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The Gabriel Barre Season Broadway USA! - New York - Spring 2003 Gabriel Barre - Guest Artistic Director Steven Yuhasz - Producing Director |
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Dorian Gray Book/Lyrics/Music by Barry Gordon and Andrew Steven Ross A musical updating of Oscar Wilde's great novel referencing the great Faustian bargain. Starting in the 1960s, we rocket through thirty years of adventures and mis-adventures of Dorian Gray, rock star. |
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City of Dreams Music by Joseph Zellnik. Book/Lyrics by David Zellnik City of Dreams tells the passionate, dark love story of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary and his 16-year old mistress Mary Vetsera, culminating in their double suicide in 1889. It is also the intimate family drama of Rudolf and his parents - a progressive son's conflict with his reactionary father (long-reigning Emperor Franz Josef), a sensitive son's almost romantic relationship with his mother (half-mad, still beautiful, Empress Elizabeth.) Set against this story, fittingly enough, is young Sigmund Freud - trying to analyze the royal family (in 1889 he is an increasingly unemployable doctor due to his "radical" ideas) - and young Gustav Klimt (in 1889 a realistic society portraitist.) Like their hero Rudolf, they feel young and unrecognized, kept down by Vienna's repressive status quo. And in the end, though Rudolf's death shocks them, it also pushes Freud towards his understanding of the competition inherent in all father and son relationships, and Klimt's growing belief of the interconnectedness between desire and death. |
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Dora: fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria Music/Book/Lyrics by Larry Bortniker Dora is an adaptation of Sigmund Freud's famous case history of a 17-year-old girl with a hysterical cough. The play recreates Dora's psychoanalytic sessions with Freud. It is set primarily in his office in Vienna, from October through New Year's Eve, 1900. For the most part, Dora is on the couch, Freud is in his chair, and the remaining characters appear in her memory and fantasy. Dora's father finds her suicide note one night. She has threatened to kill herself unless he breaks off relations with his mistress, Frau K. He refuses; the girl faints. He brings her to Freud, against her will. Grudgingly, Dora begins her psychoanalysis. Dora tells Freud of her father's long-standing affair with Frau K and of Herr K's repeated sexual advances toward her. The K's had been long-time family friends until Herr K propositioned Dora during an outing at Capo di Lago a year earlier. Horrified, Dora told her father, who refused to believe her. She tells Freud that her father has always traded her off to Herr K so as to insure the continuation of his affair with Frau K. Dora claims that she is their victim, and Freud accuses her of being her own victim and points to her own sexual complicity with Herr and Frau K. This is the essence of their conflict. In detective-story style, Freud analyzes her relationships with her father, mother, Frau K and Herr K as he uncovers the cause of her various psychosomatic ailments. They explore, much to Dora's anxiety, her Oedipal conflicts, her sexual desire for Herr K, her homosexual love for Frau K, and the significance of a reoccurring dream. There are nine characters in the cast: Freud, Dora, her parents, Herr and Frau K, and Three Hysterical Women — ex-analysands of Freud who serve as the play's not-quite-cured hysterical chorus and your hostesses for the evening. |
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"What's The Story?" — A Note About Musicals in America "What's the story?" "What's it about?" "What happens?" These are the questions we ask if we've heard about a good movie or book or play or musical...it always comes down to that! Stories have been a part of human contact and communication since the beginning of man-they are the blood of our beings and offspring of our ideas. They are how our history is recorded and changed. How our culture is transcribed and passed on. Like every society and civilization before us, our history and culture are being passed down and communicated in our art. The popular American musical grew from the teeming streets of the lower east side in the early 1900s in New York City-from immigrants who expressed in the movies and musicals they wrote and produced what they dreamed and what they experienced. They have grown with our society and are a rich part of the fabric that defines us. Unlike other countries, however, America contributes comparatively little towards developing and maintaining its arts and its artistic institutions. More and more, organizations that sponsor new work and support young and developing writers are forced to rely on generous corporate and private funding to sustain themselves. In addition, the situation in the commercial theatre has changed drastically too. Because of a combination of rising costs and a dwindling number of producers with guts, resources, vision, and know-how, productions make it to Broadway only with the help of twenty to fifty key investors now awarded with producer status and often having no real leading influence. These producers are inexperienced and understandably squeamish about taking unnecessary risks-hence the number of revivals and retreads over the last two years. What one realizes, looking at the situation carefully, is that the real commercial "payoff," the immense commercial potential of a musical theatre piece can only be realized now, regardless of how experienced or well-know the authors, after development in a non-profit environment. The process of creation is different for everyone, but I don't think that any artist would say that it's easy. Without the valuable opportunities like the ones that BroadwayUSA! and the National Musical Theater Network provides, there would be no air for these projects to breathe. No avenue or place to fail, get up, and fail again. These writers and composers are not only the creators of our next big musical hits, providing millions of dollars of revenue for countless institutions and entities as well as providing jobs for hundreds of thousands of people, but they are also the ones who will rise up and speak when others won't, and pass down our lives, history, art, and culture with their stories. " — Gabriel Barre |