| James Joyce's The Dead | |
|---|---|
 Original Broadway Playbill | |
| Music | Shaun Davey |
| Lyrics | Shaun Davey Richard Nelson |
| Book | Richard Nelson |
| Basis | "The Dead" by James Joyce |
| Productions | 1999 Off-Broadway 2000 Broadway |
| Awards | 2000 Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical |
James Joyce's The Dead is a Broadway musical by Richard Nelson and Shaun Davey based upon James Joyce's short story "The Dead".
The musical was originally presented Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons, starting on October 1, 1999. The opening night cast included Blair Brown, Paddy Croft, Brian Davies, Daisy Eagan, Dashiell Eaves, Sally Ann Howes, John Kelly, Brooke Sunny Moriber, Marni Nixon, Alice Ripley, Emily Skinner, Stephen Spinella and Christopher Walken. Musical direction was by Charles Prince, with music co-ordination and percussion by Tom Partington. [1] It transferred to the Belasco Theatre on Broadway on January 11, 2000, where it completed a run of 120 performances before closing on April 16, 2000. [2]
The musical ran at the Kennedy Center (Washington, D.C.), from October 14, 2000 to November 12, 2000, with Faith Prince and Stephen Bogardus as Greta and Gabriel Conroy and Brandon Wardell . [3] The musical had played an earlier engagement at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles from July 11, 2000 to September 3, 2000. [4]
| Year | Award Ceremony | Category | Nominee | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | Drama Desk Award | Outstanding Musical | Nominated | |
| Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical | Stephen Spinella | Won | ||
| Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical | Sally Ann Howes | Nominated | ||
| Outstanding Music | Shaun Davey | Nominated | ||
| Tony Award | Best Musical | Nominated | ||
| Best Book of a Musical | Richard Nelson | Won | ||
| Best Original Score | Shaun Davey and Richard Nelson | Nominated | ||
| Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical | Christopher Walken | Nominated | ||
| Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical | Stephen Spinella | Nominated | ||
Mame is a musical with a book by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee and music and lyrics by Jerry Herman. Originally titled My Best Girl, it is based on the 1955 novel Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis and the 1956 Broadway play of the same name by Lawrence and Lee. A period piece set in New York City and spanning the Great Depression and World War II, it focuses on eccentric bohemian Mame Dennis, whose famous motto is "Life is a banquet and most poor sons of bitches are starving to death." Her fabulous life with her wealthy friends is interrupted when the young son of her late brother arrives to live with her. They cope with the Depression in a series of adventures.
Mary Stuart Masterson is an American actress and director. After making her acting debut as a child in The Stepford Wives (1975), Masterson took a ten-year hiatus to focus on her education. Her early film roles include Heaven Help Us (1985), At Close Range (1986), Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), and Chances Are (1989). Her performance in the film Immediate Family (1989) won her the National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress, and she earned additional praise for her roles in Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) and Benny & Joon (1993).
The Dead is a 1987 drama film directed by John Huston, written by his son Tony Huston, and starring his daughter Anjelica Huston. It is an adaptation of the short story of the same name by James Joyce, which was first published in 1914 as the last story in Dubliners. An international co-production between the United Kingdom, the United States, and West Germany, the film was Huston's last as director, and it was released several months after his death.
"The Dead" is the final short story in the 1914 collection Dubliners by James Joyce. It is by far the longest story in the collection and, at 15,952 words, is almost long enough to be described as a novella. The story deals with themes of love and loss, as well as raising questions about the nature of the Irish identity.
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Stephen Spinella is an American stage, television, and film actor.
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Emily Skinner, also known as Emily Scott Skinner, is a Tony-nominated American actress and singer. She has played leading roles in 11 Broadway productions including New York, New York, Prince of Broadway, The Cher Show, Side Show, Jekyll & Hyde, James Joyce's The Dead, The Full Monty, Dinner at Eight, Billy Elliot, as well as the Actor's Fund Broadway concerts of Dreamgirls and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. She has sung on concert stages around the world and on numerous recordings.
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Jean Hanff Korelitz is an American novelist, playwright, theater producer and essayist.
54 Below is a nonprofit cabaret and restaurant in the basement of Studio 54 in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Run by Broadway producers Steve Baruch, Richard Frankel, Marc Routh and Tom Viertel, 54 Below has hosted shows by such performers as Patti LuPone, Ben Vereen, Sierra Boggess, Peggy King, Lea Salonga, Marilyn Maye, Luann de Lesseps and Barbara Cook.
The Streets of Paris is a musical revue featuring Bobby Clark, Luella Gear, Abbott and Costello and Carmen Miranda, debuted on May 29, 1939 in Boston and on June 19, 1939 in New York. Had two hours and-a-half, with the interval. The musical was staged from June 1939 to 10 February 1940, totaling 274 presentations.
Renee Brna is an American actress and singer. Brna is best known as Meg in the 1st national Broadway tour of Little Women the musical starring Maureen McGovern with Autumn Hurlbert as Beth, Katie Fisher as Jo and Gwen Hollander as Amy. She went on to understudy the leading role of Young Alex/Aaron Ashbrook and Young Thomas Ledbury in the 2007 London transfer to Broadway Coram Boy at the Imperial Theatre. Under the direction of Melly Still the production garnered six Tony Award nominations.
Epiphany in literature refers generally to a visionary moment when a character has a sudden insight or realization that changes their understanding of themselves or their comprehension of the world. The term has a more specialized sense as a literary device distinct to modernist fiction. Author James Joyce first borrowed the religious term "Epiphany" and adopted it into a profane literary context in Stephen Hero (1904–1906), an early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In that manuscript, Stephen Daedalus defines epiphany as "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself." Stephen's epiphanies are moments of heightened poetic perception in the trivial aspects of everyday Dublin life, non-religious and non-mystical in nature. They become the basis of Stephen's theory of aesthetic perception as well as his writing. In similar terms, Joyce experimented with epiphany throughout his career, from the short stories he wrote between 1898 and 1904 which were central to his early work, to his late novel Finnegans Wake (1939). Scholars used Joyce's term to describe a common feature of the modernist novel, with authors as varied as Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Ezra Pound, and Katherine Mansfield all featuring these sudden moments of vision as an aspect of the contemporary mind. Joycean or modernist epiphany has its roots in nineteenth-century lyric poetry, especially the Wordsworthian "spots of time," as well as the sudden spiritual insights that formed the basis of traditional spiritual autobiography. Philosopher Charles Taylor explains the rise of epiphany in modernist art as a reaction against the rise of a "commercial-industrial-capitalist society" during the early twentieth century.