Blogging is tough. It requires dedication and time.  And, lately, we’ve been short on time.  In addition to board meetings and grant writing, we’ve been casting two readings.  Readings baffle us.  Producing a reading is a pain, but casting a reading is the worst. 

We’ve come up with a haiku, celebrating the hard work and tenacity of the two casting directors who have been working on these readings (The Wife by Tommy Smith, directed by May Adrales; Mother Earth by Andy Bragen, directed by Jackson Gay).  Really, the following haiku is dedicated to all casting directors who, as far as we’re concerned, are the unsung heroes of this business:

Angie, Gwyneth, Reese,
Emma, Meryl, Cate and Madge —  
They do theater, no?

We’re largely non-partisan here at the Page 73 blog.

But we do like to have a laugh (or two) at the expense of our crazy primaries.

Some theater sites (this one and this one) have picked up the news about Tommy, which is nice (even our favorite picked it up). And this one. Just kidding. One day maybe. A girl can dream.

Like any good citizen, each morning, we spend the first thirty minutes of our day reading the newspaper and trolling the Internets for some entertaining blog postings relating to the Theatah.  Some of our favorite posts often appear on the craigslist of the theater community, Talkinbroadway.com, where theater’s number one fans ask the really hard questions (”Who’s going to direct the film version of Follies?”  “Was Kristen Chenoweth really wearing hair extensions at the Kennedy Center Awards?” “Whose Mama Rose is better? Patti’s? Or Bernadette’s?”). 

We sometimes come across rare TQ gems.  This morning, a poster wrote an impassioned inquiry about the climactic scene in Hello, Dolly!

“Both Jerry Herman and Carol Channing talked with great reverence about the title number in Hello, Dolly! Apparently it is the moment that Dolly decides to rejoin the human race.

Am I totally missing something? She seems like a pretty lively presence from the first moment we lay eyes on her, and no one would ever guess that she isn’t living life to the fullest. I would never describe the character of Dolly Levi as someone who was hiding from life…”

Apparently, Harold Bloom made a mistake when he forgot to include Hello, Dolly! in The Western Canon.

After almost eight months, we have finally reached a decision and have chosen Tommy Smith as the 2008 P73 Playwriting Fellow.  It was really tough - we received some pretty amazing applications this year.  We were pulling out our (collective) hair, trying to pick our fellow for next year. 

But the collective hair-pulling was worthwhile.  Tommy’s fantastic and we can’t wait to work with him on his play The Wife, a comedy about a Hasidic Jewish wife who falls in with some pretty sketchy characters.  Because Renee Zellweger gave such a memorably nuanced performance in A Price Above Rubies* as a Hasidic Jewish wife (we’re not making this up), we’re going to try to get her to tackle the wife in Tommy’s play.  She’s going to be wonderful.  We only hope that Tommy agrees with this  coup de casting.  I mean, seriously, who is more Jewish than Renee Zellweger.

* The movie’s tagline? ”In a world of rules… one woman is ruled by her passion.”  And it wasn’t even on Lifetime.

Unless we’re on them, we think that “Top Ten Lists” are kind of silly. 

This was truly nice, though.   1001 made it on both David Cote’s and Adam Feldman’s lists for the year-end Time Out edition.  Why hasn’t Jason Grote mentioned this on his blog?  C’mon, Jason!  You’re usually so great about picking this stuff up and posting it on your blog.

Reading of Leitmotif by Victoria Stewart, with (l-r) Stephen Stout, Nancy McDoniel, Erica Sullivan and Rebecka Jones

Beinecke Library, repository of a Gutenberg Bible

(l-r) Asher Richelli, Liz Jones and Nicole Fix