The Susan Gurman Agency, LLC

Fun With Khrushchev in ’50s Moscow

sga — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 18:53:54 +0000

Check out IRON CURTAIN’s review in the NYTimes!

Interview with Curt Columbus…

sga — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 18:41:27 +0000

“…As a Chekhov translator you could spend your whole life waiting for a person to have that kind of visceral response to Chekhov and never see it happen. I felt really blessed to be in the room to watch a young person hear Chekhov in a way that made her leap to her feet.”
-Curt Columbus, I AM THEATRE

Breast in Show…

sga — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 06:05:13 +0000

The first musical about breast cancer, Breast In Show, written by Lisa Hayes, directed by Kathryn Chase Bryer with music and lyrics by Joan Cushing, began two ‘preview’ performances on Friday, October 14, 2011, and has one remaining performance tonight, October 15th at 8 PM at The Jewish Community Center in Rockville, MD.

Breast in Show explores the lives of five patients who build strength and create lasting friendships even though, beyond their diagnoses, they have nothing else in common.

LATW’s Completeness to Star Jason Ritter and Mandy Siegfried

sga — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 18:33:13 +0000

Playbill.com
By Adam Hetrick
05 Oct 2011

Jason Ritter and Mandy Siegfried will co-star in the L.A. Theatre Works production of Itamar Moses’ science-filled love story Completeness, which will get its theatrical software up and running Oct. 20.

The play recently enjoyed its New York premiere at Primary Stages, which concluded Sept. 25 Off-Broadway. Completeness had its world premiere at the South Coast Repertory earlier this year.

Stephen Sachs will direct the six-performance run, which will continue through Oct. 23 at UCLA’s James Bridges Theater. Ritter (“Parenthood”) and Mandy Siegfried (“Gray’s Anatomy”) are the first cast members announced. Susan A. Loewenberg produces the run.

‘Breakup Notebook’: Musical resonates with the lonesome of all

sga — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 14:50:06 +0000

Published: Wednesday, September 14, 2011
By Peter Filichia/For The Star-Ledger

Everyone who’s ever been dumped — and doesn’t that include all of us? — is going to adore “The Breakup Notebook.”

The new musical at ReVision Theatre in Asbury Park is a complete triumph. Librettist Patricia Cotter and songwriter Lori Scarlett admit in their opening number that their story is all “what you’ve heard before.” Nevertheless, they have dealt with the subject of shattered relationships in a fresh, exciting way.

‘Ten’ Years Later

sga — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 14:42:58 +0000

By Nancy Colasurdo
Published September 09, 2011 | FOXBusiness

I could share, as I have before, something deeply reverential and reflective about what transpired for me on Sept. 11, 2001, and in the 10 years since. Or I could go another way and quote Flora, a 9/11 widow, about why she doesn’t like to attend the memorials of that day:

“When I do go to those things, people are just so incessantly respectful, ya know? Even people’s voices — however sweet they mean to be — just the tone is like nails on a blackboard. They talk to everyone like they’re 90 years old: ‘Oh, yes, yes, dear, we have a special section for you all.’ I mean seriously: ugh … Solemnity has its limits …”

Incessantly respectful? Did she just say that?

“It’s not what you think she’ll say,” playwright/director Charles Evered says in our recent interview.

‘Bakersfield Mist’ clever portrait of class differences

sga — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 02:29:31 +0000

By DEBBIE FORMAN

CONTRIBUTING WRITER

August 16, 2011

WELLFLEET — Maude Gutman’s style of art includes pictures of clowns with bulbous red noses, a plastic Santa and a bookcase full of kitsch she’s picked up at flea markets and thrift shops. But when she decides one day to buy an “ugly” painting as a gag gift, she discovers it actually could be a Jackson Pollock. So into her trailer comes an art expert from New York who is there to determine the painting’s authenticity.

And that is when the fun, along with some fiery conflict, begins in Stephen Sachs’ clever, witty and even poignant “Bakersfield Mist.”

PHOTO CALL: Freud’s Last Session Celebrates One-Year Anniversary

sga — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 23:39:39 +0000

Playbill.com
By Matthew Blank
26 Jul 2011

FREUD’S LAST SESSION celebrated its one-year anniversary July 22. The company celebrated with a special cake featuring a production photo recreated with various flavors of icing. Additionally, playwright Mark St. Germain, cast and producers hosted an onstage post-performance discussion.

‘BEST OF ENEMIES’ Clash over Civil Rights

sga — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:53:30 +0000

By Larry Murray
Berkshire On Stage

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — Let there be no doubt that “The Best of Enemies” with Aisha Hinds and John Bedford Lloyd is one of the most important historical plays about America to ever reach the stage. It is also the finest drama I have ever seen at Barrington Stage. It is a modern-day parable of the civil rights movement of the 1970s that expands dry, historical fact into a riveting tale of two polar opposites clashing over how to integrate the schools of Durham, N.C.

To capture the sweep and detail of the battle for black rights in the South of 40 years ago is no easy task. Playwright Mark St. Germain contrasts the role that C.P. Ellis had promoting white supremacy with Ann Atwater, a homespun black activist, who is a rare voice in the community, speaking up for simple justice and equal education. The stage treatment for this explosive confrontation was inspired by Osha Gray Davidson’s book of the same name, “The Best of Enemies.”

Barrington’s ‘Best of Enemies’ captures change we can believe in

sga — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 18:45:42 +0000

By Michael Eck Special to the Times Union
Published 12:01 a.m., Friday, July 29, 2011

Fact makes fiction more powerful. That’s certainly the case with the world premiere of Mark St. Germain‘s “The Best of Enemies,” now on the boards at Barrington Stage Company.

The play — based on the book by Osha Gray Davidson — is the story of an unlikely friendship that develops between an Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan and a civil rights activist in Durham, N.C., in the 1970s.