#leopoldstadt

[to-know-how-it-ends]

open Jewish identity and culture onstage my beloved...

leopoldstadt/parade/fiddler on the roof/falsettos/funny girl/prayer for the french republic

[beanthazar]

+ bonus:

[itsgrapes-exe]

https://playbill.com/article/leopoldstadt-and-arcadia-playwright-sir-tom-stoppard-dies-at-88

Leopoldstadt and Arcadia Playwright Sir Tom Stoppard Dies at 88

Stoppard's prolific playwriting career earned him the most Tony Awards for Best Play in theatrical history.

[olympain]

Best performance by an actor in a featured role in a play — Brandon Uranowitz, Leopoldstadt

[sherbertilluminated]

Brandon Uranowitz in the Ragtime revival has me thinking about Leopoldstadt again...not the best of Tom Stoppard's plays but one that means an outsize amount to me. Not just because I ended up living in the 2. Bezirk last summer, but because I saw it on Broadway my first year of college, and in the hollow between the second and third acts realized that:

Brandon's character is named Nathan because he's the one who comes back to the family house in the last scene, presumably in a reference to the first scene of Nathan the Wise, and

I was going to keep doing Comparative Literature forever probably.

Thanks Tom Stoppard; may your memory be a blessing.

[x-heesy]

„​Im already against next war“ #peaceonearth

Augarten Vienna 1020

The Augarten is a public park of 52.2 hectares (129 acres) situated in the Leopoldstadt, the second district of Vienna, Austria. It contains the city's oldest Baroque park.

#Travelingwithoutmoving

#architecture #architecturephotography #architecturelovers #architectureporn #architecturedesign #architecturelover #architecturephoto #architecturedaily #architecture_hunter #architecturedetail #architecturephotos #architecturedose #architectureanddesign #architecturelife #architecturegram #architecturelove #architecturephotograpy #architectures #architectureinspiration #architecture_view #architektur #architekturfotografie #architekturfotograf #architektur_erleben #architekturliebe #architekturporn #architekturelovers

Why Did We Fire the Gun? by Waldeck, Zeebee 🎵

#fromviennawithlove

[power-chords]

I just watched Billy Bathgate and it was bananas. I’m obsessed. I saw Leopoldstadt on Broadway in 2022 and the press angle at the time was that Tom Stoppard was finally openly addressing his heritage in his work, and I guess everybody decided to collectively repress their memory of this movie’s existence, Stoppard included. I can kind of understand why, there’s a definite Philip Roth by way of Derbyshire vibe in there, and you either despise Philip Roth for being a pig and a shanda or you get a secret thrill (maybe not-so-secret) out of the Bad Jews, whether they were self-hating or gangsters or maybe self-hating gangsters. Me, I find a spoonful of venom helps the sentimentality go down. And Stoppard actually got dealt a much, much more fucked up hand in life — it was the price he paid to live, to become a converso for the Crown, so to speak. Nathan Fischbein says it best in Leopoldstadt, speaking to Leo, the author addressing a version of himself: “No one is born eight years old. Leonard Chamberlain’s life is Leo Rosenbaum’s life continued. His family is your family. But you live as if without history, as if you throw no shadow behind you.”

[angrytheatremaker]

Personal Remembrances of Tom Stoppard

I wanted to write this a couple of days ago, but time constraints and life things got in the way. I'm writing it now because I have a moment, and because I very much want to say something about Tom Stoppard.

To be clear, I never once met the man. I would have been pleased and proud to have done so, but it was not to be. He will never know what his work meant to me as a reader, as a writer, or as a member of the audience.

As a reader, I first read a copy of R&G by chance when I was 21. It knocked me out and rearranged something in my head; I've never been the same since. Heady stuff for someone in their early twenties--I've read other plays by Stoppard since then, but that was the moment that imprinted itself on my memory.

As a writer, I was under the Stoppardian influence when I wrote my first full-length play, which was essentially a love letter to R&G but riffing on Richard III. As originally written it could have drawn charges of plagiarism. I revised it and added a framing device in 2019 after my mother died, writing in the feverish conviction that life was a fragile thing and I had but so much time to get it done.

I have never seen a Stoppard play in person. I have almost certainly watched several of the films he wrote or doctored, knowingly or unknowingly, and I have probably cheered without realizing at some Stoppardian turn of phrase. It goes without saying that I watched the film version of R&G in full, no breaks, and the time galloped by as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern grappled in vain with their inescapable fate.

And then...and then. Then there was Leopoldstadt. At the time it debuted I hadn't a hope of getting my hot little hands on a pro-shot of the stage production, so the best I could do was wait for my local library to get a copy of the script. The minute it did arrive I'm not ashamed to say I pounced. The great music of Stoppard's words washed over my eyes and danced in my head; the devastating heart of the play hit me hard as someone who also knew what it was to circle back late to a rich Jewish heritage I barely knew existed.

Thank you, Tom Stoppard. Thank you for all you have done and continue to do. May your memory be for a blessing.