Isaiah's · Blog

April 16,

My last blog entry, on March 26, was from eight time zones east of here, aboard the cruise ship Crystal Serenity on the Arabian Sea. The SELECTED SHORTS performances were successful with the cruise passengers and, I hope, will open up new opportunities for selling Symphony Space attractions to the rest of the world in order to help the budget on 95th Street and Broadway.

Some highlights of the truly unreal two weeks on the luxury cruise, presenting literary readings:

Getting off the ship in Safaga, Egypt, and travelling in a convoy of buses, with police escort, to see Luxor and the Valley of the Kings with its Pharoah's sarcophagi;

Sailing into Aquaba, Jordan (cf Peter O'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia--"On to Aquaba!"--
and looking across at the lights of the Israeli port/resort of Eilat. Another long bus ride, this time with a Jordanian guide, through rocky desert landscape to the ancient ruins of Petra, something like a grand canyon carved in rock formations with Roman edifices and amphitheatres at the bottom. A long strenuous walk back up to the top, one portin of which I did on horseback, not camel.

Traversing the Suez Canal, in fact doing our second of three SHORTS programs in mid-canal, with windows showing both Asia and Africa.

Docking in Ashdod, Israel, a port on the Mediterranean, and taking a one hour drive through the West Bank, past the wall and the checkpoints, to spend a day seeing Jerusalem, the Western Wall, the Mount of Olives, the Garden of Gesthemane, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Religious fervor on every street corner on that Palm Sunday, Jews, Christians, and Muslims in a big intense soup of religious energy. Back to the ship and departure for...

Cairo, Alexandria, and the Pyramids! Sailing INTO Egypt the ship held a haute cuisine Seder for those who wanted to commemorate the Exodus FROM Egypt! A little bizarre, but great chopped liver. Six hours on the bus to and from Gizeh, but those huge pyramids and the Sphinx were worth it.

Across the Mediterranean and up to Piraeus and Athens. The SELECTED SHORTS cast and I stole past the barriers onto the proskenium of the Theatre of Dionysus, where Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripdes had their great hits, and orated some Shakespeare, since none of us had any Greek.

Then the long but wonderful climb up the Acropolis to the Parthenon. Spectacular.

Later in the day, walking around Athenian neighborhoods, I had the chance to test my long-held theory that you can't get a container of coffee to go without the cardboard cup having drawings of Rockefeller Center and the Statue of Liberty!

Back to the ship for the final leg, through the Greek islands, the Dardanelles, and the Sea of Marmora, for a ghostly approach into the Bosphorus and Istanbul, with breath-taking vistas of huge illuminated mosques on the hills, sliding by the ship's windows.

Finally, three days on our own in the huge, crowded, sprawling metropolis of Istanbul, with daily crowds on the main streets like Times Square New Years Eve masses.

Then a long flight back home in time for last Wednesday's historic SHORTS event at Symphony Space, and rehearsals for tonight's Thalia Follies on Springtime, Baseball, and Sex.

It's good to be home.

Monday, March 26,
On Board the Crystal Serenity
In the Red Sea

Ahoy, America!

I'm blogging now from my cabin on the port side of the luxury cruise ship Crystal Serenity, as it makes its way from Salalah in Oman, where we boarded it, and heads towards its next port of call, Safaga, Egypt, not arriving there 'till Wednesday morning.

The Captain announced late last night as we made the right turn at the southwest corner of the Arabian peninsula and started up the Red Sea towards Suez that we were right on schedule, and that Yemen was to the east of us and Africa and Eritrea was just beyond the horizon to the west.

Our journey to join this segment of Serenity's world cruise in Salalah and perform SELECTED SHORTS programs over the next two weeks of voyaging required a true ordeal of air travel. Why couldn't we have spread SELECTED SHORTS to the world by taking a cruise departing from the west side of Manhattan, or even nearby Ft. Lauderdale? Because this was the only time period in the entire season when I could get away for this length of time and be back in time for the April 11th SHORTS program and the April 16th Thalia Follies on "Springtime, Baseball, and Sex."

So Ethel and I joined Mia Dillon, one of our cast members, at JFK on Thursday evening for a British Airways overnight flight to Heathrow Airport, almost seven hours and that was just the beginning. The next stage was a nine-hour flight to Muscat, Oman, that included a stopover in Abu Dabi in the United Arab Emirates. I had never looked closely enough on the map to realized that Muscat is SO FAR EAST. It's almost INDIA! It's the upper eastern tip of Arabia, further east than Moscow or the Black Sea.

It was late evening of that unreal day of flying when we stood on a long line in the stunningly clean and orderly Muscat Airport to purchase entry visas to the Sultanate of Oman. Then we made our way to the Al Falaj hotel to sleep a few hours NOT in an economy class airplane seat, before resuming our journey. Travelling EIGHT time zones from NYC was causing truly disorienting jet lag.

