Word of the Week - SQUALL

Posted by Hannah Miller
This week’s theatre artist is the internationally renowned, Academy Award-winning film actress MERYL STREEP. This past Sunday, June 22, she celebrated her 59th birthday. Prior to her success in Hollywood, she was a highly acclaimed 26-year-old newcomer on Broadway. She thrilled her first NYC audience at Lincoln Center in the 1975 revival of the classic backstage comedy, Trelawny of the ‘Wells’.

Her Word of the Week is SQUALL, a verb she uttered and ably demonstrated during the 47 performances of her auspicious stage debut on the Great White Way.

Born with the given name Mary Louise, Streep’s first love was music. She made her vocal debut as a child singing O Holy Night in flawless French, perhaps foretelling her acclaimed ability to master any dialect. At an early age, she made plans to become an opera star and started vocal training at age 12.

As a student, she excelled academically but lacked confidence in social settings. This changed when she received a standing ovation as Marian the Librarian in her high school production of The Music Man. It was then that she “stopped feeling dorky” and was able to think of herself as a genuine performer. With new found self-assurance, she continued to act in many high school productions and ended up being named Homecoming Queen her senior year.

She studied theatre and English at Vassar, graduating in 1971. Wanting to continue her education, she enrolled in the Yale School of Drama and appeared in over 30 productions at Yale Repertory Theatre. She graduated with an MFA in theatre in 1975.

Her first big break came when she joined Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. Here, she had the opportunity to appear on Broadway not only in Trelawny of the ‘Wells’, but also, two months after Trelawny closed, in a double-bill of Tennessee Williams’ 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (pictured to the right) and Arthur Miller’s A Memory of Two Mondays. Her roles in these two plays couldn’t have been more different. Critics commended her versatility, and she was nominated for the 1976 Tony Award as Best Featured Actress.

She made her television debut in 1977 in Secret Service, a filming of her next Broadway production, launching her extremely successful career in Hollywood. (Secret Service is a Civil War era spy story set in Richmond. Theatre IV produced the stage version of Secret Service in the Empire in the early 90s.) In 1978, Streep won an Emmy Award for her performance in Holocaust, a miniseries.

Moving on to the big screen, Streep played small but memorable parts in Julia (appearing with Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave) and The Deer Hunter (appearing with Robert DeNiro). For The Deer Hunter, she earned her first of 14 Oscar nominations. She’s won twice. Subsequent film and television projects have included Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Sophie’s Choice (1982), Out of Africa (1985), The Hours (2002), Angels in America (2003 - and yes, that's Meryl in one of her Angels roles pictured above and to the left), The Devil Wears Prada (2006), Mamma Mia! (now playing), Doubt (opening later this year), and 47 other productions.

First produced in 1898, Trelawny of the ‘Wells’ is a comedy about how English theatre changed during the 1860s, leaving behind over-the-top melodramas and farces in favor of more realistic “cup and saucer” dramas, paving the path for Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. During the final three decades of the 19th Century and the first three decades of the 20th, Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, author of Trelawny and many other hit plays, was among London’s five most successful and popular playwrights. He was a leader in bringing realism to popularity in England, and is best known today for his two masterworks, Trelawny and The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.

Near the end of Trelawny, Streep’s character Imogen (an actress and aspiring producer) speaks this line in the play within the play: “Miss Harrington, bring your work indoors and hear me SQUALL,” an allusion to the melodramatic acting style being lovingly satirized.

Until scanning through Trelawny, I had always thought of a SQUALL as a storm. When appearing as a noun, that’s exactly what it is—“a sudden strong wind or short violent storm.” However, when used as a verb, SQUALL refers to a human action or trait that is storm-like. Its definition is “to scream or cry loudly and harshly.”

Whether squalling, whispering or murmuring gently in a newly mastered accent, Meryl Streep is believed by many to be the finest film actress of her generation. It would be wonderful to see her return once again to her Broadway roots. Until then, we can seek out the NYC performances of her look-alike daughter, actress Mamie Gummer (pictured to the right), who recently made her Broadway debut in the Roundabout’s revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

--Hannah Miller

Word of the Week - BROMIDIC

Posted by Hannah Miller
This week’s theatre artist is the late and luminous Broadway orchestrator ROBERT RUSSELL BENNETT, who won a posthumous Tony Award last Sunday, which was the 114th anniversary of his birth. Bennett was born on June 15, 1894, and survived a sickly childhood to live to the ripe old age of 87. His posthumous Tony Award recognized his incomparable contributions to many of the greatest musicals of the 20th Century, including the current Tony-winner for Best Revival, South Pacific.

His Word of the Week is from the lyric of one of the South Pacific songs he so memorably arranged. The song is A Wonderful Guy, and the Word of the Week is BROMIDIC.

If he knew prior to his birth that he wanted to be an orchestrator, then Bennett picked the right parents. His dad was a violinist with the Kansas City Symphony, and also an accomplished trumpeter. His mom was a piano teacher. As a toddler, Bennett contracted polio. His parents filled his hours with music. At the age of 3, he surprised everyone by picking out on the piano the tune to a Beethoven sonata that his mother had recently played. At the age of 4, Bennett and his family moved to a farm south of Kansas City because the doctor suggested that the rural environment would benefit his recovery.

