The long Fourth of July weekend has a way of sneaking up on you and making the week before seem hazy and lethargic. So I’m just catching up on the arts news from last week, which had quite a number of sizzlers! Hottest theater news - Chicago version: The Hypocrites, one of the Chicago arts groups that really matter, announced their 2008-2009 season last week. Someone douse me with a firehose, quick, since, from the email release, this Hypocrites season looks to be one of the hottest, and promises to be one of the most-talked about, seasons of any Chicago theater in the coming year. The season-opener is Brecht and Weill’s masterpiece, The Threepenny Opera, to be directed by Sean Graney, one of Chicago’s most risk-taking and wildly inventive directors, at the Steppenwolf Garage. Graney doing Brecht and a musical? Stick me with a defillibrator right now (or better yet, have Christian Bale give me 10 minutes of CPR), my heart is uncontrallably pounding with excitement! The season also includes a production of The Hairy Ape which will be part of the Goodman’s O’Neill festival (with the Wooster Group and the Netherland’s theatrical enfant terrible Ivo von Hove also participating, this festival will definitely not be O’Neill as read in college sophomore English classes); Graney’s three-person Oedipus Rex to be staged promenade style; and the remount of the magnificent David Cromer-helmed Our Town which I raved about here. Hottest theater news - New York version: Broadway will be seeing this fall the acclaimed Royal Court production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, with most of its London cast intact, including the fabulously incandescent Kristin Scott-Thomas of The English Patient fame, who won an Olivier Award for her performance as Arkadina. The one big casting change from the London production, though, which has sent various Francis biological and genetic processes into nuclear overdrive is Peter Sarsgaard, brilliant actor/thinking (gay) man’s sex symbol/the-one-guy-I-would-shapeshift-into-Maggie-Gyllenhaal-for, playing Trigorin in lieu of Chiwetel Ejiofor. Just thinking how marvelous (and how hot and sexy) Sarsgaard would be performing Chekhov is enough for a flame-retardant blanket to be thrown over me! I can’t wait to see this production, and I’m booking my flight and buying my ticket soon! Hottest art and culture-related news of the week: Fritz Lang’s hypnotic Metropolis, one of the most influential films of all time, and one of the two German expressionism films that I really admire (the other one being Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) is also famously one of the most incomplete masterpieces of all time. Paramount Pictures, its US distributor, cut out key scenes and characters in order to make it more palatable for the American mass market. A complete version of the film had been thought lost for the past eighty years, until a small Argentinian film museum discovered a copy in its archives. Movie fans have been rejoicing and drinking themselves silly over this news- finally, there will be an opportunity very soon for everyone to see the movie as Lang envisioned it to be. And if the mutilated film version is a classic, everyone’s holding their breath on how masterful the complete version will turn out to be. I first read about the Metropolis discovery on Rob Kozlowski’s blog last week, which had a, ahem, pretty vivid description of its impact on film preservationists.
Tags: Fritz Lang, Hypocrites Theatre, Metropolis, Peter Sarsgaard, The Seagull
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