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Gulf Today
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Gulf Today
Producer Jeffrey Seller shines a light on his own journey
Jeffrey Seller, the Broadway producer behind such landmark hits as 'Rent,' 'Avenue Q' and 'Hamilton,' didn't initially write a memoir for us. He wrote it for himself. 'I really felt a personal existential need to write my story. I had to make sense of where I came from myself,' he says in his memento-filled Times Square office. 'I started doing it as an exercise for me and I ultimately did it for theatre kids of all ages everywhere.' Seller's 'Theater Kid' — which he wrote even before finding a publishing house — traces the rise of an unlikely theater force who was raised in a poor neighbourhood far from Broadway, along the way giving readers a portrait of the Great White Way in the gritty 1970s and 80s. In it, he is brutally honest. 'I am a jealous person. I am an envious person,' he says. 'I'm a kind person, I'm an honest person. Sometimes I am a mean person and a stubborn person and a joyous person. And as the book shows, I was particularly in that era, often a very lonely person.' Seller, 60. who is candid about trysts, professional snubs, mistakes and his unorthodox family, says he wasn't interested in writing a recipe book on how to make a producer. 'I was more interested in exploring, first and foremost, how a poor, gay, adopted Jewish kid from Cardboard Village in Oak Park, Michigan, gets to Broadway and produces 'Rent' at age 31.' 'Theater Kid: A Broadway Memoir' by Jeffrey Seller. AP It is the story of an outsider who is captivated by theatre as a child who acts in Purim plays, directed a musical by Andrew Lippa, becomes a booking agent in New York and then a producer. Then he tracks down his biological family. 'My life has been a process of finally creating groups that I feel part of and accepting where I do fit in,' he says. 'I also wrote this book for anyone who's ever felt out.' Jonathan Karp, president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, says he isn't surprised that Seller delivered such a strong memoir because he believes the producer has an instinctive artistic sensibility. 'There aren't that many producers you could say have literally changed the face of theater. And I think that's what Jeffrey Seller has done,' says Karp. 'It is the work of somebody who is much more than a producer, who is writer in his own right and who has a really interesting and emotional and dramatic story to tell.' The book reaches a crescendo with a behind-the-scenes look at his friendship and collaboration with playwright and composer Jonathan Larson and the making of his 'Rent.' Seller writes about a torturous creative process in which Larson would take one step forward with the script over years only to take two backward. He also writes movingly about carrying on after Larson, who died from an aortic dissection the day before 'Rent's' first off-Broadway preview. ''Rent' changed my life forever, but, more important, 'Rent' changed musical theater forever. There is no 'In the Heights' without 'Rent,'' Seller says. 'I don't think there's a 'Next to Normal' without 'Rent.' I don't think there's a 'Dear Evan Hansen' without 'Rent.'' So enamored was Seller with 'Rent' that he initially ended his memoir there in the mid-'90s. It took some coaxing from Karp to get him to include stories about 'Avenue Q,' 'In the Heights' and 'Hamilton.' ''Hamilton' becomes a cultural phenomenon. It's the biggest hit of my career,' Seller says. 'It's one of the biggest hits in Broadway history. It's much bigger hit than 'Rent' was. But that doesn't change what 'Rent' did.' In a sort of theater flex, the memoir's audiobook has appearances by Annaleigh Ashford, Danny Burstein, Darren Criss, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Lindsay Mendez, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Andrew Rannells, Conrad Ricamora and Christopher Sieber. There's original music composed by Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winner Tom Kitt. The portrait of Broadway Seller offers when he first arrives is one far different from today, where the theaters are bursting with new plays and musicals and the season's box office easily blows past the $1 billion mark. Associated Press
Straits Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Power producer of musicals Rent and Hamilton is now telling his own story
Power producer of musicals Rent and Hamilton is now telling his own story NEW YORK – American Broadway producer Jeffrey Seller is, by any measure, enormously successful. He has produced – always in collaboration with others – about 10 shows that have collectively grossed US$4.74 billion (S$6.1 billion) , about one-third of which was profit for producers, investors and others. His first big hit was Rent (1996) and his most recent, Hamilton (2015). In between were Avenue Q (2003) and In The Heights (2008), but also plenty of others that did not flourish. For a long time, Seller, now 60 and the winner of four best-musical Tony Awards, had complicated feelings about how he fit in. He was adopted as an infant and grew up in a downwardly mobile and fractious family in a Detroit suburb. Theatre was where he found pleasure and meaning – a way out and a way up. Now, he has written a memoir, Theater