Back out to the airport in the morning to take an Omani Air flight in a smaller plane for two hours down to the Port of Salalah. After a lot of arrangements including a long wait to acquire an EXIT visa from the Sultanate (the Sultan's picture hangs on the wall behind the Immigration Policeman) we made it down to the Port of Salalah, saw the gleaming white Serenity at the dockside, and practically fell aboard and into our cabins to sleep and recover.

Maybe more seasoned travelers to places like India, Australia, or the Far East would find our trip a breeze, but for me it was a first, and not easy. But if being the Artistic Director of Symphony Space means that it is my duty to plant the flag of our theatre in Asia and Africa, then I have to say what Christopher Columbus said to Queen Isabella-"Look, Your Majesty, someone's gotta do this."

The ship is truly beautiful and very luxurious indeed, great food, all the amenities, and a constant round of activities for the wealthy passengers who are paying astounding amounts to take one or more segments of the world cruise that lasts over three months.
After recuperating on Saturday and Sunday, we've just begun to feel normal and awake!
The first SELECTED SHORTS program ever to be presented on water between Asia and Africa will take place in the Stardust Club, Deck 5 Aft, tomorrow, Tuesday, at 7:45 pm, so that passengers from the early and late dinner seatings can all attend. Appropriately enough, the program is called "FOOD FICTIONS" and has some excerpts from our CD of that title.

It will be performed by Mia and me, since our remaining cast members, Mia's husband Keir Dullea, and Stephen Lang (accompanied by wife and daughter) don't join us until the next morning when we dock at Safaga. As I write this on Monday evening, they will be setting out soon from JFK to fly to Paris, thence to Cairo, thence to a place called Hurgada in Egypt, and thence overland to Safaga, which has no airport! "A hell of a long way from La Jolla, California," where Steve closed yesterday in Aaron Sorkin's new play, "just to read a short story or two."

I hope we're a hit tomorrow and that the cruise industry can become a regular part of the Symph's effort to balance the budget.

More breaking news as it happens here in the Middle East, where it is very strange to think that not that many miles from where we are steaming, our country is still trapped in a horrible war.

Hello, friends,

Well, you all know the classical composition, "Marche Slav", this is my "March Blog", at least the first entry for this month.

My last entry was posted from LaLaLand in Los Angeles where we enjoyed a triumphant totally sold-out set of story programs at The Getty Museum. Before long you'll be hearing them on the radio and I think you'll be pleased.

Back home in NYC, we're busy preparing for our big fund-raiser, the annual Spring Gala, this year being held at the very fancy Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center. Jane Curtin and I are sharing the hosting duties and the honorees include the real estate executive David Levinson, as well as Symphony Space Board member and major Selected Shorts funder Elizabeth Richebourg Rea, the jazz impresario George Wein, Jacques' d'Amboise and Fionnula Flanagan. It's a black tie affair, so I get to put on my tux and go from table to table introducing myself, "Good evening, my name is Isaiah and I'll be your server. May I tell you our specials tonight?"

A few days later I begin some serious traveling. First, a weekend in West Palm Beach, Florida, to see the final rehearsals of the revival of my 1986 musical, for which I wrote the book and lyrics, THE RISE OF DAVID LEVINSKY. This is a musicalization of the classic Abraham Cahan novel about the Talmud student who arrives at Castle Garden at the foot of Manhattan in 1883 without a penny and with dreams of education and college, but who eventually turns into a tough businessman and the king of the newly invented Seventh Avenue garment trade. The music is by my old friend Bobby Paul, who, in his more formal identity, is Dean Robert A. Paul of Emory University in Atlanta. Bobby is joining me, and our families to see this new staging of the show we had considerable success with in the 80's, first at the 92nd Street Y, then at the George Street Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and then in the commercial run that opened the John Houseman Theatre on West 42nd Street, starring the late Larry Kert as the older Levinsky and a young actor named Avi Hoffman as the younger David.

Well now, twenty years later, Avi Hoffman is a producer and director of a theatre in Florida and he's fulfilling his dream of playing the other side of the character, having found what he tells me is "a great, talented kid" to play the role he himself incarnated two decades ago. With any luck, this Florida production will extend its run to other places and maybe even, who knows, a guy can dream, no? re-open in New York!

One good thing is that my long time colleague Lanny Meyers, who was the show's musical director back then and is now, among his many other enterprises musical director and songwriter for The Thalia Follies, has agreed to spend a few weeks in Florida where he is right now, re-orchestrating THE RISE OF DAVID LEVINSKY, and once again doing the musical direction. He says he's doing it because he loves the score, he doesn't have to miss a Follies, and he can spend a few week with his mother who lives nearby! I can't wait to hear the new cast sing our score, but I know the music is in good hands.

