The musical — based on the Jules Verne novel “Around the World in 80 Days” — was a flop and never properly recorded. A handful of songs were featured in a very abridged performance on The Mercury Summer Theatre of the Air.
At the start of the documentary “New Deal for Artists,” Pulitzer Prize winner Studs Terkel — who got his start in the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project — laments that the contribution the New Deal and WPA made to the arts is not taught in schools and has been lost to history.
The remastered and re-released “New Deal for Artists” is narrated by Orson Welles, himself a beneficiary of the Federal Theater Project. In addition to Welles and Terkel, the WPA aided thousands including writers Richard Wright, Margaret Walker and Ralph Ellison; painters Diego Rivera, Jackson Pollock and James Brooks; and actors Will Geer, John Houseman and Howard Da Silva.
The USC School of Cinematic Arts movie recounts how a 20-year-old Orson Welles adapted and directed a Federal Theatre Project production of “Macbeth” in Harlem in 1936.
“Voodoo Macbeth,” a film recounting the 1936 production, will be an official selection at the Harlem International Film Festival in May. It will be screened at the AMC Magic Johnson Harlem 9 Theatres.
The 1981 documentary “New Deal for Artists” is a look back at the WPA and the most ambitious government-supported arts program since the Italian Renaissance.
The Orson Welles-directed “Caesar” was described by one critic as “the most exciting, the most imaginative, the most topical, the most awesome and the most absorbing of the season’s new productions.”
Orson Welles’ long-believed lost footage shot for the 1938 stage comedy “Too Much Johnson” was preserved by the George Eastman Museum’s Moving Image Department and first shown in 2013.
Porchlight Music Theatre will utilize the only surviving recording of a portion of “Around the World.’ In addition, Porchlight Artistic Director Michael Weber will talk with Wellesnet administrator Ray Kelly about the Broadway production’s history.
The Stony Creek Theatre in Branford, Connecticut, where Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre staged the ill-fated Too Much Johnson in 1938, has been reborn as the Legacy Theatre.
Orson Welles, with the support of singer Eartha Kitt and Gate Theatre founders Micheal MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards, staged An Evening with Orson Welles at three stops in West Germany in August 1950. Performances began at the Frankfurt Zoo theater before moving on to Hamburg and Munich. An Evening with Orson Welles, under the direction […]
By MATTHEW ASPREY GEAR (Marching Song: A Play by Orson Welles with Roger Hill; edited by Todd Tarbox. 178 pp. Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.) Like a few other American giants — Mark Twain and Duke Ellington come to mind — Orson Welles left behind vast archives of unreleased work in varying states of completion. He’s […]
Staten Island OutLOUD will present a stage reading of the play Moby Dick–Rehearsed by Orson Welles on February 1, 2020. The reading will take place at the Everything Goes Book Cafe and Neighborhood Stage on 208 Bay Street in Staten Island, New York, at 8 p.m. The National Endowment for the Arts chose Staten Island OutLOUD […]
By RAY KELLY For decades, Todd Tarbox has assisted Orson Welles biographers and scholars by providing them access to the archive of his late grandfather, Roger “Skipper” Hill, headmaster at the former Todd School for Boys. In 2013, Tarbox published Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts, a play recounting the two […]
By RAY KELLY Following its world premiere at The Pearl last summer, Mercury Man: The Last Performance of Orson Welles returns to Ontario for seven shows as part of the Hamilton Fringe Festival 2019 on July 18–28. The 90-minute drama was called a “smart, fun show with a nostalgic kick” in a four-star review by […]
The long-awaited renovation of the Stony Creek Theatre, where Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre staged the ill-fated Too Much Johnson in 1938, will get underway Thursday, June 6, in Branford, Connecticut. Once a chapel-turned-movie house near the Thimble Islands, the Stony Creek Theatre became a home for community theater and summer stock productions during […]
“Moby Dick – Rehearsed” runs June 8 through September 29.
A planned production of Adapting Don Quixote is being billed as the world’s first “supercut-opera,” as it will take previous adaptations — from theater, opera, films and song — and build a new work. In a narrative driven by Orson Welles’ attempt to bring Don Quixote to the screen, the audience will experience three completely […]
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group of Maryland will publish “Marching Song” in August.
Maverick, a new play set during filmmaker Orson Welles’ final months, will run February 6 through March 2 at the Connelly Theater in New York’s East Village. The play is based on the real-life happenings of Frank Beacham, a young video maker, who was given the creative opportunity to work with Welles in the months […]
By MIKE TEAL Composer Daron Hagen will direct the world-premiere of his new work, “Orson Rehearsed,” at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago on Saturday, September 15, and Sunday, September, 16. Mr. Hagen describes his work as “a 70-minute, multi-media, Joycean stream-of-consciousness dreamscape, comprised of the Zuzu’s petals-like memory shards of life, streaming through the mind […]
