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https://www.vulture.com/article/biggest-broadway-stars-legends-actors-actresses-interviews.html>
"It’s here and then it’s gone. When the run of a play or musical ends, that’s
it. If you’re a movie or TV aficionado, you can always make your way back
through the canon to catch up. Theatergoers make do with fragments: cast
albums, the tiny percentage of shows that were filmed for television, a fuzzy
YouTube clip if they’re lucky, and whatever the New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts caught on tape. Plus, of course, revivals.
Much of this art form, instead, is retained in living memory, and that is
finite. For example: Many performers who came up in the 1940s said that the
greatest actor to ever walk onstage was Laurette Taylor, especially in
The
Glass Menagerie. And I hear many of you saying, “Who?” She exists almost
solely in the minds of that generation, because the only filmed record of her
work from the sound era is just a couple of minutes long — a screen test for a
movie she didn’t end up doing. There’s barely anything else for us to see. When
everyone who watched her perform is gone, the rest of us will have to take her
greatness on faith.
For our annual “Yesteryear” issue, we asked 29 Broadway legends to pose before
Mark Seliger’s camera and revisit their most memorable roles. Their careers
span an enormous length of time, through multiple Broadway eras. Barbra
Streisand (in
Funny Girl) and Dick Van Dyke (in
Bye Bye Birdie) came out of
the late-golden-age productions of the 1960s. Others, like Donna McKechnie (in
A Chorus Line), are from shows that carried the torch through the diminished
Times Square of the ’70s. Betty Buckley, Patti LuPone, and Lea Salonga stepped
into their wardrobes from the Lloyd Webber–ian British-invasion years, and
Lin-Manuel Miranda and Idina Menzel recalled their arrival during Broadway’s
millennial reinvention of itself. Some of these performances were career
breakthroughs, turning working-stiff actors into above-the-title stars. Others
were simply definitive, astonishing audiences or winning Tony Awards or
creating a character that everyone knows to this day. All were roles these
actors felt strongly about and were eager to inhabit in the studio. It’s likely
the only time you’ll ever see most of them return to these characters. This
portfolio is, like a memory of a night in a Broadway house, an artifact of a
moment. — Christopher Bonanos"
Via Esther Schindler.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
