Word: viertel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...makes it difficult for a person to actually make a living from the performing arts.“You’d be crazy to try and make your living this way. It is not a business from someone who needs a salary,” says Thomas M. Viertel ’63, an established producer who got into show business as a hobby and has since discovered Penn & Teller and produced famed Broadway shows such as “The Producers” and “Hairspray.” “Make sure you either...
...glance at the 33 shows Encores! has produced shows that the selectors - Daykin, Fisher and artistic directors Walter Bobbie, Kathleen Marshall and Jack Viertel - look for semi-legendary shows that (1) were written by one of the premier composers; (2) boast a lush score, preferably with a few standards; (3) have a libretto that today is either amusingly anachronistic or lingeringly poignant; (4) offer strong roles to either contemporary musical theater stars or star-is-born kids; and (5) haven't received full-dress Broadway revivals in decades. The ideal musical, by these criteria, is Rodgers and Hart...
...since. In 1982, music historian Robert Kimball unearthed the score, along with lost work by Kern, Porter and Rodgers, in a warehouse in Secaucus, N.J. (I'm happy to say that TIME deemed the event newsworthy enough for us to do a story on it.) In a program note, Viertel compares the unearthing of this goofy Gershwin farce "to Howard Carter's discovery of King Tut's tomb, if you can picture that august gentleman shoving aside the stone tablet to the inner sanctum and uncovering a quite fabulous rubber chicken...
...This particular pliable poultry belongs to a Broadway subgenre - which includes Encores! honorees "Du Barry Was a Lady" and "A Connecticut Yankee" - that Viertel describes as "the 'hero-hit-on-the-head-with-a-bottle' musical." The conked conqueror in "English" is a genteel Brit, Michael Bramleigh, who, after a head-bump, becomes Goto Schmidt, owner of Dresden's notorious night spot Klub "21." (Both roles are played, with an expert counterfeit of charm, by Brian d'Arcy James.) Goto and his girlfriend Gita Gobel (Emily Skinner) are forever threatened by the pompous Police Commissioner (Imus' man of a thousand...
...outsiders. The Producers is a product and a celebration of the kind of musical-comedy showmanship that doesn't exist much anymore. "It's as if this is that one last musical from the 1950s, and everybody forgot to produce it," says one of the show's producers, Tom Viertel. "And now here...