While living on the farm, his father started a band and engaged his son as a sub whenever one of the other musicians was unable to play. Through these gigs and rigorous home schooling, Bennett learned to play pretty much any instrument he could get his hands on. When he was 15, the family moved back to Kansas City where Bennett found work as second violinist with the Symphony. He also played piano for silent movies, and various instruments with the pit orchestras of live theatres. When he turned 22, he collected all his savings and moved to New York with a total of $200 in his pocket.

Once in Manhattan, Bennett earned his keep playing in dance halls and restaurants. He also landed a job as a copyist with the music publishing house of G. Schirmer. At the start of WWI, he volunteered for the Army. Due to a crippled foot (the last vestiges of his childhood polio), he was not sent overseas. He was assigned to Camp Funston, Kansas, and named director of the 70th Infantry Band. When the war ended, Bennett returned to New York.

In 1919, he was hired to provide music lessons at one of NYC’s prestigious finishing schools. He applied for work in Tin Pan Alley, the center of New York’s world-famous music publishing business. He was given the chance to audition at T. B. Harms, the firm that sat at the top of the Tin Pan Alley heap. The orchestration he created during his “audition” was for Cole Porter’s An Old Fashioned Garden. It wound up becoming the biggest pop music hit of 1919.

As might be expected, Bennett won the job of orchestrator at T. B. Harms. That same year, he married Louise Merrill, the daughter of the prominent society woman who was the headmistress of the finishing school where he worked. Bennett and his wife had one daughter, Jean, born in 1920.

Early in his career at T. B. Harms, Bennett was asked to orchestrate not just single songs, but entire musical theatre scores. Over the subsequent 45 years, he would work with almost every major Broadway composer of his lifetime, contributing to over 300 shows.

His credits included orchestrations for Rose Marie (Rudolph Friml – composer, 1924), No No Nanette (Vincent Youmans, 1925), Show Boat (Jerome Kern, 1927), Of Thee I Sing and Porgy and Bess (George Gershwin, 1931 and 1935), Anything Goes (Cole Porter, 1934), Annie Get Your Gun (Irving Berlin, 1936), Lady in the Dark (Kurt Weill, 1941), Oklahoma and Carousel (Richard Rodgers, 1943 and 1945), Finian’s Rainbow (Burton Lane, 1947), Kiss Me Kate (Cole Porter, 1948), South Pacific and The King and I (Richard Rodgers, 1949 and 1951), My Fair Lady (Fritz Loewe, 1956), Bells are Ringing (Jule Styne, 1956), Flower Drum Song and The Sound of Music (Richard Rodgers, 1958 and 1959), Camelot (Fritz Loewe, 1960), and On a Clear Day … (Burton Lane, 1965).

About Bennett, Richard Rodgers wrote, “I give him [the credit] without undue modesty, for making my music sound better than it was.”

In South Pacific, Bennett orchestrated Richard Rodgers’ beautiful score, capturing the exotic harmonies of the Pacific islands and the corn-fed American exuberance of the young men and women stationed there with the U. S. Navy during World War II. The brilliant lyrics were by Oscar Hammerstein II.

In A Wonderful Guy, Ensign Nellie Forbush, a Navy nurse, sings about her unabashed love for the expatriate French planter Emile de Becque. The photo to the right shows Kelli O'Hara singing A Wonderful Guy in the current Broadway revival.

"I'm as trite and as gay as a daisy in May,
A cliché coming true!
I'm BROMIDIC and bright as a moon-happy night,
Pouring light on the dew!"

BROMIDIC seems to have firmly entered the language by 1913, at least that’s when the word BROMIDE first appeared in Webster dictionaries. In the war era of South Pacific, BROMIDE was readily recognized to have three related but different definitions:
1. any of the salts of hydrobromic acid, used as a sedative; or
2. a person who is conventional and commonplace in his habits of thought and conversation; or
3. a conventional or trite saying, a boring cliché.

The root syllable brom means dullness of mind. Based on the above three definitions, BROMIDIC would mean:
1. like a medicine that causes dullness of mind, or
2. like a person who has a certain dullness of mind, or
3. like a saying that prompts dullness of mind in the listener.

In his 1906 book, Are You a BROMIDE?, the author, art critic and social commentator Gelett Burgess wrote, “The BROMIDE conforms to everything sanctioned by the majority, and may be depended upon to be trite, banal, and arbitrary.”

Nellie Forbush, when she refuses to marry Emile de Becque because he is older and “foreign,” certainly fits Burgess’s definition of BROMIDIC.

Robert Russell Bennett, never BROMIDIC in the least, lived a full life, continuing to orchestrate and compose until his death. He was commissioned to write several symphonic pieces for our nation’s bicentennial in 1976. He died of cancer in 1981. The great choral director Robert Shaw wrote, “And it is just as certainly because of his kindness, honesty, humor, and wisdom that our hearts are warmed to see Robert Russell Bennett without peer in his field.”