The only reason I'm not attending the official opening night in Florida on March 23 is that that's the day we're taking off for the Selected Shorts cruise on the cruise ship Crystal Serenity, joining the world cruise at Salaleh, Oman, and sailing for two weeks to places like Karnak and Luxor in Egypt, Aquaba in Jordan, Eilat and Ashdod in Israel (with a shore excursion to Jerusalem or Masada, we have to decide!), as well as the Suez Canal, Cairo and Alexandria, the Pyramids, then up to Athens and finally to Istanbul where we disembark and spend a couple of extra days (I ask you, how often does one get to Istanbul, or Constantinople, for that matter?) before flying home for the first rehearsal of the April Thalia Follies and the very special April 11 Rea Award night at SELECTED SHORTS with a sparkling roster of great American writers in attendance! (Check the website.)

They say the cruise ship has wireless satellite capability. This means I can take my lap top and keep in touch with the office, but also that I can blog from the sun deck in the Red Sea!

Until then,

Isaiah

Los Angeles, February 8

This year our two annual SELECTED SHORTS touring trips, to Texas and to California, were combined into one, with the thought that this might be a little less stressful. We'll see whether this turns out to be the case.

So last Friday, two actors, Ted Marcoux and Patricia Kalember, joined me and Kathy Minton's lieutenant, Phoebe Lithgow, in taking off for San Antonio to begin the Texas tour. Our usual Texas routine has been to begin in San Antone, go on to Austin, and end up in Dallas. But this year our Austin friends said they'd rather have us come next fall to join the Texas Book Fair. And besdes, they said, there's some football game on tv last Sunday night and they didn't want to put short fiction readings against this sports broadcast.

Saturday night's performance in San Antonio was a smash hit, played to an audience of SHORTS radio fans. Last year, our hosts and presenters, Texas Public Radio, had rented a performance venue in a Reform Jewish Temple, where we performed up on the altar. No one was too excited about that space because of its not-so-great lighting and sound. Why not find a better site for 2007? Well,the place they rented for last Saturday was fine, but what was best about it was its name: the auditorium of the University of the Incarnate Word! I was astounded to hear that name because what is SELECTED SHORTS if not the Word made Flesh? I had to be forcibly restrained from beginning my greetings with "In principio erat verbum", in the beginning was the Word, the opening of the Gospel of John. When I get home on Monday, I'm proposing that we change the name of SELECTED SHORTS to something new, fresh, and with an edge: THE INCARNATE WORD, A Celebration of the Short Story."

On Super Bowl Sunday morning Team Symphony Space piled into the rented Chevy Malibu and drove through the Hill Country, crossing the Pedernales near Johnson City, and stopped for lunch at the legendary down-home country cooking restaurant in Austin, Threadgills, where we enjoyed the five-vegetable platters that included okra, beans, and as a note in the menu explained, "macaroni and cheese, considered a vegetable in Oklahoma".

Back into the car and with super-driver Phoebe at the wheel again, and me handling the map, we shot straight up the Interstate to Big D, where all four of us did the most American thing of our lives, watching the Super Bowl while drinking beer in a Dallas, Texas, bar! A cigar would have completed the image, but Dallas, too, has outlawed indoor smoking in bars.

Monday night's shows in Dallas went fine, and then we all went out to a late dinner with our Dallas hosts, and with Kay Cattarulla, inventor of SELECTED SHORTS, and Symph Board Member.
Next morning we returned the Malibu to the Dallas/Ft Worth airport and my three Texan tour buddies headed east to freezing NYC, while I flew west to sunny 70's Los Angeles.

I'm ensconced here at the Luxe-Summit Belair hotel, which is all that the name implies. I spend some time each day attending to Symphony Space matters by this computer and cell phone, when I'm not doing newspaper and radio interviews plugging this weekend's performances at The Getty Museum, and driving around various canyons and freeways to rehearse with our Hollywood-based actors. This year's Getty readers, whom you'll eventually be able to hear on the radio series, include Stockard Channing, Lindsay Crouse, and Stephen Lang on the Friday night program, Robert Sean Leonard and John Lithgow on Saturday night, and Rachel Griffiths, Neil Patrick Harris, and yours truly on the Sunday matinee, before Kathy Minton and I swoop down to Long Beach to return our California rental car and hop on the Jet Blue Red Eye (does that equal a purple eye?) for a restful trip arriving back in NYC on Monday morning, crisp, refreshed, and ready to get back to work.

Love From LaLa Land.

Isaiah Sheffer
Director and Host, THE INCARNATE WORD

Fond greetings to all from Ireland!

