting the audience to join the conversation.

Source: artof4elements.com/entry/298/ciklu-as-a-brand-new-youth-for-youth-stage-production-at-manuel
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text 2021-06-20 10:21
FREE E-BOOK - END OF THE ROPE - A Play in 4 Acts

FREE E-BOOK - June 20-24

END OF THE ROPE - A Play in 4 Acts

 

Download your copy now at

https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B003DS6LEU

 

When you rope up you put your life into the hands of your climbing partner. But what if you've just ruined his?

 



Craig, Whit and Milt are friends, have been for a long time. They've grown up together, but the friendship forged as young boys is getting tested as they grow into men - men with different perspectives and priorities.

Their love of climbing has kept them together. On the rock faces of the mountains they are as they once were - a team, a unit, loyal and committed. The ambiguous world of careers and relationships is left below - or is it?

Since he can remember, Craig's loved Jennifer. He can't wait for them to get married, he's even bought a house.

When she breaks it off saying she's not ready, he's hurt and confused, but if Jennifer needs more time he can wait. He's been waiting all his life for her so what's a few more months?

Then she starts dating Whit.

Whit doesn't do relationships, but that doesn't seem to matter to the many women who compete for his attention. He doesn't understand what Jennifer represents to Craig, can't even begin to imagine it, but just the same he'd never hit on a friend's woman.
But, hey, it's a free country, right, and Jennifer's warm and willing, and after all it's been about, what, two months since she dumped Craig. He needs to get over it.

Milt sees the potential for trouble, but he has his own problems. His new wife, Samantha, thinks her husband's band of brothers are a bad influence. She wants him to grow up and give up these juvenile escapades.

It's a constant battle for Milt to maintain some independence and now the tension between his friends makes him wonder if it's worth it.

This is not the way to start a challenging climb - filled with anxiety, anger and resentment. On a sheer granite wall distractions kill you. You need singularity of purpose, a clear mind and a focus that's finite.

Now Whit's goading Craig to try a new route, Craig's worried that the weather's breaking down, and Milt's frantic because his cellphone's broken and he can't report in to Samantha.

Everyone's just about at the end of their rope, but only figuratively - for now.

 

 

"Twenty pages of truth."
"...couldn't review it as I usually do, immediately ... The play was still resonating in my mind. I was still discovering nuances to plot and characters, savouring relationships. The End of the Rope is a powerful piece of writing."
"Readers with a paper copy... profit from all the attention invested in stage instructions. It makes the play come alive in our minds."
- FIVE STARS, C. Widmann, Goodreads review

 

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE PROMO VIDEO

https://animoto.com/play/ML1sDjBXjg9yYw7bYdLGpw

 

 

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text 2021-06-18 08:21

FREE E-BOOK

HARRY’S TRUTH – A Play in One Act

 

Are there cosmic truths?

 

June 18-22 Download your copy now at

https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B003DS6LEU

 

 

Are there cosmic truths? Harry thinks there are and he's discovered one which will make life easier, simpler and more fulfilling. He wants to share this epiphany with those he loves but not only do they not want to share in his enlightenment, they feel threatened by what he has to tell them.Much is at stake – careers, lifestyles, power – if Harry pursues his truth.

 

For Deidre, his wife - all her life she has worked to overcome the stigma of being the daughter of the neighbourhood drunk. She has struggled for social status, “respectability” and to have “nice things”. Now she has attained it and more is within her grasp. She can’t allow Harry to jeopardize it.

 

For Philip, his partner - his aggressive manner, lack of sophistication, short stature, balding pate, pudgy midriff and loud ties have made him a subject of derision among his colleagues, but landing this multi-million dollar client will change all that. Soon Harry’s condescension and the humiliation of his marriage will be overshadowed by the respect and power corporate success will bring. The “truth” is he only needs Harry to keep it together until the deal closes. After that, he can goddam well wander off into the wilderness if that’s what he wants.

 

For Joan, Phil's wife - the bitterness of her affair with Harry twenty years ago in college has shaped and defined her life, But not Harry’s. No, he just up and left her in search for “the truth” and she had to survive as best she could on her own. Now he’s about to do it again – turn her world upside down with the same selfish, irresponsible behavior. Maybe she can’t stop this middle-age flight of fancy but she isn’t going to let him influence her teenage daughter with all his nonsense about “following your heart”.

 

For Alexus, Joan’s daughter - her parent’s marriage is empty of love but filled with material possessions. How could “Uncle Harry’s” truth make anything worse? Her mom’s pushing her to go to college but that’s just more “preparing for life”. Uncle Harry’s truth sounds far more appealing. Better to fill your life with experiences than just more “stuff”.

 

"A quick and good read, and a play five actors can produce...One can read Harry's Truth as it were a short story."

"New money, fashionable clothes, a lot of work for Harry and Philip, the two business partners who started off selling doves to Chinese restaurants and slowly made it big. Now they're past forty and Harry has had enough. Enough, that's the keyword here: He wants to downsize the firm and his expenses because he knows that more money can't make him happier anymore. "...the interactions between the five of them let us have a glance at everybody's past. A lot gets revealed in every scene. I like the detailed stage instructions and the symbolism in the last scene. One can read Harry's Truth as it were a short story. I'd really like to see this play on stage someday..."

