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Esmailian has been featured on various power lists for Variety and other music publications, and frequently posts photos of himself and his home on social media. He and other members of the team were featured on the cover of Billboard in early 2021. A security guard was shot several times outside the Los Angeles-area home of Weeknd co-manager and business partner Amir “Cash” Esmailian in an apparent home invasion, according to Fox11. Christie D’Zurilla is an assistant editor for entertainment news on the Fast Break team. A graduate of USC, she joined the Los Angeles Times in 2003 as a copy editor, started writing about celebrities in 2009 and has more than 34 years of journalism experience in Southern California.
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A week of auditions for the musical 'Fun Home' at Eckerd College - The Current
A week of auditions for the musical 'Fun Home' at Eckerd College.
Posted: Tue, 19 Mar 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Alison remembers herself, as a child, demanding that her father Bruce play "airplane" with her, while he sorts through a box of junk and valuables he has salvaged from a barn ("It All Comes Back"). Bruce tells the family that a visitor from the local historical society is coming to see their ornate Victorian home that he has restored, and his wife Helen prepares the house to Bruce's demanding aesthetic standard ("Welcome to Our House on Maple Avenue"). In a phone call with her father and a journal entry, Medium Alison expresses her anxiety about starting college ("Not Too Bad").
Storyline
Sam Gold‘s direction brings lucidity to the complex mechanics of staging a story that takes place in three time frames. And Jeanine Tesori‘s haunting music doesn’t sound a bit like anyone else’s music. When her father dies unexpectedly, graphic novelist Alison dives deep into her past to tell the story of the volatile, brilliant, one-of-a-kind man whose temperament and secrets defined her family and her life. Moving between past and present, Alison relives her unique childhood playing at the family’s Bechdel Funeral Home, her growing understanding of her own sexuality, and the looming, unanswerable questions about her father’s hidden desires.
CAST & CREW
Alison explores the tensions her family was under at this time and watches a heated argument between her parents. Helen confesses to Medium Alison her troubled and turbulent life with Bruce ("Days and Days"). Medium Alison, Joan and Bruce have an unexpectedly pleasant evening around the piano. Bruce asks Alison if she'd like to go for a drive, and (adult) Alison realizes that Medium Alison is gone; she joins her father in the car, breaking the boundaries of time. On the drive, she and Bruce struggle to express themselves to each other ("Telephone Wire").
The set largely consists of the grand, private home/funeral home, the family calls the Fun House, with additional scenes marked by lights and props. Its situations and dynamics are very specific to the Bechdel family; but we can all recognize experiencing reveals in our own lives, and grappling with the things we know, selectively ignore or avoid, discover and reckon with. When thinking about Fun Home, and his young co-stars, Cerveris shared his hopes for the future of the theatre industry and what Lucas, Williams and Morrow will watch (or perform) on future broadcasts of the Tony Awards.
Medium Alison is angered by a noncommittal letter from Bruce responding to her coming out. At a luncheonette with her father, Small Alison notices a butch delivery woman and feels an inexplicable kinship with her ("Ring of Keys"). Esmailian has been a key member of the team around the Weeknd, which is led by his longtime manager Wassim “Sal” Slaiby’s SalXCo, for more than 20 years and founded XO Records with the artist. He played a major role in bringing both the Weeknd and Canadian rapper Nav into the company and is deeply involved in the company’s dealmaking and promotion.
Concert performances include Mozart’s Mass in C Minor, Carmina Burana, Requiem by John Rutter, and Handel’s Messiah. She made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2011 as the soprano soloist in The Golden Boy composed by Freddie Mercury. Jeanine Tesori is a composer of musical theatre, opera, television and film. She won the Tony Award for Best Score (with book writer & lyricist Lisa Kron) for the musical Fun Home in 2015. Her latest opera Blue (libretto by Tazewell Thompson) received the Music Critics Association of North America Award for Best New Opera.
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You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. The ABC daytime makeover show — hosted by Jennifer Ashton, Tim Gunn, Tiffanie Davis Henry, Harley Pasternak and Ty Pennington — has had a difficult time reinventing ABC's daytime lineup, only pulling about half the viewers that One Life to Live previously attracted in the timeslot. The Revolution may have to make way for Katie Couric's new talk show, which launches on many ABC stations this fall. Little District Books will be setting up a pop-up shop in our lobby during the Friday, July 28 performance. In order to choose your seat from only those with ideal views of the ASL interpreter, please input the promo code ASLFH on the Buy Tickets page -- this will limit seats available just to those with a clear view of the interpreter.
