Tammy Ryan born and raised in Astoria, Queens, left to go to college, and, despite having New York roots, officially became a #PLONY when she wrote her first play as a theater major at the University at Buffalo (UB) and had it produced in the back room of Nietzsche’s bar…
If you were in school for theater, what made you write a play?
I wasn’t being cast in the plays they were doing, which were restoration comedies and I had a thick New York accent and a lisp and something of an attitude. Plus, I’d never even seen a play before I went to college. I came from this big dysfunctional Irish American family and my uncle was an actor, and it seemed like an exotic life so I kind of latched onto that. I lived in New York City; you’d think we would have gone to plays. My mother was a Girl Scout leader, and we went to the Statue of Liberty and Central Park, but not plays.
Read the full interview from Donna Hoke’s blog here.
Lamentably, however, much of the acclaim that has and will accrue to Hamilton brands it as one of the first pieces of theatre to successfully incorporate hip-hop elements and sensibilities. That’s like someone thinking they’ve discovered rap music after hearing Eminem’s song “Stan” (coincidentally, and arguably, another white narrative). This is unfortunate; it not only ignores the 20-plus year legacy of hip-hop theatre in the U.S.—Idris Goodwin, Eisa Davis, Psalmayne 24, Hip-Hop Theatre Junction, Teo Castellanos, Will Power, Universes, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, etc. It also, more disturbingly, ignores LMM’s own In The Heights, a hip-hop-infused musical with a contemporary story about Latinos in a changing neighborhood that ran on Broadway for 3 years, won 4 Tonys and recouped its money after just 10 months. Yet we’re still in a cultural landscape where In The Heights and other hip-hop generation stories will never be celebrated to the extent that Hamilton will be, simply by virtue of who the show is about.
-April 23, 2015 – Excerpt from a piece by Danny Hoch for American Theatre. Read it all here.
Prospect Theater Company, under the leadership of Cara Reichel, Producing Artistic Director and Melissa Huber, Managing Director, will present a concert staging of Evergreen, a family friendly musical for the holidays at The TimesCenter (242 W 41st Street), with performances Friday, December 18 at 7pm and Saturday, December 19 at 2pm and 6pm.
The concert will feature the Obie Award-winning Gretchen Cryer (I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It On the Road), Tony Award nominee and Drama Desk Award winner Melissa Errico (Amour), and Orville Mendoza (Peter and the Starcatcher), alongside Pace University students Hillary Fisherand Joe Ottavi-Perez in the leading roles of Maya and Joshi.
The cast also features an ensemble of youth performers ages 8 to 15, including Abbie Anderson, Anabella Brizuela, Victoria Csatay, Ciela Elliott, Maddox Elliot, Virginia Franks, Andre Gulick, Gabrielle-Marie Kaufman, Irena Kogarova, Joy Kate Lawson, Jibreel Mawbry, Carys Mesinai, McKenzie Mullahey, Lily Peterson, Violet Prete, Nolan Shaffer, Brigit Eileen Tejada,Alexa Valentino, and Thomas Vaethroeder.
Recommended for ages six and up, Evergreen is an original (one act, 75-minute) holiday musical by Peter Mills and Cara Reichel, that follows Maya, a headstrong girl on a fantastic adventure to find the Earth’s last living evergreens.
Clockwise from top left, Queen Latifah, Mary J. Blige, Uzo Aduba and Ne-Yo in “The Wiz,” on Thursday on NBC.
Perched atop a spiky chariot, Mary J. Blige rolled onto a set here and began making demands. “What’s that there?” she yelled, pointing to an invisible blotch. Underlings scurried to clean up. “Worrrk!” she bellowed.
Ms. Blige, the enduring R&B star, was rehearsing her part as Evillene, the Wicked Witch of the West, in “The Wiz,” the enduring musical, which NBC will broadcast live on Thursday night at 8, Eastern time. As with its live-broadcast predecessors “The Sound of Music” and “Peter Pan,” the cast is a mix of Broadway, television and film veterans, alongside music stars like Queen Latifah as the Wiz, and Ne-Yo as the Tin Man. There will be spectacle, too, in the form of Cirque du Soleil acrobats.
Unlike the audiences of the previous shows, Thursday’s viewers may get a chance to see this one again, off screen: “The Wiz” is already scheduled for a Broadway run next year, with much of the same design, costuming and choreography, including the Cirque performers. For the actors, then, it amounts to a live televised tryout.
Ms. Blige has been cramming. In a break from rehearsals last week, she talked about plumbing her “nasty, dark side” and showed off her crimson-tipped nails, which she has been growing long to feel witchy. She lobbied to play Evillene, she said, because the character’s number “Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News” is one of her favorites.
“My sister and I were singing this song recently, before I even got the part, just playing around with it,” she said. “Something about that ‘no bad news’ part relates to me now as a businesswoman: I don’t want to hear it. I want you to make it happen.”
For a while, though, it looked as if a full-fledged new “Wiz” might never happen.
An urban adaptation of “The Wizard of Oz,” “The Wiz” won seven Tonys after it opened in 1975, a milestone for a show with an all-black cast, and introduced the song “Home,” sung by Stephanie Mills, as a radio hit. It became a cultural touchstone, especially for African-American audiences, who grew up on the over-the-top 1978 film version starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, a pricey critical flop that went on to have a devoted following. The show is also a school theater staple.
But a 1984 Broadway revival was short-lived. And a starry Encores! concert production in 2009 at City Center that featured members of the creative team now behind “Hamilton” generated tepid reviewsthat seemed only to remind critics of the show’s flaws.
Read the full article from the New York Timeshere.
My entry point into theater was cast recordings, when I was a kid that was all I listened to (let’s be honest, they’re still basically all I listen to…I listen to cast recordings at the gym). I had a cassette tape when I was very young of songs for kids from Broadway shows?—?“Consider Yourself,” “Getting to Know You,” “I’d Do Anything”?—?that I listened to every night before I went to bed. I memorized the songs. My parents noticed this and they also were musical fans, and so they took me to a variety of local and regional productions. My first really clear memory of seeing a piece of theater is seeing the SECRET GARDEN tour in Chicago (I’m from Gary, Indiana…). My mom and I had watched the number from the show on the Tonys and we had been listening to the tape, and I think that was the first major touring show I got to go to. I remember sitting in the front of the balcony, peering over the edge and watching Mary sing and thinking that could be me, I need to be a part of that.
When did you recognize you were a writer? Or when did you start writing?
I used to write stories when I was in elementary school and everyone would tell me I was a writer, and I would say, “yeah, yeah, I want to be a painter.” And then, in middle school I got picked to write a column for the local newspaper and I HATED it, and everyone said, “oh you’re such a good writer, you should be a writer,” and I said, “No way. I’m never going to be a writer, that’s the last thing I ever want to be after this.” But, there was a musical theater writing class in my high school that was a big deal, where you got to take a trip to New York (from Indiana), so I did that and I loved it, but I still wasn’t going to be a writer, I wanted to be an actor. When I got to college, Brown had this program where students could write musicals for the main stage and I did that with my friends and it started to creep into my mind that MAYBE if I could write musicals, that wouldn’t be so bad. But I was still in denial about being a writer. My playwriting teachers were amazing, and very encouraging, but I don’t think I really accepted that I was a writer and that that was going to be the thing that I was going to do until after I graduated from the Musical Theatre Writing grad program at NYU. I still don’t really love the label, I never want to be one thing, I want to do all kinds of things, so now I say I’m a writer AND…
What was your first experience with Theater?