When my New York Irish friends heard that I was going over to Dublin on January 8th for a week, they asked,"Are you insane? It's the wettest, coldest, time of year there! Nobody goes to Ireland in January." But it was a rare week in which I could get away without missing too much of my responsibility at the theatre, and perhaps do a little good for the cause of BLOOMSDAY ON BROADWAY, and do a little sight-seeing, as well,-- weather permitting.

As it turned out the weather wasn't all that terrible at all. Through four days in Dublin the umbrella hardly had to open, though it was windy and cloudy. Then, renting a car and driving to the west, there was one big rain that caught me attempting to have lunch in Athalone, the halfway point on the drive from Dublin to Galway, and then considerable windy sunshine for driving through beautiful Connemara and the sea shore for a couple of days, with the only other rain casting a bit of a damper on my attempt to view the spectacular Cliffs of Moher rising over the raging Atlantic Ocean. But all in all, not bad for winter.

On the first day in Dublin, still jet-lagged, a walk up O'Connell Street past the General Post Office where the declaration of Independence was read in the 1916 uprising and where you can still see the bullet holes in the facade, led to a visit to The James Joyce Centre on Great George's Street, to begin conversations with its lovely Director Laura Barnes about cooperative collaborations between the Center and Symphony Space's literary ventures, especially BLOOMSDAY ON BROADWAY. What's in the works is the possibility of a live simulcast of this year's BLOOMSDAY on RTE Irish Radio Network, who seem pretty enthusiastic about this possibility, if all the copyright problems and permissions can be worked out. Joycean copyrights in the United States and in the European Union, of which Ireland is of course a member, are rather different, so agreements have to be reached if this is to happen.

Another possibility discussed in my Dublin meetings is having the one-act opera about James Joyce, THE ANTIENT CONCERT, with libretto by the great poet Paul Muldoon and music by Darren Hagen, which I have been planning as one of the centerpieces of this year's June 16th BLOOMSDAY, have its premiere one week earlier on June 9th in Dublin, under the sponsorship of the Joyce Centre and then come to Symphony Space for its American premiere. We're writing joint funding proposals to see if we can make that grand plan into a reality.

My return flight from Shannon airport in the southwest of Ireland was an early morning one designed to get me back to Newark Airport (or as they pointedly call it "Newark Liberty International Airport" in time to get through customs, then through the Lincoln Tunnel, in time to begin rehearsals for the January 22 Thalia Follies on the subject of Real Estate! But the weather had one more threat--dense pea-soup fog blanketed Shannon that morning and no one was landing or taking off. For a while it looked like another night in an airport hotel rather than a rehearsal at the Thalia, was in the cards. But afer about a five hour delay the fog lifted enough for a take off and an arrival in New York just as the Follies singers were clearing their throats to start work. Ah, the jet-set life can be exciting!

Happy New Year!

This past week I've been spending my spare time, such as it is, directing an unusual event that took place on Symphony Space's stage yesterday, January 7. It was a staged reading of Neil Simon's Broadway comedy, THE SUNSHINE BOYS. But it was in a new YIDDISH translation!

When the head of New York's last remaining Yiddish Theatre, The Folksbiene, called me some time ago to say that he had rented Symphony Space for a gala fund-raising benefit, I said great! I have known the Folksbiene since my childhood days in Second Avenue Yiddish theatre, and I once even directed a Folksbiene show when they did a Yiddish translation of the musical for which I had written book and lyrics, THE RISE OF DAVID LEVINSKY.

For the January 7 Neil Simon play benefit, I was told they had recruited two remarkable stars to play the two curmudgeonly old vaudeville comics--the roles played in the SUNSHINE BOYS movie by Walter Matthau and George Burns.

These were the noted actor, folksinger and former President of Actors Equity, Theodore Bikel, and the rubber-faced comedian Fyvush Finkel. They asked me would I direct this simple little staged reading and I answered of course.

It ended up being a wacky week of helping the two 85-year old comics to master the intricacies of Miriam Hoffman's very juicy and idiom-filled Yiddish version of Neil Simon. To complicate things further, The Folksbiene makes a practice of adorning their Yiddish language performances with super-titles in English and in Russian!

It ended up a grand success with a sold-out house and a very appreciative audience who didn't complain too much about the rusty Yiddish pronunciations of my narrated stage directions.

And now I'm off to Ireland for a week, to visit the home of that other Yiddish comic, Leopold Bloom. (Actually, we learn in ULYSSES that Bloom's Yiddish is much worse than mine!) I'll report on Dublin my next blog. Sholom Aleichem and Erin Go Bragh!

Dear Blog-Readers,

I thought this blog entry might, for a change, NOT address the doings of Symphony Space. Even though my duties at the theatre seldom allow an afternoon or an evening away from the ranch, once in a while I do manage to get downtown to see a play or a movie, and I thought I'd use this session to recommend three pretty terrific films for your enjoyment.

