I know of course that these are semi staged, and usually edit down the script--but I hope they go back to the original 1968 concept (the cafe setting--telling stories framework,) and original script/lyrics and not the watered down revival.
Several people either here or at ATC said that Encores had gone back to the original Broadway version of Paint Your Wagon, and not the heavily revised version Lerner made for the national tour, which is what is currently licensed (although a few of the revisions were used).
I hope that's a good sign. I believe even the tour of Zorba's Hal Prince production made some minor revisions--but it seems to partly negate the Encores point if they do use revisions. (Still, they did with Follies didn't they? But of course we have the Widow Goldman issue there :P )
^^^^^^ The currently circulating version of CHICAGO originated in this very same concert series. Though nowadays the Encores concerts are far from "semi-staged" concert readings as they were then. And any script cuts (were there even any for the Encores version?) I imagine were restored to CHICAGO.
On line someone is saying the role of Zorba is cast. They won't say who but the hints are it is someone known as an actor, writer, and director but necessarily a singer. His last NYC stage appearance was in a Chekov play. Any guess?
Lesli Margherita would be killer as the Leader. She played The Widow in a production in LA a few years ago with Marc Kudisch as Zorba but would be much better suited to the Leader.
Tonya Pinkins: Then we had a "Lot's Wife" last June that was my personal favorite. I'm still trying to get them to let me sing it at some performance where we get to sing an excerpt that's gone.
Tony Kushner: You can sing it at my funeral.
"On line someone is saying the role of Zorba is cast. They won't say who but the hints are it is someone known as an actor, writer, and director but necessarily a singer. His last NYC stage appearance was in a Chekov play. Any guess?"
Well, the person who clearly fits that criteria all to a T is John Turturro, who directs, writes and acts but has never been in a musical (that I know of), even though he directed one on screen, which means he has an affection for the form. His last NYC stage appearance was as Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard at Classic Stage Company in 2011-2012, and he's certainly the right age for the part (5. It's a wild card, all right - could backfire enormously - but if in fact it is him, it does seem like a canny, inspired choice.
On line someone is saying the role of Zorba is cast. They won't say who but the hints are it is someone known as an actor, writer, and director but necessarily a singer. His last NYC stage appearance was in a Chekov play. Any guess?
(Theatre gossip thread #161 if anyone wants to google.)
"This thread reads like a series of White House memos." — Mister Matt
"Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”
~ Muhammad Ali
Turturro makes sense. Ethan Hawke is also an "actor, writer, director" who recently appeared in a Chekhov play (Ivanov), but he seems less suited to the role. Not that it's stopped him in the past...
Donna Murphy would make an ideal Mme. Hortense.
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body