--Posted by Hannah Miller

Word(s) of the Week - RUTTING HUNK

Posted by Hannah Miller
Today’s theatre artist is the legendary Broadway and Hollywood actress JESSICA TANDY, born on June 7, 1909 (pictured to the right). The world celebrated her 99th birthday a week ago Saturday. Tandy died in 1994 of ovarian cancer at the age of 85, but last week she was remembered by her legion of fans as one of the great actors of the 20th Century.

Tandy is the first woman to have made it into this blog series. In recognition of her ushering our gender into Word of the Week, I’m giving her (or I should say that Tennessee Williams gave her) two Words instead of one. Her Words comprise the provocative phrase, RUTTING HUNK.

Now please don't get offended or mad or nervous just yet. Jessica Tandy was a highly esteemed actor of the stage and screen, and enjoyed a career that lasted over sixty years. She was born in London as Jessie Alice Tandy, and became involved in theatre as a child when her parents enrolled her in the Ben Greet Academy of Acting.

Her early years were marked by one success after another. She made her professional debut at the age of 16 in a regional production of The Manderson Girls, and was soon invited to join the full time acting company of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. At the age of 20 she made her West End debut in London. One year later she achieved transcontinental success when she appeared on Broadway in The Matriarch. A short two years after that, she was featured in her first Hollywood movie, The Indiscretions of Eve.

Throughout her 20s and 30s she remained busy focusing on her stage career, and charming audiences on two continents. In 1942, she met and married actor and director Hume Cronyn, beginning a 52-year partnership that was destined to become one of the most successful and respected marriages in America’s entertainment industry.

Tandy’s encounter with history came in 1947 when, at the age of 38, she created the role of Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire. She is pictured with Kim Hunter and Marlon Brando to the left. She won the Tony Award and immediate national recognition. Since '47 she has been, and will continue to be, inextricably associated with the iconic Southern stage role of her era.

When the film version of Streetcar was produced, all of Tandy’s Broadway costars were invited to recreate their characters: Marlon Brando as Stanley, Kim Hunter as Stella, and Karl Malden as Mitch. Ironically, it was another British superstar who was invited to play the role of Blanche.

Vivien Leigh (pictured to the right as Blanche with Marlon Brando as Stanley) was four years younger than Tandy. Leigh had won her first Oscar and become an international household name playing another iconic Southern belle in the 1939 blockbuster Gone with the Wind. When the film version of Streetcar was made in 1951, Hollywood had a choice—Jessica Tandy who had created the role of Blanche on Broadway to universal acclaim, or Vivien Leigh who had starred as Blanche when the play transferred to London’s West End. Internationally beloved as Scarlett O’Hara, Leigh was the more bankable star, and so she beat out Tandy for the coveted role, performing brilliantly in the film and earning her second Academy Award.

Tandy’s Hollywood superstardom was still to come.

In Act I, Scene 5 of Streetcar, Blanche begins writing down in a little notebook colorful words said by other characters. “I must jot that down in my notebook,” she tells her rough brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski.

Blanche -- Ha-ha! I’m compiling a notebook of quaint little words and phrases I’ve picked up here.

Stanley -- You won’t pick up nothing here you ain’t heard before.

Blanche -- Can I count on that?

Stanley -- You can count on it up to five hundred.

The first phrase that Blanche records in her book is RUTTING HUNK. But here’s the surprise—at least it was a surprise to me. That term is not used to describe the musclebound Stanley Kowalski, played by the young and buff Marlon Brando. It is used by Stanley and Stella's upstairs neighbor Steve to describe his wife Eunice.

The word RUT can be applied to non-human mammals, either male or female. When used as a verb, RUTTING means to be in “a state or period of heightened sexual arousal.” It comes from the old French word rut, meaning “to roar.” When used as a noun, the phrase “in RUT” is synonymous with the phrase “in heat.”

Whereas the word HUNK today refers to an attractive man in admirable physical condition, the word HUNK historically referred to either a man or woman. It most likely was derived from the Flemish work hunke, meaning "a piece of food." HUNK is defined in the thesaurus found at Answers.com as “a person regarded as physically attractive: beauty, belle (used of a woman), lovely, stunner. Slang – babe, doll, knockout, looker, stud (used of a man).”

Going by this historical definition, not only was it appropriate for Tennessee Williams to have Steve refer to his wife Eunice as a RUTTING HUNK, it would also have been appropriate for Frank Loesser to have renamed his classic musical, which opened on Broadway only three years after Streetcar, Guys and Hunks.

Isn’t it interesting how the popularly perceived meanings of words change over time?

But one thing that doesn’t change is talent. Jessica Tandy may not have been selected to make the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire, but she did go on to make many other films, including Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds in 1953, The World According to Garp in 1982, and Cocoon in 1985. Finally, in 1989, Tandy starred as another memorable Southern woman, the octogenarian heroine of Driving Miss Daisy, earning her first Oscar at the age of 80.