Kid, published on May 6. It is a coming-of-age and rags-to-riches story that is unsparing in its description of his colourfully challenged and challenging father, unabashed in its description of his sexual awakening, and packed with behind-the-scenes detail, especially about the birth of Rent. In an interview at his office in the theatre district, Seller spoke about his life, his career and his book. These are edited excerpts from the interview. Producer Jeffrey Seller accepts the Tony Award for Hamilton, which won for Best Musical at the 70th Annual Tony Awards in New York in June 2016. PHOTO: SARA KRULWICH/NYTIMES You do not need the money or the attention. Why write a memoir? I wrote it to figure out why I am here. I wrote it to try to figure out how I fit in. And I guess I wrote it as an exercise in squashing all of my shame at being an adopted, gay, Jewish, poor kid and always feeling like an outsider. What did you learn about yourself? I think maybe we adoptees are never sure we are going to be okay. There is something so deep about what it means to not know where you come from, and to feel that you have been rejected by the very people who created you. That has affected every part of my life. And I think that through some process of psychoanalysis, therapy and this book, I maybe have come to see that I am okay, and I am going to be okay. You grew up in a Detroit suburb, among far more affluent families, in a neighbourhood nicknamed Cardboard Village. I was so ashamed of it that I would experience extreme anxiety if someone aske d w here I lived. Everybody else was doing a little better every year, including my cousins and my friends. I just remember being so angry, like why can't we get out of here? And we never did until I produced Rent. The story of Rent is so complicated because it is this enormous success wrapped up with the enormous tragedy of the death of Jonathan Larson, the show's composer and author, hours before the first off-Broadway preview. The cast of Rent during a rehearsal in New York in March 1996. PHOTO: SARA KRULWICH/NYTIMES For many years, I felt guilty. I reap these benefits from Rent, and Jonathan never got to see it. But with the passage of time, my feeling has changed because now I realise that Jonathan changed American musical theatre forever, and all contemporary American musical theatre now stands on his shoulders. Jonathan changed Broadway, and Broadway is better for it. Your other key creative relationship has been with Hamilton's creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda. In the book, you describe wondering if his gift was divine. Actor and composer Lin-Manuel Miranda on stage during a Hamilton performance at Richard Rodgers Theatre in New York City in February 2016 for the 58th Grammy Awards. PHOTO: AFP I remember two things the first time we did a reading of In The Heights. The first was the opening number. Every hair on my arm rose because the juxtaposition of this warm rap with this Broadway choral singing was completely new to my ears. And a half-hour later, when this older woma n s ings about her experience arriving on the shores from Cuba as a little girl and becoming a housekeeper on the Upper East Side, I thought it was one of the most beautiful arias I 'd heard in my life. But I also went, 'How does this young man understand the lifeblood of a 70something Cuban woman?' And that's when I thought for the first time, 'Is he channelling God?' You knew from the beginning that Hamilton would be amazing? I knew from the beginning that Hamilton was yet another step forward. I did not know from the beginning that it would become a phenomenon. That came with time, and with the audience. We talked a lot about your successes. You've also had failures. How do you handle that? Failure at making a new musical is crushing to me, and I spend hours, days, weeks, months, years after analysing what went wrong. What could I have done differently? I was developing The Last Ship (a musical with a score by English singer-musician Sting) at the same time that I was developing Hamilton, and I was a fervent believer in both. And when The Last Ship could not find a Broadway audience, it broke my heart. I love all of my shows, and all I can do is my best, and know that ultimately I do not control their destiny. What I must do as a producer, though, is accept their fate. And that means making the tough decision to close when you know it is not working. How are you feeling about the state of Broadway, artistically and financially? I'm going to equivocate. On a positive level, this year, we are going to do the highest attendance we have had since 2018 to 2019. We have seen the arrival of more than 10 new musicals. Both of those facts are cause for celebration. But it is getting harder and harder to make money, and I am concerned about if and when the investment money starts drying up. We have not had a megahit since Hamilton, and that is a problem. What is your advice for someone who wants to be a theatre producer? Find the next Jonathan Larson. Find the next Lin-Manuel Miranda. Everything else will fall in place if you get the team. Find the artists. NYTIMES Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Scoop
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
CAST ANNOUNCED For The New Zealand Premiere Of The West End Hit Peppa Pig's Fun Day Out LIVE!
