Dr. Maya Cantu
@mayamcantu
Greasepaint Puritan: Boston to 42nd Street in the Queer Backstage Novels of Bradford Ropes, University of Michigan Press ‘24; Drama, Bennington College.
Celebrating the milestone with @dcorr.bsky.social. Halloween is over, but our couple’s costume lives on.
Two very different backstagers at Dorset Theatre Festival and Goodspeed—Theresa Rebeck’ s ‘The Understudy’ a Kafkaesque actor’s nightmare, ‘Crazy for You’ the blissful Absurd of musical comedy. ‘What Causes That?’—‘Who Cares?’ On with the Show.
Hooray for this prescient, audacious and hilarious show getting the balloons it always deserved. And @dcorr.bsky.social and I love our signed copy! Excited to explore the special features.
A thrilling surprise: Teri Ralston (aka the original Jenny) was in the audience, and delivered a delightful and informative Q&A with moderator Steve Wertimer.
At the ‘62 Center in Williamstown for a site-specific screening of ‘Original Cast Album: Company.’ This autographed program extravaganza greets the audience. Love that famous ‘Sweeney Todd’ star Gilda Radner.
A French newspaper illustrator captured Marian Hamilton’s airborne twinkle (fourth from left) at the Casino de Paris in 1926.
Hopwood all but invented queer-coded (if hetero-populated) bedroom farce, as well as co-writing the long-running gothic mystery ‘The Bat.’
And some great backstudio and dressing room shots, including one showing the bond between Hattie McDaniel and her secretary Ruby Berkley Goodwin.
And more theater history from the museum’s excellent Marcel Duchamp retrospective: his collaboratively designed 1935 leather book binding, with Mary Reynolds, of Jarry’s ‘Ubu Roi.’
Four favorites from the fascinating MoMA ‘Face Value’ Hollywood press photography exhibit. Some movie legends, and with Marilyn Miller, one theater great.
'But how strange the change from major to minor.' I love this Carl Van Vechten photo finding the melancholy amid the madcap in #botd Cole Porter's 'Anything Goes,' with William Gaxton and Ethel Merman, 1934.
Following its developmental workshops, this gorgeous adaptation just had its full-staging premiere at Bennington College.
And bonus archival image for Pride: loving Ropes’s close friendship (circa 1937) with Cary Grant and rapport with ‘tops’ Greta Garbo.
From ‘Proper Bostonian’ to vaudeville hoofer to chronicler of gay lives in early show business, ‘Greasepaint Puritan’ goes into & beyond ‘42nd Street’ to explore the many paradoxes in the life and work of Bradford Ropes—& it’s at a 50% discount @uofmpress.bsky.social through July 1! Code: SPRING26.
One more archival find for this thread: Robert Friend, at Yaddo 1947, next to Henri Cartier-Bresson. Robert is back, 4th left.
Robert Friend is also Alfred Kazin's 'Waste Land'-reading Brownsville frenemy and theatergoing companion 'Isrolik' in the latter's 'A Walker in the City.'
Praise from Iris Murdoch, Marianne Moore and Richard Wilbur about the poetry of my great-uncle, Robert Friend. Murdoch: ‘I do like your poems. They produce happiness, as real poetry does.’
And I love these details from A.R. Gurney, who recounted Sondheim, in his college musicals, ‘casting women from Smith and Bennington to supplant the usual all-male hairy-legged kick choruses.’
Remembering this great exhibit at Williams during the ‘Sondheim@90’ celebration in 2020: photos of his college shows as composer and actor (Dan in ‘Night Must Fall;’ Teresias in ‘Oedipus Rex;’ and Henry in ‘The Skin of Our Teeth’).
My Random House drama collection has so many of those play-y titles (though Lanford Wilson doesn’t represent his own ubiquity, and I only have ‘Talley’s Folly’).