Driving Miss Daisy will play at Barksdale Theatre at Hanover Tavern this fall, starring one of Richmond’s great actresses, Joy Williams.

--Posted by Hannah Miller

Word of the Week - HOCUS

Posted by Hannah Miller
This week’s theatre artist is WAYNE BRADY, born on June 2, 1972, which means he celebrated his 36th birthday last Monday. As opposed to last week’s stage luminary Charles Winninger, Wayne Brady is at the height of his career and well known to millions for his Emmy Award-winning TV performances on Whose Line Is It Anyway?. His Word of the Week is HOCUS.

Brady was born and raised in Orlando, and began his entertainment career when he was 16 as a “character” actor playing Tigger at Walt Disney World. For the next seven years he was very involved in central Florida theatres, performing in stage productions of A Chorus Line, Fences, A Raisin in the Sun, Jesus Christ Superstar and I’m Not Rappaport.

Success at the local level encouraged him to move on to a larger market. He spent a short time in Las Vegas and then relocated to Los Angeles in 1996, where he was almost instantly successful in both theatre and television. He performed at the prestigious Mark Taber Forum in its production of Blade to the Heat. He also was cast in guest starring roles in TV series including I’ll Fly Away (which also featured Joe Inscoe, now starring in Greater Tuna at Barksdale Hanover Tavern), Home Court and In the Heat of the Night.

In 1998 he hosted the VH-1 series Vinyl Justice, and the following year began his appearances on Whose Line Is It Anyway?. In 2001, he wrote, produced and starred in The Wayne Brady Show, a sketch comedy series that had a short run on daytime TV. This experience led to a more successful talk show by the same name that ran for two seasons and earned four Emmy Awards, two of which went to Brady himself for Outstanding Talk Show Host.

Brady’s national popularity grew based on his talent as an improv artist, singer, actor and comedian, but mainly based on his friendly, out going personality and down-to-earth charm. In 2004, Brady was spoofed on Comedy Central’s Chapelle’s Show for "not being black enough." Cast member Paul Mooney made fun of Brady, saying “White people love Wayne Brady because he makes Bryant Gumbel look like Malcolm X.” Soon thereafter, Brady spoofed his white bread image by appearing on the show as a drug-dealing psychopathic pimp.

Also in 2004, Brady made his Broadway debut, starring as Billy Flynn in the long-running musical hit, Chicago. In Act II of the Kander and Ebb classic, smooth and flashy lawyer Flynn sings his show-stopper, Razzle Dazzle, in an effort to convince Roxie that she has nothing to worry about at her murder trial. “It’s all a circus, kid,” says Flynn. “A three-ring circus. This trial—the whole world—all show business. But kid, you’re working with a star. The biggest!”

The lyrics to Razzle Dazzle include all kinds of fun words that vied for Word of the Week. Splendiferous, vociferous, flummox, finagle, bamboozle, unassailable and whammy. But after looking up the etymology of each of these fun-to-say words, I wound up settling on HOCUS, as in hocus pocus, because it has the most interesting history.

The two-word phrase "hocus pocus" seems to have entered the language a century or so before the word HOCUS as a stand alone. In medieval times, the Latin words spoken by priests in the Eucharist included “hoc est corpus meum,” meaning “this is my body.” The same words, in English, are used by my minister today at the beginning of Communion, quoting what Jesus said at the Last Supper as he broke the bread for his disciples.

According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, vagrant students who wondered Europe often earned their keep as jugglers or fools. Wanting to surround themselves with an air of the supernatural, they invented the nonsense phrase “hax pax max Deus adimax,” based loosely on “hoc est corpus meum.” They used this phrase to draw attention to their act as it was about to begin.

As the centuries progressed, the phrases “hax pax” and “hoc est corpus” combined and transformed into “hocus pocus.” In 1634, a book entitled Hocus Pocus Junior – The Anatomy of Legerdemain was published in England. The author was anonymous, but over time, he became known simply as Hocus Pocus, after the popular book’s title.

Soon the words “hocus pocus” became well known by the public at large, and were universally accepted to mean pretty much what they mean today:
· nonsense words or phrases used as a formula by quack conjurers, or
· a trick performed by a magician or juggler, or
· any type of foolishness used to disguise trickery or deception.

By the 19th century, the word HOCUS was appearing on its own as a verb in the popular work of Dickens and Thackeray, and even earlier in the works of less prominent writers. Then as now HOCUS means:
· to fool or decieve, or
· to add a drug to food or drink.

So, if you feel like HOCUSING someone, or believe that you yourself have been HOCUSED, thank Billy Flynn, Kander and Ebb, Wayne Brady and Word of the Week for providing a new verb to ably describe your action or state.

In 2006, Barksdale was honored when Wayne Brady showed up at Willow Lawn for a performance of The Full Monty. Turns out Wayne is close personal friends with Harrison White, the L A actor who lit up the stage every night in the role of Horse. Wayne flew into town to see his buddy Harrison in the show.

And that’s the truth, with no HOCUSING involved.