Press Release – Blackout Music Management An all-Australian cast has been confirmed for Peppa Pig's Fun Day Out LIVE! with Zoe Crisp (Avenue Q, We Will Rock You) cast as Peppa Pig in the upcoming tour this June/July school holidays. The New Zealand premiere follows a smash hit season in London's West End, and is the first time Peppa Pig has graced New Zealand stages since 2018. The rest of the multi-talented, infectiously fun cast includes Romy Juliette Glass (Legally Blonde; Universal Studios Singapore roles) as Daisy; Maddison Price (Queensland Pop Orchestra, QPAC's The Wizard of Oz in Concert) as Suzy Sheep; Jake Waterworth (Tigger in Disney's Winnie the Pooh: The New Musical Adaptation) as Danny Dog. Joining them are Zuleika Khan (PAW Patrol Live, Offspring, Please Like Me) as Mummy Pig and Miss Rabbit; Jacqui Dwyer (Disney's Winnie the Pooh: The New Musical Adaptation) as George; with Daddy Pig played by Benjamin Richards (Heathers, Cry Baby). Titular star Zoe Crisp remembers growing up watching the Peppa Pig TV show with her twin brother: 'My brother and I related very much to Peppa and George's sibling relationship. I was a tiny bit bossy and he didn't have a lot of words,' says Zoe. A WAAPA graduate with a range of professional credits, Zoe recently toured with the National Theatre for Children, playing various characters with lots of silly voices (an evil cat, a dopey dog and plenty more!). In her free time, Zoe passionately supports causes to conserve our wildlife for future generations. 'Peppa Pig has captured hearts for so many years. The characters are so loved and iconic – I can't wait to bring the magic that is Peppa Pig to life on stage!' says Zoe. New Zealand audiences are proving just how much they really adore Peppa Pig and her oinktastic adventures, with the tour adding extra shows for Auckland since the first extension was announced in March before Peppa Pig and Friends hit Wellington, Christchurch and finally, Hamilton. Presented by TEG Life Like Touring and Fierylight, the stage show is based on the much-loved animated series. Peppa Pig is currently the #1 kids show on Nick Jr. and #2 on ABC Kids Australia, while the show's theme song received a whopping 165 million views in just six months of 2024. Packed with fun, games and special new puppets, this new live show will see small audience members squealing with delight. The best seats are selling faster than families can say 'Peppa Pig's Fun Day Out LIVE!', so audiences are advised to act fast and book tickets via Prepare to sing and dance with colourful scarecrows, feed the penguins, build big sandcastles, and even swim in the sea! Packed full of songs, dance and muddy puddles, Peppa Pig's Fun Day Out LIVE! guarantees giggles and snorts for all Peppa fans and is a perfect introduction to theatre. 'We are excited to be bringing Peppa Pig back to New Zealand in 2025 with TEG Life Like Touring,' says the show's director and writer, Richard Lewis from Fierylight. 'For Peppa Pig's Fun Day Out LIVE! we have created lots of new puppets our New Zealand audiences wouldn't have seen before. We bring together all sorts of different techniques to make the action and fun with Peppa, her family and friends come to life on stage. Also, the level of audience interaction has increased, with even more opportunities in this new show for the audience to sing along, dance and to get involved.' In 2025 Peppa Pig celebrates 21 years on our screens, having first aired in May 2004. She has also been performing live stage shows for 16 years, with Peppa Pig Live playing to sell-out crowds across New Zealand, Australia, USA, UK, Ireland and Asia, entertaining almost 3 million people. Join Peppa, along with her family and friends, in their latest new adventure as they go to the zoo and also the beach for a special party – it's going to be an exciting and fun packed day, promising interactive fun, songs and games for pre-schoolers. It's the perfect family treat. Facebook: @PeppaPigLiveAUNZ Instagram: @PeppaPigLiveAUNZ PEPPA PIG'S FUN DAY OUT LIVE! NEW ZEALAND TOUR 2025 Sky City, Auckland Sat 28, Sun 29 & Mon 30 June 2025 St. James Theatre, Wellington Sat 05 July 2025 Isaac Theatre Royal, Christchurch Tue 08 July 2025 Globox Arena, Hamilton Sat 12 July 2025 Content Sourced from Original url
Scoop
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
CAST ANNOUNCED For The New Zealand Premiere Of The West End Hit Peppa Pig's Fun Day Out LIVE!
