Friday, April 2, 2010

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Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Dark Side of The <b>Beatles</b>: Mis-pressed Fab Four album goes up for auction

Posted: 02 Apr 2010 12:11 AM PDT

A rare Beatles picture disc which plays The Dark Side of the Moon is set to spark a bidding frenzy.

The mis-pressed album combines the iconic Sgt Pepper's image with Pink Floyd's classic LP.

Cameo Auctioneers of Midgham, Berks, call it "The Dark Side of The Beatles".

It goes to auction on May 4.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Great Lakes Theater Festival's spring repertory: 'Bat Boy: The Musical' and <b>Beatles</b>-infused 'Midsummer Night's Dream'

Posted: 01 Apr 2010 09:57 PM PDT

By Tony Brown, The Plain Dealer

April 02, 2010, 12:00AM
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PREVIEW

Great Lakes Theater Festival

What: Great Lakes Theater Festival presents its spring repertory season, "Bat Boy: The Musical" and "A Midsum mer Night's Dream," with one cast of actors performing both plays at alter nate performances.

When: "Bat Boy" runs Thursday through Sunday, May 16. "Midsummer" runs Thursday, April 22, through Saturday, May 15. Go to Greatlakestheater.org for a schedule.

Where: Hanna Theatre, PlayhouseSquare, Cleveland.

Tickets: $11-$69. 216-241-6000.

Editor's note: The Plain Dealer's theater critic has been possessed by the spirit of Ed Anger, the late columnist for the late Weekly World News tabloid. Anger's work was "so vitriolically right-wing that [it] possibly came from the left," the Wall Street Journal said. Is there a journalistic exorcist in the house? Meantime: Reader discretion advised.

By Tony "Anger" Brown, Plain Dealer Theater Grouch

I'm madder than a Hamlet-and-cheese sandwich in an all-vegan kosher restaurant.

I'm Bard-biting mad about Great Lakes Theater Festival, "Cleveland's classic theater."

With its 2010 spring repertory season that begins this week, Great Lakes is guilty of conspiring to make the classics -- of all things! -- fun.

On Thursday, resident director Victoria Bussert will stage "Bat Boy: The Musical" -- which premiered way back in the vintage year 1997 in always-classic Los Angeles.

Then, two weeks later, artistic director Charles Fee will throw in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," filling Shakespeare's romantic comedy with wacky 1960s love-ins and catchy tunes by a rock band called the Beatles.

Giant gobs of Swan-of-Avon excrement!

Just listen to Bussert rationalize how the universal, timeless themes of the ancients could possibly make sense in a work created nowadays:

"When the creative team of 'Bat Boy' was working on it, they had copies of 'Othello' and 'Oedipus' open. They used classical, universal themes in a musical form, especially the theme of being excluded from a community because of being different.

"One of them said they wanted to bridge Sophocles and the supermarket tabloid. It's all about bringing people into theater who don't usually go to the theater."

First: Sophocles? Wasn't he that Greek father-killer and mother-you-know-whatter?

Second: Borrowing ideas from other writers? Shakespeare never would have done that.

And third: Bat Boy? The evil spawn of stem-cell research.

The Bat Boy scandal was uncovered in a hard-hitting 1992 news story in the Weekly World News. A half-bat, half-boy was found in a cave in West Virginia. Outlandish? You ever been to West Virginia?

Of course it's real. He's a half-breed monster threatening the planet. And these "playwrights" come along and make a joke out of it.

As if that weren't enough, they satirize their very own art form -- the great American musical. The nerve!

Then there's Fee's updating of Shakespeare's story of star-crossed lovers. Fee adds music by English dandies with long hair -- to a comedy about youthful cavorting!

Fee might as well call it "Lucy in the Sky With Puck and Hermia and Demetrius and Lysander and Helena." Boys in fancy Edwardian suits and girls in miniskirts, skipping through the woods! Rude mechanicals -- led by a weaver named Bottom (what kind of man, even one with a ridiculous name, weaves for a living?) -- making a surprise entrance in a VW Beetle!

(Hmmm. Beetle-Beatles. Fee has gone buggy!)

But here's something else to be mad about.

Did you know that both of these productions have been seen before right here in Greater Cleveland and were loved by the audiences that saw them?

Bussert did "Bat Boy" as a city of Cleveland Heights production at Cain Park, and Fee did "Midsummer" for Great Lakes at the Ohio Theatre, both to great critical acclaim. Now they're both coming back to be staged at the same time in Great Lakes' new home, the Hanna Theatre.

I smell a conspiracy to make hilarity all over again.

When asked to explain, Bussert and Fee muttered something about how in the new, technically superior Hanna, the actors will be able to clamber and rappel all over the set in "Bat Boy," and the thrust stage will put "Midsummer's" Bottom in our noses!

Baldwin-Wallace College professor Bussert gives us a load of liberal education as she tries to explain how "Bat Boy" with Great Lakes actors makes it "different":

"Every time I work with this company, the actors come at it so strongly from the text. They're all so text-driven. I feel like I'm hearing the story for the first time. The classical nature of the themes seem more classic, and the popular references much more contemporary."

I wonder if she text-drove that one as far as Fee did his explanation about how only three Great Lakes actors from his first "Midsummer" are back for the second:

"As they watch, the audience might remember some parts, but they'll also see lots new. Every time actors, directors and designers come back to a play, we look at them fresh. We have a new opening, a darker first scene where we see the problem of the play. We just go deeper."

As if anyone going to see Shakespeare wants depth!

But here's the thing that just really slams it: Kids will be subjected to this frivolity in the name of education! Your kids. My kids.

Great Lakes has a long history of putting ideas -- ideas, yet! -- into its education programs. Now it will do school matinees of "Midsummer Night's Day-Tripper" and "Bat Boy: The Genetic Geek."

Children will be bused to downtown Cleveland to laugh at new and innovative programming involving Sophocles and Shakespeare! This theater is Cleveland's classic?

As Bottom might say: My assic!

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