--Hannah Miller

Word of the Week - SKYLARKING

Posted by Hannah Miller
My spring plays at school and church are over; my exams and SAT subject tests are winding down. So now’s the time to get back to Word of the Week.

This week’s theatre artist is CHARLES WINNINGER, born 124 years ago yesterday, on May 26, 1884. His name may be largely forgotten today, but in theatre history, he’s someone worth noting. His Word of the Week is SKYLARKING.

From the mid-1920s until the mid-50s, Charles Winninger was one of America’s favorite character actors, especially in musical theatre, both on Broadway and in Hollywood. He began his career as a lovable vaudeville comic, and became a star in 1927 when he originated the role of Cap’n Andy in Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s landmark Broadway musical, Show Boat (pictured below and to the right). Winninger was so associated with that iconic role that he was asked to play the part again in the 1932 Broadway revival, the classic 1936 movie, and radio revivals in 1940 and 1944.

Show Boat is considered by many to be the first great American musical. Based on the 1926 best-selling novel by Edna Ferber, Show Boat was the first Broadway musical to tell a dramatic rather than comic story. This took place at a time when most musicals were actually revues and didn’t tell stories at all. Show Boat’s story was epic, taking place over several decades, and its depiction of racism and interracial marriage broke new ground for American musical theatre.

In addition to his star-making role in Show Boat, Winninger appeared in 13 other Broadway musicals. The first was The Wall Street Girl in 1912, which he also directed. Co-starring in The Wall Street Girl was another newcomer named Will Rogers.

Winninger appeared in numerous revues produced by George M. Cohan and Florenz Ziegfeld. He starred in the original cast of the 1925 Broadway hit No, No, Nanette, and starred two years later in the follow-up trifle Yes, Yes, Yvette (I’m not kidding). Luckily for Winninger, Yvette closed after only one month, allowing him to move on to Show Boat, which opened seven short weeks after Yvette went dark. Winninger’s last appearance on Broadway was the 1951 revival of another Kern / Hammerstein musical, Music in the Air.

His major role in the film version of Show Boat helped Winninger became a star in Hollywood, and he eventually appeared in 75 movies and TV shows during his long career. His national popularity grew with standout roles in classic movies such as Babes in Arms with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, Destry Rides Again with Jimmy Stewart and Marlene Dietrich, and State Fair (pictured to the left) with Jeanne Crain, Dana Andrews and Vivian Blaine. He also was a frequent TV guest star on I Love Lucy, playing Fred Mertz’s old vaudeville partner.

In the opening scene of Show Boat, Cap’n Andy introduces the show boat stars to the locals who have come down to the dock to see what’s going on. He encourages several of his performers to present short “samples” of their acts. When a fight breaks out between leading man Steve and a rowdy member of the crew, Cap’n Andy tries to convince the crowd that the fight is also only a “sample” of the exciting dramatics that will be performed on the show boat later that evening.
“Well, folks—that was jest a sample. The boys jest showed you a scene from one of our bills. That’s the way they are, folks, always SKYLARKING, always playing pranks. Jest one big happy family!”

A SKYLARK is a bird with brownish plumage. In Old World tradition, the feature that distinguished a SKYLARK from other larks was that a SKYLARK was known for its singing while in flight. In history, the French people referred to Joan of Arc as The Lark, and in 2006 Barksdale produced The Lark by Jean Anouilh, American adaptation by Lillian Hellman, starring Erin Thomas as Joan.

The French word for “lark” is “alouette.” In Old World tradition, a lark was a game bird. In the popular childhood song Alouette, a French housewife merrily sings to the recently bagged lark that will soon grace her dinner table, celebrating how she is about to pluck his head, and then, in subsequent verses, his neck, wings, back and tail.

Having said all that, the verb “to SKYLARK” has nothing to do with the bird.

Originally, SKYLARKING described the antics of young Navy men who climbed the masts and then slid down the rigging of their ships for fun. Since the ancient word “lac” means “to play,” and since these nautical acrobatics took place against a background of sky, the term “skylacing” (with a hard c) was coined to describe such airborne hijinks. Later, popular usage of the word changed it to SKYLARKING, which became a familiar term to most sailors. Over time, the term was generalized to include all types of playful and boisterous activity engaged in by the crew of a ship—even, it seems, a show boat.

Charles Winninger died in 1969 at the age of 84 in Palm Springs, CA. During his lifetime, he became one of the most beloved and “huggable” character actors in Broadway and Hollywood history. You can view a trailer for the movie musical Coney Island at http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi1522467097/, featuring Winninger singing the first few lines of everyone’s favorite party song, Who Threw the Overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder.

--Hannah Miller

Word of the Week - HALLOING

Posted by Hannah Miller
On Saturday March 22, the world wished a very happy 78th birthday to STEPHEN JOSHUA SONDHEIM, so this edition of Word of the Week is created in his honor. This week’s word is HALLOING.

Stephen Sondheim is one of the most respected composers and lyricists of the 20th century. He has won more Tony Awards than any other composer on Broadway. Sondheim developed his love for theatre and music after attending his first musical at the age of nine. He was hooked when the curtain rose and a piano was revealed.