1. Go see THE QUEEN. Though I'm not usually much interested in the doings of the British royals, this is a very enjoyable movie, largely because of the performance of Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II at the time of the tragic death of Princess Diana. Mirren is superb in every way--from the Queen's dealings with her Prime Minister Tony Blair, to her wearing galoshes and a babushka to trudge through soggy castle grounds at Balmoral with her beloved corgis, to the slowly growing awareness of her subjects' acute need for her to share their grief publicly on the loss of her troubled and troubling daughter in law. I love Helen Mirren and have often tried to recruit her for SELECTED SHORTS. I haven't succeded because she's a busy lady, mostly on the other side of the pond, as they say over there, but one day this dream may come true. I am among the thousands who have loved her as Inspector Denison on the British series PRIME SUSPECT. (If you watched the final episode of PRIME SUSPECT, you probably enjoyed the inside joke when the policewoman, looking agonized and more than a little bedraggled, is given the line,"I'm not the Queen, you know." Also very good in the movie is the American actor and sometmes SELECTED SHORTS reader Jamie Cromwell, who creates a bitingly satirical portrait of Quneen Elizabeth's consort, Prince Philip, a cold, snobbish prince if you ever saw one. A very good holiday movie which will be on every list and probably win many awards.

2. Less of a headline feature film, but really wonderful is the new Pedro Almodovar movie, entitled VOLVER. Like most Almodovar films, this one shows his immense fascination with women, all varieties of women, girls, grandmothers, careerists, prostitutes, and ghosts,and its plot concerning murder, disappearance, separations, and grand reconciliations and reunions, is constantly and delightfully surprising. Even if you have to wait until it's finished its first run and is revived by us at The Thalia, don't miss it.

3. The Angelika is showing a movie about Algerian Muslim soldiers fighting in DeGaulle's French army in World War II to liberate a "homeland", France, to which many of them feel a fierce patriotism, despite the prejudices and abuses by their white Christian comrades in arms to whom they are very second class citizen-soldiers. The film, enitled INDIGENES in French is being shown here in the USA under the title DAYS OF GLORY and it's a great war movie, as it investigates the realities of Liberte, Egalite, and above all, Fraternite. Epic battle scenes, vivid characters in the platoon we follow from north Africa through Provence and up to the snows of Alsace as the Allied victory looms near, but with uncertain prospects for the French Algerians. We know all too well what will happen in the following decades add the blody wars of Algerian independence. Someone ought to show this movie on a double bill with BATTLE OF ALGIERS.

HAPPY MOVIE-GOING!

Sometime around next Labor Day, if you're a Symphony Space member, or on our mailing list, you will reach into your mailbox and pull out a lovely publication announcing all the details of our programs and offerings for the 30th Anniversary 2007-2008 season. You may be interested to know that the process of creating the contents of that season and that brochure is beginning now, in early December.

I should say that the THINKING has already been going on for weeks and months. But this coming Friday, in an all-day retreat held off-site to avoid disruptive phone calls and other distractions, the creative people responsible for formulating our programs in many kinds of music, liteature, dance, theatre, film, education, family entertainment,public affairs, and political cabaret will gather around a table and take their turns laying out their dreams of what they'd like to do next season, accompanied by draft budgets of what these dreams might cost. Also present will be the fund raising people who will reflect on how to find the funds to make them come true, and the marketing people who will have to let the world know about them and get the world to buy tickets.

Now everyone around that table will know that not all of those dreams can or will be fulfilled, at least not this year, that this Friday is only the start of a process of thinking, tweaking, and triage that will cut and trim and modify so that by next March we can submit to the Board for its approvals reasonable as well as an exciting program and budget.

A year ago, at the similar meeting, which resulted in this season's brochure which you surely have on your coffee table or hanging from the kitcen bulletin board, my partner Cynthia Elliott, the Executive Director, and I made speeches to our colleagues suggesting that maybe we should hold back on big new initiatives for a year, and not take on more than we could handle.

After we had gone around the table and heard everyone's ideas and plans, I was moved to cry out that those introductory speeches might just as well have been like standing under Niagara and pleading, "No more water right now, please!" The creative imaginations of our talented and ambitious curators and program heads were not so easily to be restrained! "Look who's talking, Isaiah," someone said. You tell us no big new initiatives, but you yourself suggest starting a new summer theatre project, expanding the Thalia Follies to two shows a night, more SELECTED SHORTS touring, and creating a big brand new public radio series about music to be a sister program to SHORTS on the radio!"

