High School Tony Awards Honor Schools' Biggest Nerds, Losers

From: Publicity Intern LA (Focus Features)
To: Me. Gil.
Subject: contact info
Hello,
I came across your blog while researching Broadway blogs for the new Focus Features film--and musical--"Hamlet 2."
Could you please send me your contact information (full name, mailing/email address and phone number)? I am compiling a list of Broadway blogs and it would help to have this information if we were to contact you.
Thanks,
Stephanie WITHHELD
Online Publicity Intern
Focus Features

Hi there,

I'm happy to give you my name, it is Gil Varod, and as you've figured out my e-mail address is [gil{at}broadwayabridged{dot}com]. However, even though you've sufficiently convinced me that you do in fact work for Focus Features (your "from" e-mail address did the trick!) I'm not convinced that I should be giving you my personal phone number and postal mailing address all willy-nilly.

What are you planning on contacting me for or to do? Am I going to get phonecalls in the middle of the night, day after day, asking me if I've seen Hamlet 2 yet and why not? Am I going to get on your postal mailing list for various sorts of junkmail for the next five years? Or one day, am I going to go home and find out that you've sent me a package containing a kit for me to take ten thousand friends to a screening of Hamlet 2?

That would be fantastic. I'm pretty popular and I do have a lot of friends, so I'm glad you offered at such a high number. Ten thousand tickets would probably suffice. Although... I don't know of a movie theater that holds ten thousand friends in a single showing. I'd have to split the ten thousand friends into twelve and a half showings at 800 people each. And that would be really inconvenient for me, because what if two people wanted to sit together, and I ended up separating them into two different showings?

Geez, this would be more difficult than planning seating at a wedding. You've put me into a very precarious position, you know. Maybe you should have thought this out better.

Sincerely,
Gil

you'll have to apologize for me not properly capitalizing things. my left shift key came off and i've learned that in day-to-day typing, i rarely ever use the right shift key. argh.

anyway, yes, i am the co-author of a play that was selected to be part of the 2008 new york international fringe festival. it's called time, et. al.: a cautionary tale about love and time travel and it's a science fiction dark comedy that i'm quite proud of. and apparently, off-off-blogway's interest was peeked by it! or at least by the title!

i promise not to turn this blog into a forum for my private, separate projects. i'll bug you once when i actually have www.timeetal.com working, and a second time when tickets go onsale, and that'll be it.

2013? The future looks SCARY!

NEW YORK - The New York City Opera commissioned Charles Wuorinen to compose an opera based on "Brokeback Mountain," the 1997 short story by Annie Proulx that became the basis for a 2005 movie that won three Academy Awards.

The opera is scheduled to premiere in spring 2013, City Opera said Sunday. It will be City Opera's second Wuorinen premiere, following "Haroun and the Sea of Stories," which was based on a Salman Rushdie novel and opened in October 2004.

"Ever since encountering Annie Proulx's extraordinary story I have wanted to make an opera on it, and it gives me great joy that Gerard Mortier and New York City Opera have given me the opportunity to do so," Wuorinen said in a statement.

"Brokeback Mountain" is a cowboy romance about two ranch-hand buddies who start a homosexual affair when they meet on the fictional mountain in 1963.

Sometimes I think Jim Hill just likes to get my proverbial feathers ruffled:

There reportedly has been some talk at Disney Theatrical about possibly bringing "Beauty" back to the Big Apple as a holiday treat. You know? For a short seasonal run like the 2006 revival of "Annie" or the Old Globe Theatre's version of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" ?

Yeah actually I don't think know what "proverbial" means. I suppose there's the interwebs for that, but then I'd have to... open a new tab.

I'm glad to see that SDav 10495 on BroadwayWorld also likes to add the word "Electric Bugaloo" to everything ever:

Yesterday, three performers (Jake Friedman, Rachel Pincus, and Ron Varod) joined Michael Gilboe and I to do two more recordings of "Broadway Abridged: Live!' for the Broadway Bullet podcast. Might be another episode or two until they're broadcast, but I hope it'll be as much fun to listen to as it was to do. We did Les Miserables and Spring Awakening this time around... I think they'll air in that order. As per usual, the scripts are just a little different, with a few new jokes and some stuff you couldn't really do in "print" form.

When we were done with the Spring Awakening one, Ron picked up a guitar and we essentially "scored" the entire thing... hopefully you can catch when he basically breaks out into "I am barely breathing". And the ending is kind of perfect... I won't ruin that for you.

I'll post when Broadway Bullet broadcasts the episode with the next Abridged recording. I think neither will make the June 5th show, so the first of the two may not air until June 17th.