Never fitting easily with his parents, Sondheim spent many afternoons learning from his “surrogate father,” Oscar Hammerstein II, of Rodgers and Hammerstein fame. The Hammersteins and the Sondheims lived near each other on the upper West Side of NYC. When Sondheim wrote By George, a musical for his high school, Hammerstein spent an entire day teaching him what he could do to make the musical better. In Sondheim’s words, he “learned more about songwriting and the musical theatre” in that one afternoon “than most people learn in a lifetime.” Sondheim continued his apprenticeship with Hammerstein until he left New York to attend Williams College in Massachusetts.

In 1957, Sondheim made history by writing the lyrics to West Side Story, and then to Gypsy in 1959. Though both of these shows brought him great success as a lyricist, Sondheim knew that what he really wanted to do was compose. Three years later, he received that opportunity and wrote both music and lyrics for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, another hit. His string of commercial success was broken in 1964 when he wrote Anyone Can Whistle, which lasted for only nine performances.

Sondheim went on, of course, to write other history-making hits such as Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures and Sweeney Todd, all in partnership with director Hal Prince. He was disappointed by the short run of their next show, Merrily We Roll Along. Following this commercial flop, he considered quitting theatre to write murder mysteries. Instead he switched directors, breaking with Prince and teaming with James Lapine (pictured with Sondheim to the left), who not only directed his subsequent musicals but also wrote the books. The first Sondheim/Lapine triumph was Sunday in the Park with George (my favorite musical), based on the artistic genius of French painter Georges Seurat, the father of Neo-impressionism. Sunday in the Park is one of only seven musicals to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Other Sondheim/Lapine musicals include Into the Woods (produced at Barksdale last summer), Passion, and Assassins.

I study voice with Amy Hruska, and one of the songs she has me singing currently is Green Finch and Linnet Bird from Sweeney Todd. Inspired by the beautiful warbling of caged birds, the character of Johanna sings:

Green finch and linnet bird,
Nightingale, blackbird,
How is it you sing?
Whence comes this melody constantly flowing?
Is it rejoicing or merely HALLOING?
Are you discussing or fussing or simply dreaming?
Are you crowing?
Are you screaming?

When I first sang the word HALLOING, I assumed it meant something like “saying hello.” But this is Sondheim, so of course there are other layers of meaning. In 16th and 17th century England, to hallo or halloo was to shout an exclamation in a hunt when the quarry was spotted. In Coriolanus, Act I, Scene 8, Shakespeare writes, “If I fly, Marcius, halloo me like a hare.” Considering the plot of Sweeney Todd, certainly the birds were halloing when they spotted Johanna—or perhaps when they spotted the Judge.

Our word hello, issued as a greeting rather than a shout, dates from the mid-19th century, and fell into popular usage when Thomas Edison proclaimed it the appropriate way to greet someone when answering a telephone. Alexander Graham Bell preferred the phrase Ahoy, as used on ships. But by 1889, telephone operators were known as hello-girls due to the public acceptance of the Edison-inspired hello.

Today, Sondheim continues to write, create and inspire young admirers like me. His 2003 original musical Bounce has failed thus far to receive a NYC production. But in 2007, he composed incidental music for the Public Theatre production of King Lear, directed by Lapine. In that same year he had a bit part as himself on The Simpsons episode Yokel Chords.

--Hannah Miller

Word of the Week - BANDY

Posted by Hannah Miller
Welcome to the third Word of the Week. From March 3 until 7, I had the chance to spend my Junior Work Week volunteering at Barksdale. It was a great experience being with the staff for five days. Phil, Brad and Janine (my supervisors) let me spend a full day and a half working on this column. Thanks to Barksdale’s accounting, marketing, development and costume staffs for letting me share their offices.

This week’s theatre artist is EDWARD ALBEE, and the word is BANDY.

Edward Albee is often named as America’s greatest living playwright. His credo is that each of his plays should “bring its audience some special sense of awareness of the times.” He celebrated his 80th birthday this past week on March 12.

Edward Albee was adopted into an affluent family and lived a pampered childhood as the grandson of a vaudeville producer. He did not have an admirable school record. After getting kicked out of a boarding school and a military academy for bad conduct, he finally found his place at Choate where he discovered his love for writing. He wrote many poems, short stories, a play and a novel, working sometimes for 18 hours a day.

After graduating from Choate, Albee left home and spent a decade studying at several universities, working a variety of jobs, and attending theatre as often as possible. During a state of depression, he wrote his first successful play, The Zoo Story. Originally rejected in New York for being too “experimental,” the play was recognized by reader after reader and finally premiered in Berlin in 1959.

Albee then went on to write other plays that proved to be controversial in many quarters. In the preface to the first published edition of The American Dream, which was written to bring attention to the shortcomings of American values, Albee wrote that the play was "a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen. Is it offensive? I certainly hope so; it was my intention to offend ... as well as amuse and entertain.”

In 1962, Albee created even more controversy with his most successful play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, for which he received a Drama Desk and Tony Award. Though he was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, the controversy kept him from winning.