On Friday, we'll make the same kind of "hold-the line-and consolidate" speeches again. Our staff already has a lot on its plate. Must we keep growing? But I know some new ideas are brewing in the fertile minds of my colleagues, and we'll see what happens. I'll keep you posted,

September 16, FASHIONING THE NEW AND IMPROVED ME:

Perhaps this will be of some interest to regular listeners to the radio series of SELECTED SHORTS. Now the NPR series, made up of recordings of the live story readings we present at Symphony Space and on tour elsewhere, has been on the air for a couple of decades. If you think about it, that's pretty rare for any radio program. What other radio broadcasting, except perhaps the news, the weather, and the ballgame, have you been listening to regularly for that long?

SELECTED SHORTS'radio popularity continues to grow and by now we're up to 148 or so stations from Maine to Hawaii and Alaska. The program stays fresh, I think, because listeners' hunger to hear good stories read by fine actors remains strong, the stories are always new (or as they say on television "ALL NEW!") and the performers are a careful mixture of steady favorites and fresh, new voices.

The only thing that listeners could get bored or unhappy with is the host--me.

So our friends at National Public Radio, as a service to us, convened a Listening Group, made up largely, I believe, of public radio station Program Directors, to listen, evaluate, and perhaps give us some helpful hints about everything, the stories, the features, the music, and, of course, the host. A conference-call meeting was set up for them to deliver their ideas and opions, but I was told that program hosts are not invited to take part in such sessions, so that critics can speak freely.

So while my colleagues Kathy Minton and Cynthia Elliott were on the conference call with the Listening Panel, I cowered cravenly behind the couch in my office awaiting the verdict on me, which they promised they'd report faithfully. "Do they hate me? Am I fired?", I asked when they came in. "No, they love you, it was all very positive,"they reassured me. No, in fact, what the listeners felt was needed was a more personal style from Isaiah, a more intimate sharing of his enthusiasms for particular fictional works, a chattier, more conversational style. "Our one complaint is that sometimes Isaiah sounds too scripted," they said.

I'm the first to admit the possibility of my story intros sounding scripted because in fact I have spent hundreds of Saturday and Sunday afternoons over the past years writing out the scripts for radio program and individual story introductions, to be recorded downtown at WNYC's studios on Wednesday mornings! And given the tight constraints of fitting in all the varying stories, intros, outros, teases, station-handoffs, funding and production credits, advice to listeners about how to learn more, or get the reading list, or come to live performances at Symphony Space, or send in their opinions and suggestions, there isn't really the freedom to ramble on conversationally and have it all just happen to end up totalling, counting the theme music, an exact 59 minutes of public radio time.

But hey, we're not going to give the back of the hand to helpful suggestions from people who love us. I'm not about to defy the wisdom of those whose job it is to know what's hip and cool versus what is foramal and stodgy. So recent recording sessions have seen the effort made by our Radio Producer Sarah Montague and SHORTS producer Kathy Minton to render me less "scripted" and more informal.

What a relief not to spend those weekend hours writing copy! The time saved, one would think, could perhaps be used to be a more faithful and regular blogger.

But I'm just not a perfect ad-libber. So each piece, each thought or anecdote, or riff or explanation often takes many takes before it's perfect. Perfect? Who's talking perfect? Before it's coherent, acceptable... The tension in the control room begins to rise after take twenty seven of what would have been accomplished in one or two takes in the old, pre-conversational transformation era. And the result? Is the public getting a relaxed, informal, "chatty" host to SELECTED SHORTS? Is it better? Have we enhanced your enjoyment of each week's program? You can judge for yourself when the new season of shows starts airing in October.

But I'll let you in on a secret. No, I'm not a good ad-libber, no Garrison Keillor skills at all. But I'm a pretty good actor, and in recent sessions I've been taking pieces of written-out or partly written out scripts and spoken them AS IF they had just come to mind. My friends, i'M NOT CHEATING. I'm not chatting. I'm not a chatter!! I'M ONLY PRETENDING TO CHAT!!!

Sorry, friends, for letting my blog stay on vacation for so long while I was engaging in some RandR.

Labor Day Weekend has always been my absolutely favorite time of year. At long last, the summer is ending, and as the Catskill hotel waiters sing in the Broadway musical WISH YOU WERE HERE, "that Sweet First Monday in September" is about to arrive. For me this has always meant crisp fall weather, new shoes, new school year with fresh, crisp notebooks and other school supplies, the Yankees comfortably in first place, having overcome early-summer Red Sox rumblings, and above all, a brand new theatre season, full of new ventures and new hopes.

The Symphony Space Season Overview for '06-'07 has just arrived from the printer, and, like every year, it gives me powerful, but mixed, feelings. I think within the lovely design and beautiful layout of this colorful publication there is an amazing amount of artistic vitality. I'm very moved by and proud of this booklet and all that it represents in the way of talent and effort taking place at 95th Street and Broadway. But it's also a little scary—now that we've announced all these projects and series, and special events, we have to actually create them and put them on our stages!

