Posts from — June 2011

How to play the only “normal” woman in “The Addams Family”

Welcome to Building Character, TDF Stages’ ongoing series about actors and how they create their roles

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If you’re used to vamping it up, then how do you button it down? Heidi Blickenstaff solved that Zen riddle when she got cast in The Addams Family, the Broadway musical based on Charles Addams’ gleefully macabre cartoons.

Since March, Blickenstaff has played Alice Beineke, a repressed, “normal” woman whose son falls in love with the demented-yet-alluring Wednesday Addams. When Alice visits the Addams mansion for a family dinner, she’s a sunny aberration among the cobwebs and killer plants. “She’s one of those people who moves through life making everybody very comfortable,” Blickenstaff says. “She hears all this stuff and her answer to it is always, ‘Oh! Totally normal! That’s not crazy that I’m looking at a photo of your cousin Helga who has two heads!”

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After 14 years, “Death Takes a Holiday” hits the stage

Shortly after the musical Titanic opened on Broadway in 1997, its composer-lyricist Maury Yeston and bookwriter Peter Stone were looking for their next project together. “We really felt that having done the complete blow-out, no-question-about-it, 36-people-in-the-cast, 26-people-in-the-orchestra, massive grand epic musical, we really wanted to do a chamber piece—something really small,” Yeston says. Stone suggested the 1928 Italian play by Alberto Casella, Death Takes a Holiday. In the show, Death takes human form and vacations to an Italian villa where he falls in love.

At first, Yeston needed persuading:”I said, ‘Look. I don’t want to write this. It’s death death death.’ And [Peter] said, ‘No no no. To me it’s holiday holiday holiday,’”

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A new series at New Georges asks playwrights to write the impossible

For a playwright, it’s the dramaturgical equivalent of a blank check: a theatre company asking for a piece, or at least the beginnings of a piece, with a big cast, a berserk structure, and as unwieldy a setting as you can possibly imagine.

This was the offer that four playwrights couldn’t refuse when New Georges, an acclaimed company that focuses on female writers, came calling. The Germ Project, which opened last week at 3LD Arts and Technology Center, showcases the products of these four scribes’ newly unfettered imaginations.

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How can the theatre enhance your mind and your personal relationships? Just ask these students, teachers, and theatre professionals, who recently took part in Theatre Development Fund’s Open Doors Program.

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How the actor is tackling two roles for Shakespeare in the Park

One advantage of performing in repertory is the chance to try on a variety of roles: Coriolanus one night, a stable hand the next. Alternatively, there’s the subtler satisfaction of finding different nuances within similar characters. Just ask André Holland, a central part of the Public Theater’s current season of Shakespeare in the Park.

In All’s Well That Ends Well, directed by Daniel Sullivan, the rising young actor plays Bertram, a callow nobleman who snubs the heroine, spurring all sorts of trouble. In Measure for Measure, directed by David Esbjornson, he plays Claudio, a callow nobleman who tries to corrupt the heroine (a nun, no less), spurring even more trouble.

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