In 1961, Albee helped found the Playwrights Unit. This project was meant to provide a jump-start to young, inexperienced playwrights, an opportunity that he did not have when he wrote The Zoo Story.

In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, when Nick tells George that he isn’t planning on working as a professor forever, George replies, “Well don’t let that get BANDIED about. The old man wouldn’t like it. Martha’s father expects loyalty and devotion out of his…staff.”

BANDY – (ˈban-dē) verb – to bat (as a ball) to and fro, or
to discuss back and forth in a casual or offhand manner—often used with about

The verb, to bandy, comes from the game of Bandy, which began as an open air, warm weather sport in which opposing teams try to take control of the ball and land it in their opponent’s goal. In Romeo and Juliet, Act III Scene 1, Shakespeare writes, “The Prince expressly hath forbidden Bandying in the Verona streets.”

Some time in the 18th century, the warm weather version of the sport became better known as Field Hockey, and the winter version, played on frozen lakes and fens, took over the name Bandy. Ice Hockey, played in a smaller rink and with a puck instead of a ball, was developed in Nova Scotia in the 19th century. But it was in the 20th century that the verb to bandy first fell into popular usage, usually associated with the back and forth tossing of ideas or gossip.

George makes a great deal of Nick’s athletic prowess throughout Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe? Perhaps that’s why Albee had George, a professor who obviously relishes language, use a quasi-athletic term to describe Nick's idle chitchat.

Edward Albee is continuing to work in the theatre today. In honor of his 80th birthday, several of his plays are being performed Off-Broadway, including The American Dream and The Sandbox. Both of these are directed by, who else? -- Albee himself!

--Hannah Miller

Postscript - I was in Lancaster PA last night watching Hannah Zold's TERRIFIC performance in All Shook Up at the Dutch Apple Dinner Theatre, when the character of Dennis used the word bunk, not once but several times, to describe the life philosophies espoused by the leading character Chad. Bunk, of course, is the shortened version of our first Word of the Week, buncombe.

Word of the Week - BILIOUS

Posted by Hannah Miller

Welcome to the second installment of Word of the Week on the Barksdale Buzz. Every seven days or so, I’ll discuss a theatre legend whose birthday was celebrated during the previous week, choose a word somehow connected to the selected artist, and define it.

This week’s theatre artist is REX HARRISON, and the word is BILIOUS.

Rex Harrison is a beloved English actor of the stage and screen, best known for creating the role of Henry Higgins in Lerner and Lowe’s My Fair Lady. My Fair Lady has been produced in Richmond by both Swift Creek Mill Theatre and TheatreVirginia. Before it changed its name from the Virginia Museum Theatre to TheatreVirginia, VMT also produced Pygmalion, the classic play by George Bernard Shaw on which My Fair Lady is based.

Rex Harrison was born in Liverpool, England as Reginald Carey Harrison on March 5, 1908. On Wednesday of this week, the world celebrated his centennial. As a child, Harrison changed his first name to Rex (Latin for “King”). After he made his stage debut in Liverpool at the age of 16 and his film debut at the age of 22, his career as an actor took off. He became a star after his 2-year run of French Without Tears in London, and continued acting until just a few weeks before his death in 1990.

In response to his multiple marriages (6 wives), the press dubbed him “Sexy Rexy,” a nickname with which he was none too happy.

In 1956, Harrison starred on stage in My Fair Lady in New York and London, garnering fame on both continents. His co-star was Julie Andrews.

In 1964, Harrison won the Oscar for best leading actor in a film when he reprised the role of Higgins in the screen adaptation of My Fair Lady, co-starring Audrey Hepburn. In 1967, he earned a new generation of fans playing the title role in Doctor Dolittle. Despite his reservations about performing in a children's movie, Harrison agreed to star in the film because of the involvement of lyricist Alan Jay Lerner. Harrison stuck with the movie even after Lerner pulled out due to frustration.

In addition to his popularity with audiences internationally, Harrison was well respected among professionals. The Oscar-winning actor Jose Ferrer explained, “I've been in this business a long time, and Rex Harrison is the only actor doing comedy that I can learn from.” Impressed by his talent, Noel Coward (an acclaimed playwright and comedic actor) named him “the best light comedian in the world—after me.”

In My Fair Lady, Harrison’s character (Henry Higgins) is an expert in phonetics. While visiting the open-air market in London’s Covent Garden (the first scene of the musical), Higgins encounters an uneducated flower girl named Eliza Doolittle. In the following lines, he arrogantly tells her how much he dislikes her way of speaking.

Eliza: I have a right to be here if I like, same as you!

Higgins: A woman who utters such disgusting, depressing noises has no right to be anywhere, no right to live! Remember, you’re a human with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech. Your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible. Don’t sit there crooning like a BILIOUS pigeon.

Shortly after this encounter, Higgins bets a fellow gentleman that he can transform Eliza from a “guttersnipe” into an elegant lady by teaching her proper diction. The rest of the musical tells the story of how he does just that, with questionable results.