FIVE STARS, C. Widmann, Goodreads review

 

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE PROMO VIDEO

https://animoto.com/play/ANtkqSL1h8ju0Xz3rDT3WQ

 

 

 

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review 2021-03-24 20:59
Tinder Box: The Iroquois Theater Disaster, 1903 by Anthony Hatch
Tinder Box: The Iroquois Theatre Disaster 1903 - Anthony P. Hatch
Tinder Box: The Iroquois Theater Disaster, 1903 by Anthony P Hatch 
Six hundred and two people, mostly women and children, lost their lives in the fire even worse than the Great Chicago Fire that destroyed most of the city in 1873. The Iroquois Theater was advertised as “absolutely fireproof.” It was not.
Hatch has written a very readable, but scholarly, look at the causes, failings, politics, and machinations of the owners, builders, managers, politicians, firemen and inspectors charged with safeguarding the lives entrusted to them.
Illustrated by 30 pages of photographs and drawings and supported by personal interviews with survivors and voluminous research, he details the fire itself and the changes that resulted from the fire.
Any group interested in history, fires or politics will find this an interesting and revealing look at the fire, what lead up to it and the changes it forced.
5 of 5 stars

 

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review 2020-05-16 20:07
Love All, aka Cat's Cradle: Sayers Does Drawing Room Comedy
Love All and Busman's Honeymoon: Two Plays by Dorothy L. Sayers - Dorothy L. Sayers,Alzina Stone Dale

When I bought this joint edition of Busman’s Honeymoon and Love All, the obvious pièce de résistance, for me, and the reason why I spent some time hunting down an affordable copy at all, was the stage version of Busman’s Honeymoon – the final full-length outing of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane (later transformed into a novel of the same name) and just about the last published bit from Dorothy L. Sayers’s own pen still lacking in my collection, at least as far as Lord Peter and Harriet are concerned. Love All, in comparison, looked like an also-ran – interesting, certainly, but surely no dice on the star turn of Sayers’s recently-married supersleuths?

 

Oh, ye of little faith.

 

Ostensibly, Love All (which Sayers co-wrote with her Somerville College friend Marjorie Barber, and which in an unpublished manuscript version bears the alternative title Cat’s Cradle) is a drawing room comedy, set first in Venice and later in London – but Sayers wouldn’t be Sayers if a drawing room comedy was all she had given us here. In fact, this is the theatrical expression of the thoughts also expressed in the two addresses jointly reproduced under the title Are Women Human? – that it is women’s given right as human beings to live a fully realized life, which most definitely includes the right to choose their own professional path, and the freedom not to have to place a man’s needs and demands over their own (as, however, so many of her female contemporaries had to do).

 

The play was never published in printing during Sayers’s lifetime and only had a limited stage exposure outside of London (and none at all in London itself); possibly as a result of clashing – as Sayers herself put it – on its opening night “with Mr. Hitler’s gala performance in Norway and Denmark” (i.e., the Nazis’ 1940 invasion of Norway). Another reason may have been the strictures imposed by Sayers’s son Anthony Fleming, who – jealously protective of his mother’s standing as a writer – even in this 1980s’ “resurrection” prohibited any editorial reference to Sayers’s private life or to himself, even though the play features a young boy brought up by relatives in the country while his mother is pursuing a literary career in London. And according to the play itself, he definitely had a point; the boy's mother, a successful dramatist, is observed rebutting a journalist (on the phone): “Oh, no, Mr. Mackenzie – Not the personal angle, please. No, really, what has one’s private life to do with one’s work? Well, I daresay that is the question, but I don’t want to discuss it.”

 

Whatever the reasons for the play’s having been allowed to slip into oblivion, it is a pity that this should have happened, as Love All compares favorably with other plays in a similar vein that actually have survived until today. – As the alternative title suggests, to even try and sum up the plot would be giving away major plot points, so I’m just going to end with a few of my favorite quotes: 

   “LYDIA: I thought it would be nice to marry Godfrey […] his books were so thrilling. They made me go all soppy, only he isn’t really a bit like his books.

   JANET: Authors never are. They write themselves out into their books, and the real person is just the odds-and-ends left over.”

 

   “LYDIA: And after dinner he’d read me what he’d done.

   JANET: Just so. And ask for your opinion and advice.

   […]

   LYDIA: Sometimes I tried disagreeing with something for a change.

   JANET: How did that work?

   LYDIA: Then he explained why he was right. I found that took rather too long.

   JANET: It does, rather. Has he done much scrapping and rewriting?

   LYDIA: He’s always scrapping and rewriting bits. Except the bits I disagreed with. He always kept those.”

 

   “LYDIA: Every great man has had a woman behind him.

   JANET: And every great woman has had some man or other in front of her, tripping her up.”

 

   “LYDIA: Is the next book going to be about a devoted woman who sacrificed her career for her lover?

   JANET: No, darling; that was the one he wrote just before he met you.”

 

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