An all-Australian cast has been confirmed for Peppa Pig's Fun Day Out LIVE! with Zoe Crisp (Avenue Q, We Will Rock You) cast as Peppa Pig in the upcoming tour this June/July school holidays. The New Zealand premiere follows a smash hit season in London's West End, and is the first time Peppa Pig has graced New Zealand stages since 2018. The rest of the multi-talented, infectiously fun cast includes Romy Juliette Glass (Legally Blonde; Universal Studios Singapore roles) as Daisy; Maddison Price (Queensland Pop Orchestra, QPAC's The Wizard of Oz in Concert) as Suzy Sheep; Jake Waterworth (Tigger in Disney's Winnie the Pooh: The New Musical Adaptation) as Danny Dog. Joining them are Zuleika Khan (PAW Patrol Live, Offspring, Please Like Me) as Mummy Pig and Miss Rabbit; Jacqui Dwyer (Disney's Winnie the Pooh: The New Musical Adaptation) as George; with Daddy Pig played by Benjamin Richards (Heathers, Cry Baby). Titular star Zoe Crisp remembers growing up watching the Peppa Pig TV show with her twin brother: 'My brother and I related very much to Peppa and George's sibling relationship. I was a tiny bit bossy and he didn't have a lot of words,' says Zoe. A WAAPA graduate with a range of professional credits, Zoe recently toured with the National Theatre for Children, playing various characters with lots of silly voices (an evil cat, a dopey dog and plenty more!). In her free time, Zoe passionately supports causes to conserve our wildlife for future generations. 'Peppa Pig has captured hearts for so many years. The characters are so loved and iconic - I can't wait to bring the magic that is Peppa Pig to life on stage!' says Zoe. New Zealand audiences are proving just how much they really adore Peppa Pig and her oinktastic adventures, with the tour adding extra shows for Auckland since the first extension was announced in March before Peppa Pig and Friends hit Wellington, Christchurch and finally, Hamilton. Presented by TEG Life Like Touring and Fierylight, the stage show is based on the much-loved animated series. Peppa Pig is currently the #1 kids show on Nick Jr. and #2 on ABC Kids Australia, while the show's theme song received a whopping 165 million views in just six months of 2024. Packed with fun, games and special new puppets, this new live show will see small audience members squealing with delight. The best seats are selling faster than families can say 'Peppa Pig's Fun Day Out LIVE!', so audiences are advised to act fast and book tickets via Prepare to sing and dance with colourful scarecrows, feed the penguins, build big sandcastles, and even swim in the sea! Packed full of songs, dance and muddy puddles, Peppa Pig's Fun Day Out LIVE! guarantees giggles and snorts for all Peppa fans and is a perfect introduction to theatre. 'We are excited to be bringing Peppa Pig back to New Zealand in 2025 with TEG Life Like Touring,' says the show's director and writer, Richard Lewis from Fierylight. 'For Peppa Pig's Fun Day Out LIVE! we have created lots of new puppets our New Zealand audiences wouldn't have seen before. We bring together all sorts of different techniques to make the action and fun with Peppa, her family and friends come to life on stage. Also, the level of audience interaction has increased, with even more opportunities in this new show for the audience to sing along, dance and to get involved.' In 2025 Peppa Pig celebrates 21 years on our screens, having first aired in May 2004. She has also been performing live stage shows for 16 years, with Peppa Pig Live playing to sell-out crowds across New Zealand, Australia, USA, UK, Ireland and Asia, entertaining almost 3 million people. Join Peppa, along with her family and friends, in their latest new adventure as they go to the zoo and also the beach for a special party - it's going to be an exciting and fun packed day, promising interactive fun, songs and games for pre-schoolers. It's the perfect family treat. Sky City, Auckland Sat 28, Sun 29 & Mon 30 June 2025 St. James Theatre, Wellington Sat 05 July 2025 Isaac Theatre Royal, Christchurch Tue 08 July 2025 Globox Arena, Hamilton Sat 12 July 2025
The Guardian
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Crash at 20: is it the worst best picture winner of all time?