My new colleague, our Music Curator Laura Kaminsky, and I have already been working on assembling the ingredients for this new season's Wall to Wall free marathon-WALL TO WALL OPERA, which will take place on Saturday, May 19th, only thirty-seven weeks, as I pointed out to Laura, from the Saturday of Labor Day Weekend! More about this survey which will begin with an operatic work that premiered in 1607 and end with a 2007 operatic premiere, in future blogs. (Why have we changed the tradition of WALL TO WALL happening on the third Saturday in March to this May date? Many reasons, but perhaps the most important that it will moist likely be warmer for those waiting on line to get in!

More immediate on my work schedule is creating songs, sketches, and monologues for the first THALIA FOLLIES POLITICAL CABARET, which will happen on Monday evening, October 23d and focus on the subject of the midterm congressional elections in Washington and the gubernatorial race here in New York State. Once again, blog-readers are invited to submit material that can be performed by our troupe of Follies-Fools. You can also look up the titles and subject matters of the five other Follies this season on our website and get a head start on submissions for those dates.

Does anyone know just when the leaves turn beautiful in Montana? I'll be in Helena on October 14 and 15 with the Helena premiere of SELECTED SHORTS LIVE!

From Helena we'll fly to Chicago (can you name the cities we have a choice of changing planes in?) for the first touring SHORTS program in the Second City on the night of October 16.

More soon. Thanks for blogging with me.

Sunday, June 11

Since returning from the SELECTED SHORTS Los Angeles swing, our New York days have been filled--nay, overfilled!--with intense preparations for not one, but two major Symphony Space ventures.

This coming Friday is June the 16th, and of course that means it's time for BLOOMSDAY ON BROADWAY XXV, our 25th annual James Joyce ULYSSES marathon, celebrating the day on which the great novel happened, June 16th, 1904, and at the same time celebrating Joyce, language, love, lust, and literature!

So I've been working hard along wit this year's team, co-director Mac Barrett and intern Sarah Carbiener, to arrange this year's 12 hours of text selections, at the same time contacting potential readers and recruiting them, both regular Joyceans and new recruits. Then we faced the task of working out the timings and text assignments, from noon until after midnight on the great day, and deciding who was right for each of the 125 or so reading assignments, who could make it at what time, who is currently in a Broadway show and has to be out of here by seven pm, and who is working in film or television that day and can't get here UNTIL seven pm!

And once all that is clear (as of this moment there will be 83 actors taking part) the actual scripts, with yellow highlighting of each speaker's actual words, have had to be manufactured and mailed out and delivered, along with the letters of transmittal to each reader, reminding him or her about their assigned arrival time, about the schedule of rehearsals which will take up about 12 hours on Thursday, and about the vital need to confirm receipt of all the stuff in the envelope before we give their part away to someone else!

The final few days before Friday's marathon will be devoted to rehearsal, technical preparations for the live event on stage at Symphony Space, and the broadcast over WBAI, 99.5 on your FM dial, as well as the Pacifica rado stations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Houston.

As to the program itself, in case you're planning to attend or listen, this year's central theme, after last year's 12-hour concentration on Mr. Leopold Bloom's women, is on the character of the younger male member of the book's three leading figures, Stephen Dedalus, who is, of course, Joyce's own self-portrait of an exiled Irish artist. So after the traditional Bloomsday opening scene of the book's first episode, Stephen's encounter with Stately, plump Buck Mullian, instead of going forward to the next episode and the next hour of Stephen's day, we'll flash back in time and see the young boy Stephen in the fabulous Christmas dinner scene in James Joyce's earlier work, A PORTRAIT OF HE ARTIST. Later, of course, we'll return to June 16th, 1904 and rejoin Stephen's travels through Dublin, heading towards his climactic meeting with Leopold Bloom (who won't actually appear this Bloomsday until the program's fourth hour! By late evening, when FCC regulations allow the broadcast of a text filled with such sexually explicit material, the incomparable Fionnula Flanagan will once again render her prodigious 2 and 1/2 hour reading o the final episode of ULYSSES, Molly Bloom's night time stream-of-consciousness.

Another feature of this 25th BLOOMSDAY is a celebration of the centenary of Joyce's friend, helper, and disciple, Samuel Beckett, starting in late afternoon for about three hours, with a lineup of Beckett readers, more than a dozen Broadway stars--the greatest cast any Beckett offering has ever had anywhere. As my own Beckett-reading assignment, I chose something I've loved for years and always wanted to read aloud, the "sucking stones" story from Beckett's novel, MOLLOY. It is truly hlarious and tragic at the same time. It sums up what life is really all about, and I hope I can do it justice on Friday.

