On stage ~ BrontëBlog

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

On stage

Tuesday, September 30, 2008 2:18 pm by Cristina in Movies-DVD-TV, Theatre, Wuthering Heights No comments

Information continues trickling in about Tamasha's Bollywood take on Wuthering Heights. From Zee News:

Wuthering Heights, one of the timeless classics in English literature is getting adapted into a Bollywood musical. Emily Bronte’s intense, brooding, dark saga of passionate love between Catherine and Heathcliff, would be acquiring varied hues of Bollywood for a theatrical presentation by acclaimed writer Deepak Verma.
In the theatrical adaptation, the beautiful deserts of Rajasthan would swap the violent Yorkshire heaths and would present the dualities of Indian caste system. UK based Verma and his theatrical company ‘Tamasha’ plan to produce the play in Citizens' Theatre in Glasgow during this springtime.
While talking to a news daily, Tamasha's artistic director, Kristine Landon-Smith said, "It is not like putting a square peg into a round hole. I thought of the harsh landscape in the original book, and if you put some swelling Bollywood music behind it you already almost have a Bollywood film. It just felt to me that it was a perfect match. There are points where the emotions get so high that they have to sing instead of speak. It's natural why it should be a musical."
Earlier, Tamasha has been transposed the works of French novelist Emile Zola to an Asian setting, but this is the first time the London-based company is entwining a musical and classic literature.

The Frisky posts Five Things You Didn’t Know About Abbie Cornish. BrontëBlog readers, however, are probably familiar with part of the fifth thing:

Abbie may replace Keira Knightley as the queen of the historical drama. Up next, she’ll appear in the Viking drama “Last Battle Dreamer,” “Wuthering Heights,” and “Bright Star,” which chronicles the relationship between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne. (Annika Harris)

Metro reviews Mine, the new play by Polly Teale. Mentioning her Brontë background is unavoidable:

The unsettling aspects of domesticity implicit in this idea are familar territory for Teale. Shared Experience uses a combination of text-based and experimental theatre to stage highly dramatic works that give intense physical form to emotional experience. In particular, Teale's fascination with the Brontës has led to three outstanding productions: After Mrs Rochester, Bronte and Jane Eyre. (Tina Jackson)

The Washington Post has an article on the new Vietnam Veterans Memorial created by Maya Lin.

Titled "Storm King Wavefield," it is a huge earthwork commissioned by the Storm King Art Center here in Upstate New York. It takes up 185,000 square feet -- more than three football fields -- in a far corner of the center's 500-acre sculpture garden. The project is not officially complete, but it's pretty close. It is only waiting for the grass that blankets it to take deeper root before it opens to the public, sometime next spring. [...]
Anyone who has struggled with a novelist's descriptions of landscape -- the walks in "Wuthering Heights," the heroic treks in "The Lord of the Rings" -- will appreciate the way that Lin shrinks the Earth for us in her "Wavefield." (Blake Gopnik)