Gratuitous Violins (Free subscription) | 11/23/2009
Yesterday I picked up a copy of Free for All , by Kenneth Turan, an oral history of Joseph Papp and New York's Public Theater . I've just started thumbing through it but so far, it looks pretty interesting. I first heard Papp's name when I was a teenager. I remember watching a play from the New York Shakespeare Festival on TV and being enthralled by it. I'm fairly certain it was...
ArtsJournal (Free subscription) | 11/13/2009
"Papp mostly appears as a kind of theatrical superhero, arriving to give a crucial green light, to fire a director, to change a second act, to shake a cast up or to raise impossibly large sums of money in a single bound."...
New York Times (Free subscription) | 11/07/2009
If Joseph Papp had had his way, “Free for All,” Kenneth Turan’s newly published oral history of Papp and the Public Theater he helped found, would never have seen the light of day.
Cinematical (Free subscription) | 12/02/2009
Forget Pirates of the Caribbean . Forget musicals like My Fair Lady . My favorite swashbucklers don't have an Aerosmith swagger or terrible speech troubles. They hold their own against the very model of a modern major general. In 1980, theatrical producer and creator of the New York Shakespeare Festival Joseph Papp brought Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance to the Delacorte...
Cinematical (Free subscription) | 12/02/2009
Forget Pirates of the Caribbean . Forget musicals like My Fair Lady . My favorite swashbucklers don't have an Aerosmith swagger or terrible speech troubles. They hold their own against the very model of a modern major general. In 1980, theatrical producer and creator of the New York Shakespeare Festival Joseph Papp brought Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance to the Delacorte...
BOOKSTEVE'S LIBRARY (Free subscription) | 12/02/2009
... scenes, it's more interesting as one of the producers is listed as the legendary Broadway producer Joseph Papp , founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival! Equally legendary record producer Phil Ramone is one of the folks listed as being responsible for the film's score! Based on a play by playwright Dennis Reardon who had worked with Papp before, THE MIND SNATCHERS turned...
New York Times (Free subscription) | 11/13/2009
One of the best lines in “Free for All,” the big, bouncy new oral history of Joseph Papp and the , isn’t about Papp at all. It’s about the mesmerizing effect the director had — and still has — on playwrights. “I think if an Eskimo wrote a play,” the playwright James Kirkwood says, “he’d put it on an ice floe and push it toward Mike Nichols.” FREE FOR ALL Joe Papp, the Public...
Timothy Birdnow (Free subscription) | 11/07/2009
... about a block from the Astor Place Library, now the home of the Public Theater started by the late Joseph Papp. The theater had also been formerly a Jewish refugee housing center both before and after WWII. II. You can see a brass plaque near the front entrance attesting to that. It was where I spent my first night in America with my parents in 1949. As I read the ad in the newspaper...
Cinema Blend (Free subscription) | 11/03/2009
... in the New York theater scene with roles in everything from "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Joseph Papp Public Theater to "The King And I" on Broadway. Many moviegoers' first exposure to Avari was in the role of Kasuf in the 1994 science fiction blockbuster Stargate. It was a challenging role that required Avari to embody a character almost entirely through expression and gesture,...
The Boombox Music Blog (Free subscription) | 10/29/2009
... to be "backed" by Simmons, Nas and the FFEU. In April, the FFEU awarded LL Cool J the Joseph Papp Racial Harmony Award at an event held at Simmons' home. The award is named after the organization's late co-founder and "honors individuals for their efforts in promoting diversity and ethnic tolerance through their business and personal endeavors."
