Bell's Play Storms Us Conference
The Age
Tuesday June 10, 1997
AUSTRALIAN writer Hilary Bell (whose Wolf Lullaby just finished a Melbourne season) has landed a prized spot in the American dramatic world. She is one of 15 playwrights to have a work selected for inclusion at this year's National Playwrights' Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Centre in Waterford, Connecticut, beginning on 29 June.
Bell, 30, daughter of actor/director John Bell, has been in New York for 10 months after winning a scholarship to the playwrights' program at Manhattan's prestigious Juilliard School.
In Connecticut, her work The Eye of the Storm - A Shipwreck Trilogy will be part of a four-day rehearsal process followed by public performance at a staged reading.
She says the first part of her trilogy - Wreckage, set in Sydney in 1857 - was commissioned by the fringe theatre company Kick House. During the conference, she hopes to develop a fourth part, possibly a short opera.
To Bell, the most exciting aspect of the conference will be watching a work on paper being transformed on stage, especially sections involving music and dance: "I'd love to see what's been in my head."
SHE JUST can't escape that movie. Julie Andrews, who has played the lead in the musical Victor/Victoria since the show opened on Broadway in October 1995, took her final curtain call last Sunday. Before a dewy-eyed audience, the cast serenaded her with a rendition of Edelweiss.
Then, in a moment of pure pathos, Christopher Plummer, Julie's Sound of Music co-star way back when and now winning plaudits for his portrayal of John Barrymore in New York, joined Julie on stage. More sobbing from the star. And probably yet more when she heard her Victor co-star Tony Roberts say: "She's been like a mother to every one of us."
WITH all those lawsuits hanging over his greying head, it must have been a relief for Bill Clinton to have an interviewer asking about music rather than misdeeds. That's what music channel VH1 did last week when it screened a program called Rock & Roll President, featuring the First Bopper talking about his favorite music.
Seems that the Prez is a big Elvis fan. He even claims to feel a "special relationship" with the King, as they were both poor white kids from the south. He is also a fan of gospel music, James Taylor, Simon and Garfunkel and Joni Mitchell. Oh yes, and the Beatles, which makes you wonder which of the Fab Four's songs might best serve as a theme for the White House. Love Me Do, perhaps? Or, more likely, Hello/Goodbye.
THE audience at a performance of the musical The Life got a bonus last week: Liza Minnelli joined the cast on stage and hung around to sing You Made Me Love You, a song associated with her mother, Judy Garland, and one that Liza has seldom sung. Apart from being a tribute to mum, it was seen as a sign of support for The Life, which didn't fare as well in the Tonys.
CALL IT the other New York marathon. It's the New York Shakespeare Festival, which began 10 years ago and is soon about to reach the finish line with a production of Henry VIII, the 36th play in the series. The festival will have to end now, as it has simply run out of Shakespeare plays to stage.
Over the years, the festival has featured many, many big names - or names that weren't so big at the time but have since grown substantially. Among them: Kevin Kline as Hamlet in 1990; Vanessa Redgrave as Cleopatra this year; Michelle Pfeiffer as Olivia in Twelfth Night in 1989; Denzel Washington as Richard III in 1990; Christopher Walken as Iago in 1991.
JEFF GOLDBLUM has also paid his dues to the Bard, portraying a suitably self-centred Malvolio in Twelfth Night. These days, of course, he makes considerably more money running away from dinosaurs, most recently in Jurassic Park II. He, more than most, would appreciate the extent to which dinosaurs are taking over the world. Now the American Museum of Natural History in New York is riding the Spielberg wave with an exhibition called The Lost World - The Life and Death of Dinosaurs.
Explaining the museum's grab for the family market, a spokesman has said: "It's important to get the message of scientists out there. If this is a unique moment in popular culture when there's a lot of interest in the field, we are happy to use it."
© 1997 The Age
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