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Post by sonnygirl on Sept 13, 2011 3:12:05 GMT -5
Oh my Em, Randy looks Hot in the leather, the Henley, the jeans, etc. Oh yes he does look hot... I like his hair; BTW: nice comparison cwazy sierra could be true... Hmmm...too bad I'm not in the US...so I have to wait until someone nice will upload the episode; I want to see Gale!! but thanks cwazyfor the update about the show. I'm still excited and I can hardly wait!! so quick hair check pic 1 qaf s5 and ---it's a little bit darker...you were right Attachments:
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emelwhy
Gyllenhaalic Wannabe
Posts: 805
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Post by emelwhy on Sept 13, 2011 8:22:15 GMT -5
his hair has been modified since this photo was taken (probably during dress rehearsal)
Saturday night it was curly only on the ends in the back . Cute none the less. I'm thinking it is not a perm and that they might style it for each performance
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emelwhy
Gyllenhaalic Wannabe
Posts: 805
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Post by emelwhy on Sept 13, 2011 9:19:18 GMT -5
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olivia29
Jake Fan
You are my sunshine
Posts: 301
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Post by olivia29 on Sept 13, 2011 9:58:18 GMT -5
Absolutely love Randy in the leather and with the curled hair
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Post by liberty on Sept 13, 2011 14:03:36 GMT -5
Randy looks great! Gale is not on Twitter, but his dad is. There is a family resemblance. Guess, the time we must worry about his hair is limited. twitter.com/#!/galeharoldjr
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Post by gale1969 on Sept 13, 2011 14:34:53 GMT -5
From twitter: HQ caps of Gale as Charles in Secret Circle Pilot (SPOILERS!): t.co/CkNvB9k
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Post by QAFnewbie on Sept 13, 2011 17:12:25 GMT -5
Another review of HoA: This time mentioning Randy's performance But Tim ( Randy Harrison), who plays the rent-boy within “Caliban’s Day,” has the most thematically important role. He articulates how biography whitewashes sex workers like himself, and Tim (the actor) shows the most enthusiasm over getting inside his character Brightest Young Things www.brightestyoungthings.com/articles/play-dc-the-habit-of-art-the-studio-theatre.htm
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Post by grapesmugglers on Sept 13, 2011 19:25:23 GMT -5
165 HQ screen caps of The Secret Circle pilotAll-Gale & just-Gale: wp.me/p1dTEf-4bQ
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Post by triolla on Sept 13, 2011 22:48:10 GMT -5
Thanks the pictures! What kind of evil, witch his first scene. And in all moments veeeeeeeery cool. Based on the sound wrote out the child song.
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Post by sonnygirl on Sept 14, 2011 3:20:15 GMT -5
the screen caps are amazing grapesmugglers thank you so much!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
@qafnewbie thanks for the review. everyone who is going to see Randy in this play enjoy it and keep us informed!! ;D
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emelwhy
Gyllenhaalic Wannabe
Posts: 805
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Post by emelwhy on Sept 14, 2011 12:33:26 GMT -5
New review of the Habit of Art from "Drama Urge" The Habit of Art Can We Know the Dancer from the Dance?
Alan Bennett's homage to theater The Habit of Art (2009), now at the Studio Theatre (to 10/16), is a privileged and comical look at the rehearsal process from the unique to the mundane. Constructed around not one but two plays, this backstage comedy - English style "darlings"! - shows us the many small, petty steps required to transform an inspiration into a work of art. Think of it as puzzle, say a What's Wrong with This Picture Game? - where there are a dozen differences between the original and the altered copy - and you'll have an idea of what Habit in toto is about (as, say, The Bard's Rude Mechanicals in The Midsummer's Night's Dream). Only you won't have to search too hard: the play-within-a-play, here entitled Caliban's Day, is a really, really bad one - miscast, poorly acted, ill-conceived, edited to the point of incoherence, obscene, and trite. But you get the point!