Now, did I say TWO major projects have been keeping us busy up at my office at Symphony Space? The other one, which starts three weeks of rehearsals tomorrow, Monday, morning, is nothing less than the long-dreamed of launching of our theatre's important and exciting new project, "Summer Stock on 95th Street and Broadway". Most of the summers of the past years Symphony Space has been pretty much closed down while various kinds of renovations and upgradings have gone on. But now that's pretty much complete, and we at last be able to take our place along with such favorite summer arts as Shakespeare in the Park, SummerStage, and Lincoln Center out of Doors.

The opening show (first preview on July 6th!) will be a newly "rediscovered" Rodgers and Hart musical, "MANHATTAN MADCAPS OF 1924". This show is built around twenty terrific songs by those two very talented and promising kids, both Upper Westsiders, Dick Rodgers and Larry Hart. The rediscovered libretto, no sillier than the books to quite a few Rodgers and Hart shows of the early 1920s, appears to be by someone whose work I stumbled upon, an obscure writer named Jerzy Turnpike, who, as his name suggests, combines the adventurousness of the Polish avant garde with an all-American spirit. Lanny Meyers is the musical arranger and diector, and the show is being staged by Annette Jolles, who staged parts of WALL TO WALL SONDHEIM last year, with choreography by Regina Larkin, who danced he role of the Soldier in WALL TO WALL STRAVINSKYS'S presentation of STORY OF A SOLDIER.

So while we were working on James Joyce assignments in the upstairs office, we were conducting singimg and dancing auditions in the Thalia. The result is a terrific cast of eight, presenting in song and dance the fable of some young people who cme to New York City to find fame, fortune, love, and an apartment they can afford! We're planning a three week run in the Leonard Nimoy Thalia, so tickets will be hard to ge for this historic and entertaining pemiere. Be there!

Finally, I ought to tell you that on June 1st, taking a day away from the theatre, I was honored by my alma mater, Brooklyn College, CUNY, with an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, as well as an invitation to give the commencemen address. I'm used to addressing cowds of 850 people at sold-out Symph events, but speaking to more than three tousand graduates, relatives, faculty and friends on the packed quadrangle of the Brooklyn College campus was like nothing I've ever done before.

They put the doctoral hood over my head, but I do not plan to waer it at BLOOMSDAY. It's the wrong color. And meanwhile, anyone addressing me as "Doc" is looking for serious trouble.

Greetings from LaLa Land! Here I am in a hotel on Wilshire Boulevard near the UCLA campus in the Westwood section of Los Angeles. When I'm not blogging, I'm rehearsing actors for this coming weekend's series of SELECTED SHORTS programs at The Getty Center.
Katherine Minton reserved a car for me for my srrivsl on Jet Blue in Long Beach the other day, but I didn't know she was reserving a sleek little bright white Chrysler convertible!

So I'm working carefully on my tan, wearing my Cape Cod sunglasses, rolling the top down, putting on my Symphony Space cap, and, holding my Thomas's Guide to the freeways and canyons, turning the music on the car radio way up because it's hard to hear music with the top down among ten lanes of Freeway traffic, and I'm off to the homes of movie stars to work on short stories.

This Getty season (our sixteenth year) is devoted to FOOD FICTIONS, stories about food, dining, take-out, gastronomy, wine, and indigestion. The Getty Center food services department is arranging special public promotions at their frestaurants, and have even devised a SELECTED SHORTS CHOCOLATE BAR with a beautiful wrapper!

This weekend's readers include John Lithgow, Rene Auberjonois, Samantha Eggar, Fionnula Flanagan (who will also be at Symphony Space next June 16th doing her incomparable 3-hour read of Molly Bloom's night-time msings,complete and uncensored) Christina Pickles, Raphael Sparge, John Shea (a Symph regular making his Getty debut, the wonderful Iranian actress Shoreh Agdashloo (with whom I'm doing Saturday morning's radio call-in show on radio station KIRAN, serving the one and a half million Iranians in Los Angeles) Brad Whitford of The SWest Wing, and his wife Jane Kaczmarek.

I'm also spending some hours on my long-distance cel phone and at this trusty little laptop lining up the other readers for this June 16th's 25th Anniversary BLOOMSDAY ON BROADWAY. I've got about 65 great peole confirmed so far, with another 20 or so still to be confirmed for the 12-hour marathon celebrating Joyce's ULYSSES and also, this year, the centenary of Joyce's friend, Samuel Bdeckett. It feels a little strange cating a Joyce event for 95the street from Hollywood, but that's modern technology.

Well, I've got to have my alfalfa sprouts now, but only after my fitness run at the health spa. Love from the Sunshine State.