I t doesn't take long for Paul Haggis's Crash to end up on the shortest of shortlists for the worst film ever to win best picture at the Oscars, maybe the single worst in the color era since 1954's Around the World in 80 Days. At the time, it was a dark-horse favorite to upset the widely acclaimed Brokeback Mountain, premiering a full year earlier at the Toronto film festival before riding an unexpected cultural wave to awards-season glory. Now 20 years later, it feels like a 'you had to be there' moment that's hard to explain, because the movie itself is so obviously rancid that it suggests few answers on its own. The job is probably better suited to cultural anthropologists than film critics. Nonetheless, Haggis's ensemble piece about racial animus in Los Angeles seems to have struck a chord with, well, the many Academy voters from Los Angeles who reside in that lumpy melting pot. Haggis was also capitalizing on the everything-is-connected trend in arthouse screenwriting, pulling off a clunkier version of the narrative engineering that brought films such as Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia and Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores Perros to life. By linking a little over a day's worth of incidents together, Haggis seized on the potentially powerful idea of racism as a viral scourge in the city, infecting everyone it touches. Instead it plays like a po-faced cover of the Avenue Q hit Everyone's a Little Bit Racist. The ham-handedness starts immediately, as Don Cheadle, playing a police detective who's just gotten in a minor rear-ender with his partner (Jennifer Esposito), muses poetically about living in a city where everybody drives and nobody touches each other. 'We're always behind this metal and glass,' he says. 'I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something.' (Amusingly, that line could apply to the other Crash, by David Cronenberg, which is about love-starved characters who get off on collisions.) But Cheadle's philosophizing runs against the blunt-force conflict that defines the film the moment he steps out of the car and the epithets start flying. There's one big, honking twist related to this opening scene, but Haggis and his co-writer, Robert Moresco, dial back the clock to over 24 hours earlier, when a larger cast of characters is getting in metaphorical crashes of their own. When two Black carjackers (Chris 'Ludacris' Bridges and Larenz Tate) swipe an SUV outside a restaurant, its well-to-do white owners are thrown in crisis, with the wife (Sandra Bullock) looking askance at all people of color and her husband (Brendan Fraser), the district attorney, facing major political blowback as the news gets out. Meanwhile, a racist cop (Matt Dillon) opts to terrorize the Black couple in another SUV, forcing a TV director (Terrence Howard) to look on helplessly as the cop molests his wife (Thandiwe Newton) in a body search. Haggis isn't done turning the screws by a long shot. The racist cop has a partner (Ryan Phillippe) who's enlightened enough to request a transfer, but not enlightened enough to avoid his own tragic confrontation later. After a buying a handgun from a white guy who calls him 'Osama,' a Persian shop owner (Shaun Toub) considers using it on a Hispanic locksmith (Michael Peña) he blames for his business getting ransacked by Islamophobes. Then the cherry atop this gooey sundae is a Chinese man who gets run over by a car, but turns out to be a flawed victim, to put it mildly. A herky-jerky pattern starts to emerge here, where Haggis keeps pulling the rug out on the audience, punishing us for our presumed narrow-mindedness. You think that cop is an irredeemable racist, eh? Well, what if he's capable of risking his life to save the very woman he violated? Are you feeling good about his conscientious partner asking for a transfer? Well, what if he winds up shooting an unarmed Black man and covering up his crime? Disgusted by Sandra Bullock suspecting her Hispanic locksmith might be a gang member? Well, what if her Hispanic housekeeper is her best friend in the whole world?! There's some version of Crash that might have been more like Panic in the Streets, Elia Kazan's great 1950 noir about a pneumonic plague that slip through the port of New Orleans and spreads around the city, creating a domino effect that threatens everyone it touches. Kazan's film is an elastic allegory that could apply to the spread of foreign ideology or the dangers of mob mentality, but it works as a thriller first, with the themes spilling out more organically. Crash does the opposite: it has one big, fat theme and orchestrates every moment to serve it, like a grade-school essay that jams a few paragraphs of supporting evidence to support the thesis that is offered in the first graf and repeated in the last. There's no room in there for how actual humans might behave. With all of these subplots converging, the title Crash implies a multi-car collision, where one racist action leads to a cascading succession of tragic consequences, not unlike the single bullet that would create a butterfly effect in Iñárritu's 2006 film Babel. But these stories only come together because Haggis bends them into a tidy little pretzel, bending time, space and fate like a malevolent god who reduces the population of Los Angeles to about a diverse dozen of angry, unlucky, occasionally redeemable souls. The ostensible message of Crash is agreeable – racism is, indeed, bad – but Haggis ends on the jokey, cynical note that racism is such an intractable problem that it's fruitless to address. Another day brings another crash, and the cycle begins anew. Want change? Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.