Directed by David Muse with finesse and wit, Habit ostensibly concerns two historical figures, poet W.H. Auden (Ted van Griethuysen) and composer Benjamin Britten (Paxton Whitehead) and an imagined meeting of the two at the end of their lives. The talkative Auden, who was reportedly dissatisfied with the ending of The Tempest, hovers meta-critically over Caliban like an authorial voice. The play, an allusion to Shakespeare's savage, is the ultimate paean to a bottom-up method of historiography, namely those anonymous foot servants of the great who didn't make the cut.
A few comments on the genesis of the play. Mr. Bennett's script, which feels like a pre-emptive strike against his own future chroniclers, was assembled from a pair of biographies on Auden and Britten written by one of the play's real-life characters, Humphrey Carpenter (Cameron Folmar), and culled from their diaries. As such, it takes a frank and personal look at the lives of these two creative artists. So the picture that emerges is admittedly skewed. Sensational, yes - Auden lived more or less openly as a homosexual while Britten was discrete and somewhat of a pedophile - but prosaic as well, both following their muse to the exclusion of all else. Before you can get to the interesting part on their artistic processes and respective views on their art, you're forced to hear lots (and lots) about fellatio, male prostitution ("rent boys"), and male genitalia.
Next to sexuality, nothing seems to confound the public more than the idea that flawed people can do good work. This shouldn't be strange since the nature of creativity functions like an addiction, or habit if you will, excluding relationships and the "angels of our better nature." In the pursuit of excellence, many fall by the wayside, masters and associates alike. Habit also points out another disconnect: while we gladly accept these artistic gifts, we continue to dig for the moral lapses that would seemingly render them tainted.
Habit, as Mr. Bennett tells us in an introduction to the work, was intended to explore both characters' psyches late in life and also as a means of recycling some material cut from his earlier plays. So what starts out as a memory play or plays, with the deck shuffled for time and space, begins retrospectively encumbered. What are the stakes and why two points of view? All the questions the playwright received from the original director, Nicholas Hytner, got him to superimpose a realistic framework around the main story which now becomes a play-within-a-play about the rehearsal of an Auden riff on The Tempest. This is a burden that Mr. Muse and his excellent cast work hard to carry off, succeeding more often than not.
But it's the backstage antics that give the play traction as power struggles, temper tantrums, and vanity vie to unsettle the process. (The plot is further complicated by the introduction of the theme of the subplay: the completion of an opera based on Thomas Mann's short story "Death in Venice" and the working cast starts to think it might be "Death in London" for them!)
As the play begins, a motley assortment of actors takes the stage to begin the day's rehearsal, stepping around James Noone's cramped set which looks like a literary flophouse (circa 1972), with books, albums, and bottles piled up (or strewn) everywhere. The director, it turns out, has been called out of town and left the show in the hands of the stage manager (Margaret Daly).
The pacing of Caliban is at rehearsal speed - herky-jerky - with a lot of verbal (or physical) stumbling, requiring prompts for and questions from the actors as they step in and out of character. There's also a hint of insubordination with the director gone, and there's a bit of holding back in their deliveries. Despite the histrionics, the play is definitely not ready for show time!
The operatic collaboration of Death in Venice feels a bit contrived. You never get a sense of what musical hurdles the composer was struggling against and why Britten would solicit Auden, of all people, for a rewrite of a libretto that was already written. Certainly, the theme of homosexual desire by a sixty-plus year-old novelist for an adolescent boy was taboo, but given his body of work - Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, and The Turn of the Screw - not beyond the pale. Mr. Britten's character, always circumspect, emerges as guarded and we never get a clear understanding of what is problematic about the score.
The play starts to run out of steam well before the end, as if the playwright were trying to leave nothing on the table and in this production there are two of them. Still if you're patient, there's a few treats remaining.
