A sad, loving farewell to the great playwright, librettist and director Arthur Laurents, who died in his sleep today at the age of 93. Mr. Laurents was best known for writing Gypsy (1959), The Way We Were (1973), and of course the incomparable West Side Story (1959), about which this author has nothing to say, except that without West Side Story the world as she knows and loves it would cease to exist.

He will be missed.

via  @SteveSilberman

Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.

RIP Arthur Laurents, Writer of West Side Story is a post from: Open Culture

We giddily present “Jersey Shore” Gone Wilde, as performed by the cast of The Importance of Being Earnest, a production currently being staged by the Roundabout Theatre Company in New York City.

Go ahead and catch this inspired mashup of Victorian comedy and MTV “reality” at Playbill Video in 5 parts … unless you have work to do this afternoon.

via @MaudNewton

Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly

“Jersey Shore” in the Style of Oscar Wilde is a post from: Open Culture

Here’s the trailer for the play Frankenstein, which opens in London at the National Theater this Thursday. Two intriguing points: 1.) This production is helmed by Danny Boyle, the Oscar-winning director behind Slumdog Milionaire, 127 Hours, and the appropriately terrifying zombie movie 28 Days Later. 2.) Boyle’s Frankenstein is part of the National Theater Live program – now in its second season – and will be simulcast live in hundreds of movie theaters all over the world. There are 12 participating venues in California alone – click here to find out if there’s one near you.

For a pre-screening refresher, you can download Mary Shelley’s classic novel for free at Project Gutenberg, or as a free audiobook at LibriVox. And whatever you do, don’t miss this video of the gorgeous 1934 illustrated edition, with woodcuts by the American artist Lynd Ward.

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Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.

Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein Live at a Cinema Near You is a post from: Open Culture

Sophocles and Aeschylus may be spinning in their graves. Or, who knows, they may be taking some delight in this bizarre twist on the Oedipus myth. Running eight minutes, Jason Wishnow’s 2004 film puts vegetables in the starring roles. One of the first stop-motion films shot with a digital still camera, Oedipus took two years to make with a volunteer staff of 100. But the hard work paid off. The film has since been screened at 70+ film festivals and was eventually acquired by the Sundance Channel. Separate videos show you the behind-the-scenes making of the film, plus the storyboards used during production.

via Curiosity Counts

Oedipus … Starring Vegetables is a post from: Open Culture

This week, the Harry Ransom Center at UT-Austin acquired the archives of Spalding Gray (1941-2004), the actor and playwright most well known for his performance piece “Swimming to Cambodia” (clip here). According to The New York Times, the archive spans some 40 years and features performance notebooks (see image above), diaries, and tapes of Gray’s performances, including an early version of “Swimming to Cambodia” recorded in 1983, and a clip from “Life Interrupted,” the monologue Gray was working on when he died in 2004. Gray’s materials will reside alongside the papers of David Mamet, Norman Mailer, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and others.

 The NYTimes has the full story here.

Spalding Gray Archives Head to the University of Texas is a post from: Open Culture

This fall, Paul Meier, a theatre professor at the University of Kansas, is working with students to stage the first-ever American rendition of a Shakespeare play – A Midsummer Night’s Dream – in its original pronunciation. As The History Blog writes, there have only been “three other productions of original pronunciation (OP) Shakespeare before this one, 2 at The Globe theater in London, and 1 at Cambridge in the 1950s.” But this difficult project became possible when Meier and his students started working with David Crystal, a linguistics scholar who wrote Pronouncing Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press) in 2005. Prior to the KU production, Crystal consulted on a production of Romeo and Juliet at the Globe theatre on London’s South Bank (mentioned above), and you can listen to audio clips taken from that English performance right here.

via Neatorama and Kottke

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Shakespeare in the Original Voice is a post from: Open Culture

It’s getting hard to dismiss the cultural influence of Lady Gaga, especially when you see the Gaga phenomenon inspiring György Ligeti’s satirical “anti-anti-opera” Le Grand Macabre staged at The New York Philharmonic this summer. In this clip, we encounter Gaga-inspired costumes and performance as we watch Gepopo, chief of the secret service, telling Prince Go Go about the panic breaking out in the streets…

On a related note, don’t miss Christopher Walken reading Gaga’s “Poker Face”.

Gaga-Inspired Opera is a post from: Open Culture

The CBS Radio Workshop was an “experimental dramatic radio anthology series” that aired between 1956 and 1957. And it premiered with a two-part adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s now classic 1932 novel, Brave New World. Huxley himself introduced and narrated the program, and now this classic radio drama has resurfaced online. You can listen to Part 1 here and Part 2 here, or find the mp3s housed in our collection of Free Audio Books.

Note: Looking for an easy way to download Brave New World, or any other audio book, for free? Just head over to Audible.com and register for a 14-day free trial. You can download any audiobook for free. Then, when the trial is over, you can continue your Audible subscription (as I did), or cancel it, and still keep the audio book. The choice is entirely yours.

Download Brave New World for Free: Read by Aldous Huxley is a post from: Open Culture

I have been afraid for you sometimes, because success sings a deadly lullaby to most people. Success is a real and subtle whore, who would like nothing better than to catch you sleeping and bite your cock off. You have been as brave as anybody I’ve known, and it is comforting to think about it. You probably don’t think of yourself as brave because nobody who really has courage does, but I know you are and I get food from that.

This passage echoes Williams’ own views on success, especially his beautiful (and ironically inspiring) essay On a Streetcar Named Success, written eight years earlier:

It is never altogether too late, unless you embrace the Bitch Goddess, as William James called her, with both arms and find in her smothering caresses exactly what the homesick little boy in you always wanted, absolute protection and utter effortlessness. Security is a kind of death, I think, and it can come to you in a storm of royalty checks beside a kidney-shaped pool in Beverly Hills or anywhere at all that is removed from the conditions that made you an artist, if that’s what you are or were intended to be. Ask anyone who has experienced the kind of success I am talking about–What good is it? Perhaps to get an honest answer you will have to give him a shot of truth-serum but the word he will finally groan is unprintable in genteel publications.

You’ll find the rest of Brando’s letter (including an image of the original) — which includes reflections on actors Anna Magnani and Burt Lancaster — here.

Wes Alwan lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he works as a writer and researcher and attends the Institute for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture. He also participates in The Partially Examined Life, a podcast consisting of informal discussions about philosophical texts by three philosophy graduate school dropouts.

Marlon Brando Opens Up to Tennessee Williams is a post from: Open Culture

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je0gTnheVe4

March 15th. It translates to the Ides of March on the Roman Calendar. And it’s the date when Julius Caesar was famously assassinated in 44 B.C. To mark the occasion (today is the Ides of March), we bring you a dramatic, six-minute clip of the assassination scene from the film version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz in 1953. The scene features Louis Calhern as Caesar, John Gielgud as Cassius and James Mason as Brutus.  The film also stars Marlon Brando as Mark Antony, but we only get a fleeting glimpse of him in this scene as the plotters contrive to separate him from Caesar.

Note: You can download a free audio version of Shakespeare’s play thanks to Librivox, or get a free etext here. And if you have an iPhone, feel free to download a free app that includes all of Shakespeare plays.

Mike, one of our faithful readers, gets all of the cred for this one! Many thanks.

Julius Caesar Gets Clipped 2054 Years Ago Today is a post from: Open Culture