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More (Tony award) Life!

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This blog is going to be about Angels, and why being the most nominated play in Tony history is important. But it's also a little bit personal. The Tony’s have book-ended my Theatre Nerd career, and so my research career. When I was 18 I flew to New York the night the Tony’s were happening. It was my first solo trip to the city, and I was going to see Hugh Jackman in The Boy From Oz again. I'd seen it by accident the December previously, and fallen in love. Not just with the show, but with theatre, and as every theatre kid does at some point, with Broadway. That show changed me in that it's the first I really connected with, but that show also put me on the path to my PhD. It is, for those who don't know, the story of Peter Allen, Australian Singer-Songwriter who died of AIDS. (Except they never mention the word AIDS in the show, but that's another thesis altogether). And to this day I can't explain it but being a slightly strange kid (evidently) that set...
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“Hello and Good Morning”

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“Hello and Good Morning” When Susan Brown step out, obscured by Rabbi beard and hat, to utter those words and open Angels in America this Saturday, it is a milestone moment. 26 years, 4 months and 2 days (yes, exactly) after opening on Broadway the Angels have finally flown home, via London. There’s a sense that once again in this play’s history, London quietly created something quite special out of this iconic American play. It’s right that it’s Brown who opens the play. The formidable, often overlooked actress Broadway probably has never heard of but should have. Because despite the star line up above the title there’s a quiet, yes quite British confidence, about a production filled with non-Americans taking on this icon of British theatre. Much like the doubling in the play, the original London production was a ‘double’ of the Broadway (and Los Angeles) productions happening simultaneously.   And yet, through quirks of logistics, the National Theatre en...
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The World Only Spins Forward- saying goodbye to Angels

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It’s taken me two weeks to write this. Two weeks since I personally said goodbye to this production, and to this play for whoever knows how long. Long before I got on a plane and traveled halfway across the world for it, I asked myself how do you say goodbye? To a production that’s spent two, almost three years nestled in my brain. Two years of it in production. Of writing about it again. Of finding a love for it again. I think the answer is you don’t. I think I never have, much like Prior’s prophecy this play has become part of me. Except I didn’t reject it. Which I think legitimately means I can declare ‘Fuck you I’m a Prophet’ whenever I feel like it. What I will do instead, is write my own Epilogue.   But of course, it’s longer than these two, almost three years. I’ve lived with this play for fourteen years. I’ve grown up with this play. I’ve grown into it. When I started I was over a decade younger than Prior and Louis. This time around I was their age....
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