Mr. van Griethuysen is a joy in or out of character - fussy, patrician, and petulant when called for and sonorous always in his vocalization. Mr. Whitehead has a tougher row to hoe as an enigmatic composer and an "efficient," plodding stage performer. It's hard to say whether the perfunctory delivery style was occasioned by the script, roles, or direction, but I've seen him shine elsewhere. As the stage manager, Ms. Daly is a comforting presence, directing traffic, soothing jaded nerves, and applying the whip as needed to get the company on track. Both she and her assistant stage manager (Matt Dewberry), are a hoot as they soldier through various authorial devices, inanimate and conceptual, to convey the fractured storyline. Wynn Harmon, the fictional playwright Neil, is a sight as his truncated script disappears with this factious assembly but catch him at the finale when his fanfare for the common man is restored, and you will see prayerful gratitude and tearful joy made manifest.
Mr. Folmar, a first class scene stealer, will leave you howling with his interpretation of the play and maneuvers to achieve them (one at the top of Act II, especially), his neediness and incomprehension unbounded. Randy Harrison is convincing in his characterization of an opportunistic outsider making his way "on the game" or through the theatrical hierarchy.
With a dozen actors spread across two plays - many in multiple roles - you may need a scorecard to keep them straight. I'd advise checking out Studio's online notes or their excellent program guide to sort things out. There are some rough edges around the dialogue in Habit, the structure is convoluted, and the plot, such as it is, feels tacked on, but the character-driven script and overall acting - Messrs. van Griethuysen and Folmar in particular - will leave you laughing.
This play is Recommended 3 ½+ hands (out of 5).
Additional cast: Alfredo Pulupa, Sam O'Brien, Lynn Sharp Spears, Will Cooke, and Leo Erickson.
Additional design: Nancy Shertler (lighting), Alex Jaeger (costumes), and Veronika Vorel (sound).
Runtime: 2:15 w/intermission.
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emelwhy
Gyllenhaalic Wannabe
Posts: 805
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Post by emelwhy on Sept 14, 2011 14:13:39 GMT -5
from DC Theatre Scene
Good review for Randy...for the play...not so much
The Habit of Art September 14, 2011 By Tim Treanor
To begin with, The Habit of Art is not a play about an imagined encounter between W.H. Auden and the composer Benjamin Britten, late in their lives. It is a play about a play about this fictional encounter. Imagine Stoppard’s The Invention of Love having a love child with Noises Off, and you begin to understand what Alan Bennett renders here.
Auden and Britten were famously gay artists whose best work was done in the middle of the last century before, to paraphrase former Sen. Phil Graham, homosexuality was cool. Their wildly contrasting attitudes toward their own sexuality inform the play. Auden was open, flamboyant and voracious; his indifference to public censures an extension of his general indifference to the opinions of others. He urinated in the sink, got pee-stains on his trousers, smoked like a chimney, flung ashes around his fire-trap of a room, and used male prostitutes with great glee but also on a very rigid schedule: no oral sex after the 6 pm cocktail hour began.
Britten was by a considerable measure more circumspect; he had internalized much of society’s contempt for his own sexual nature. The play – not The Habit of Art, but Caliban’s Day, the play which The Habit of Art is about – has Britten visit Auden in the latter’s Christ Church cottage in order to obtain moral support for Death in Venice, his operatic adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel about a man who is eventually destroyed by his unrequited lust for a young boy. Britten himself had spent his entire adult life in unrequited lust for young boys.
If this seems difficult to follow in print, I’m sorry to report that it’s also a bit of a challenge to watch. It is not the production’s fault. Ted van Griethuysen, who plays Fitz, the actor who plays Auden, and Paxton Whitehead, who plays Henry, the actor who plays Britten, are both superb. van Griethuysen is – well, I probably don’t have to tell you; you’ve seen him before, and know what he is capable of doing. It is sufficient to say that he puts on the character of Fitz, who is a bit of a blowhard and a bit of a fraud, with the ease and comfort with which he dons the carpet slippers he wears when he morphs into Auden and becomes every bit of that difficult and sometimes tedious man.