BILIOUS - (ˈbil-yəs) adjective - of, relating to, or containing bile; or
peevish, irritable, cranky, extremely unpleasant or distasteful

BILIOUS comes from the Latin word bilis, which means anger or displeasure. Practitioners of ancient and medieval medicine believed that health was governed by the four vital fluids or humours: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Gasses rising up through the body from a supposed excess of yellow bile (the yellowish, greenish digestive fluid secreted by the liver) were believed to make a patient irritable. Consequently, BILIOUS now has two definitions: the first having to do with the fluid from the liver and the second having to do with a cranky dispostion. Today, of course, we know that bile has nothing to do with crabbiness.

Higgins’ analogy of Eliza “crooning like a bilious pigeon” conjures up the amusing and pathetic image of her chirping like a peevish pigeon, incapable of speaking English.

If I'm not mistaken, I believe I heard our word BILIOUS spoken onstage in Little Women, now playing at the Mill, to describe “Aunt March.”

In 1990, Harrison returned to Broadway in The Circle by Somerset Maugham, author of Barksdale's 2006 hit, The Constant Wife. In May Harrison fell ill and was replaced, temporarily it was believed, by his understudy. Three weeks later he died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 82, closing the show.

To read previous Word of the Week columns, click on “Word of the Week” in the labels below. Thanks for reading!

--Hannah Miller

Word of the Week - BUNCOMBE

Posted by Hannah Miller

Welcome to the first Word of the Week. My plan is to pick a playwright, actor or other well known theatre professional every week, someone whose birthday was celebrated during the preceding seven days. I’ll write a short bio of his or her life and accomplishments, select an interesting word from his or her work, define it, and put it out there for whatever it’s worth.

This week’s theatre artist is BEN HECHT (pictured above) and this week’s word is BUNCOMBE.

Ben Hecht was a great American playwright, an Oscar-winning screenwriter (mostly uncredited), and an internationally recognized Jewish activist before, during and after World War II. A character based on Ben Hecht was portrayed by Scott Wichmann in Barksdale’s recent comedy Moonlight and Magnolias. Moonlight is a somewhat fictionalized depiction of the emergency re-writing of the screenplay for Gone With the Wind.

Ben Hecht was born on February 28, 1894 in New York City. He moved at an early age to Racine, Wisconsin. He was a child prodigy violist and circus acrobat. He started his career as a writer in Chicago while still a teenager, working for the Journal and the Daily News. In 1923, he founded his own paper, the Chicago Literary Times, and lost all his money. During his Chicago years, he met and befriended Charles MacArthur who was working for the City News Bureau. In 1926, both men moved to NYC to pursue careers as writers of plays and novels.

In New York, Hecht received a telegram from another friend, Herman J. Mankiewicz, who had recently moved to Los Angeles. "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around." He meant millions of dollars. Lured by this promise of prosperity, Hecht moved to L A and began a lucrative career as a screenwriter.

Dividing his career between Hollywood and New York, Hecht co-authored three Broadway plays with MacArthur: The Front Page (1928), Twentieth Century (1932) and Ladies and Gentlemen (1939). The first two are American classics. Barksdale produced The Front Page at Hanover Tavern in 1974, and both Swift Creek Mill and the Henrico Theatre Company have produced the musical comedy On the Twentieth Century, based on the Hecht/MacArthur play.

In his autobiography, A Child of the Century, Hecht wrote, “The American of 1953 is a cliché-strangled citizen whose like was never before in the Republic. Compared to the pre-movieized American of 1910-1920, he is an enfeebled intellect. For forty years the movies have drummed away on the American character. They have fed it naïveté and BUNCOMBE in doses never before administered to any people. They have slapped into the American mind more human misinformation in one evening than the Dark Ages could muster in a decade."

BUNCOMBE – (bŭng'kəm) noun – empty or insincere talk, claptrap, hogwash, nonsense

The word originated during the debate in the U S Congress regarding the Missouri Compromise, circa 1820. Felix Walker, an old and fading moutaineer representing Buncombe County, N C, rose to speak after the question had been called. With numerous congressmen begging him to sit down and be quiet, he persisted in delivering a lengthy lecture that had nothing to do with whether Missouri should be admitted to the United States as a slave state or a free state. In his ramblings, he said he felt compelled to “make a speech for Buncombe,” despite having nothing to add to the debate. Today, BUNCOMBE is frequently shortened to BUNKUM or BUNK.

Despite earning his fortune from the movies, Hecht had little respect for American filmmaking. He thought most movies were as meaningless as Felix Walker’s Congressional ramblings, nothing but a load of BUNCOMBE.

Hecht died of a heart attack at the age of 70 on April 19, 1964, while working on the script for the first movie version of Casino Royale, a “pointless” satire (according to critics of the day) in which the character of James Bond was played by multiple actors including David Niven and Peter Sellers. It sounds like exactly the kind of movie that inspired Hecht's grumblings.

Nonetheless, Hecht will go down in theatre history as co-author of two classic American comedies, The Front Page and Twentieth Century.

--Hannah Miller