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But it’s not all fun and games living under the same roof with their domineering father, the funeral director, who is also a schoolteacher and an absolute fanatic about restoring his Victorian home. The impact of Fun Home, which, following its Tony victories saw an increase in ticket sales, could be far-reaching, and it has already resonated deeply with theatregoers. Cerveris told Playbill.com in a previous interview that he had received messages from people who said his performance as Bruce had inspired them personally. Granted, it’s unlikely that many details of your childhood exactly resemble those of the narrator of this extraordinary musical, which pumps oxygenating fresh air into the cultural recycling center that is Broadway. As Bruce, Murphy finely carries the balance between his character’s captivating charisma and his repressed vulnerability. Prior’s performance elegantly nails his wife’s frustrations at her unhappy marriage, though her stiff delivery sometimes gets in the way of her strong vocals, especially in the moving 11 o’clock ballad expressing this long-suffering regret, Days and Days.
Read more about Cerveris' personal journey with Fun Home and the character of Bruce Bechdel here. "We force people to identify themselves first according to their race or sexual orientation or any number of things," he said. After initially focusing so much on Bruce's sexuality, he was surprised to realize he needed to focus on being a father as well, leading him to think about his own father, who also had three children. This revelation helped him to understand the role and his own thought process, which focused on Bruce's sexual orientation more than his overall life, differently. "People ask, 'How do you explain the theme to the kids?' The truth is we just told them," Cerveris said at the Tony Awards.
The songs play occasionally at a slower tempo than the original Broadway cast recording, which, while drawing out the musical’s pacing slightly more than necessary, brings a new clarity and detail to the score. With Bryant at the helm, the production holds dearly on to Fun Home’s depiction of an artist’s attempt to grasp at the elusive reasoning behind her father’s death – an incident that opens the show. It’s a harrowing place to begin, but it’s tactfully and shrewdly pulled apart by the director, his cast and creative team. Two-time Tony winner Michael Cerveris made his Broadway debut as the title character in The Who’s Tommy. He won a 2004 Tony for his portrayal of John Wilkes Booth in Assassins and a 2015 Tony for his portrayal of Bruce Bechdel in Fun Home.
Gordon Nimmo-Smith (he/him) is a Maryland-based sound engineer and designer. By day, Gordon works as the Audio/Video and Stage Operations Supervisor for Shakespeare Theatre Company. “Ring of Keys,” another trenchant musical number, is sung by the young tomboy Alison, who can’t articulate her sexual feelings but wholeheartedly declares her admiration for the butch lesbian who swaggers into a diner swinging a powerful set of keys.
His other Broadway credits include Sweeney Todd, LoveMusik, Hedda Gabler, In The Next Room, or the Vibrator Play and Evita. Alison remembers a time when Bruce took her and her brothers on a trip to New York City. After a long day, Small Alison, Christian and John settle into sleeping bags. He reassures his daughter that he's just going out for a paper, but Alison realizes he was probably going cruising.
The musical is a tumultuous tale of wrong and difficult choices, pain, and the need to find and center oneself as best you can. Despite his own passion for the material, Gold said he was surprised by the musical's impact. A finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize, Fun Home received its world premiere in October 2013 at the Public Theater, where its run was extended through January 2014 before opening on Broadway in April 2015. “Fun Home,” a poignant and raw exploration of family, memory, sexuality and suicide, on Sunday completed a long journey from the margins to the mainstream as it won the Tony Award for best new musical. Sounds like the stuff of a pulpy Lifetime movie, doesn’t it, or of a choked-up, closure-seeking best seller?
Regionally, she has worked with the San Francisco Opera’s Merola Opera Program, the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, and Skylight Music Theater in Milwaukee, among others. Lauren is an alumna of the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee’s Theatre Program, with a BFA in Stage Management, and is a proud member of Actors' Equity Association. Debra Booth has a long history with Studio, where she has set designed People, Places and Things; Pass Over; Translations; The Wolves; The Father; The Hard Problem; Constellations; The Apple Family Cycle; Jumpers for Goalposts; Cock; Bachelorette; and many others. This enormously likeable show was a popular hit when it opened at the Public Theater in 2013.
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