Whitehead, though, is a real revelation for those of us who have not followed his career on Broadway or British television. He is an alumnus of Beyond the Fringe, along with the late Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett himself, and thus may have been on stage when Moore performed “Little Miss Britten” to the tune of “Little Miss Muffet” – unfortunately, with Britten in the audience. For ten years he ran the Shaw Festival, and after that appeared all over England and North America (including at the Shakespeare in All’s Well That Ends Well.) Here he embodies, as Britten, Britain – its noble suffering, in all its quiet dignity; making himself vulnerable to the self-involved Auden slowly, as a flower opens to the sun. Then, in an instant, he transforms into Henry, an amiable, curious actor who is largely oblivious to the trauma and shenanigans which go on around him.
The rest of the cast is similarly swell in somewhat less challenging roles. I liked Cameron Folmar (you may remember him as Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband), who here plays Donald, the actor playing the biographer Humphrey Carpenter. Carpenter, who in real life wrote books about both Auden and Britten, is reduced to a plot device in Caliban’s Day, and Folmar’s Donald goes to ridiculous lengths to give him the sort of glamour and charisma he is sure his character deserves.
[red]Randy Harrison does a delightful turn as the actor playing Auden’s prostitute, switching effortlessly from the prostitute’s working-class bottom-line practicality to the actor’s graduate-school pretentiousness and back again. [/red]
I bought Wynn Harmon as the playwright, who wanders into rehearsal and thus serves as Bennett’s device to answer actor’s questions and provide background into the lives of Auden and Britten. Margaret Daly and Matt Dewberry also do good work as the stage manager (the director is at a conference) and her assistant; Dewberry’s timing in this is a work of art in itself. Indeed, the whole 12-actor cast is sterling, particularly in reaction, and this is a tribute to the efforts of director David Muse.
With this huge load of actorly talent, why doesn’t the production work better than it does? I suspect part of the problem is the play-within-a-play structure, which further constrains a story about, ultimately, two elderly artists discussing their art and sexuality. In an essay for the London Review of Books, Bennett explains that the play was originally simply about Auden and Britten, but that he came on this device when he and his first director, Nick Hylton, struggled over what to keep in the play and what to leave out. They resolved it by creating this unusual structure, which allowed them to remove unnecessary dialogue but retrieve the information by having the “actors” talk with the “playwright” about it.
That’s his story, but I don’t think it’s the whole story. It appears that Bennett decided to leaven his play, which is pretty dry on its face, with some humor by adding ridiculous scenes to Caliban’s Day, involving talking furniture, a horrifying mask of Auden’s ruined face, a discussion between Auden’s words and the notes of Britten’s music, and the like. This stuff is fitfully amusing, but damaging to credibility: the Caliban’s Day playwright is a good writer, who writes fine, involving prose (he writes like Alan Bennett!) and the chances that he would put this sort of nonsense into his play approximates zero. And when an author diminishes his own credibility, he invites his audience to disengage.
In conclusion, there is no conclusion. This is a capsule description of all that’s wrong with The Habit of Art; it is full of clever conceits and pretty words, but it never fully engages. We are not with the Caliban’s Day actors – separate from their characters – or the production staff for a sufficient length to invest in them; Auden, as portrayed here, is brilliant but insufferable and a little disgusting; Britten, as portrayed here, is hangdog and defeated; and the remaining Caliban’s Day characters are essentially plot devices. Thus there is no real rising action (the first Act concludes without a dilemma to propel us into the second), no climax, and no catharsis.
We see a lot of play titles in this show – The Habit of Art, Caliban’s Day, Death in Venice – but, and it pains me to say this, what we really see is much ado about nothing.
The Habit of Art runs thru Oct 16, 2011 at Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St NW, Washington, DC.
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Post by jennaj022 on Sept 14, 2011 15:10:42 GMT -5
Just wondering, was this how Randy's hair looked when you saw him, emelwhy? It did look much more curly in that 1 pic from the theatre's web site.
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emelwhy
Gyllenhaalic Wannabe
Posts: 805
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Post by emelwhy on Sept 14, 2011 15:15:25 GMT -5
Just wondering, was this how Randy's hair looked when you saw him, emelwhy? It did look much more curly in that 1 pic from the theatre's web site. It is exactly how it looked this past Saturday
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