Ladies Night (play)

Last updated

Ladies' Night is a play by the New Zealand writers Stephen Sinclair and Anthony McCarten about a group of unemployed workers who develop a male strip show.

New Zealand Country in Oceania

New Zealand is a sovereign island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. The country geographically comprises two main landmasses—the North Island, and the South Island —and around 600 smaller islands. It has a total land area of 268,000 square kilometres (103,500 sq mi). New Zealand is situated some 2,000 kilometres (1,200 mi) east of Australia across the Tasman Sea and roughly 1,000 kilometres (600 mi) south of the Pacific island areas of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga. Because of its remoteness, it was one of the last lands to be settled by humans. During its long period of isolation, New Zealand developed a distinct biodiversity of animal, fungal, and plant life. The country's varied topography and its sharp mountain peaks, such as the Southern Alps, owe much to the tectonic uplift of land and volcanic eruptions. New Zealand's capital city is Wellington, while its most populous city is Auckland.

Stephen Sinclair is a New Zealand playwright, screenwriter and novelist. He is the co-author of stage comedy sensation Ladies Night, which continues to be performed throughout the world. In 2001, the French version won the prestigious Molière Award for stage comedy of the year. Other plays include The Bellbird and The Bach, both of which are prescribed texts for Drama Studies in New Zealand secondary schools.

Anthony McCarten New Zealand writer

Anthony McCarten is a New Zealand-born novelist, playwright, journalist, television writer, and filmmaker. He is best known for writing the biographical films The Theory of Everything (2014), Darkest Hour (2017), and Bohemian Rhapsody (2018).

Contents

Performances

It was first performed in December 1987 at Auckland's Mercury Theatre and is the most commercially successful play in New Zealand's theatre history. [1] It had several national sell-out tours in the UK since 1990 and has been translated into sixteen languages. It continues to play worldwide to popular acclaim. In 2001, the Paris production at the Théâtre Rive Gauche in a French adaptation by Jacques Collard received the Molière Award for Best Comedy.

Théâtre Rive Gauche theatre in Paris, France

The Théâtre Rive Gauche is a theatre in Paris in France located at 6, rue de la Gaîté in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. It is owned by the Edgar Entertainment Society, which also owns the Edgar Café and the Edgar Theatre located at 58 Edgar-Quinet Boulevard in the same borough. The auditorium has 400 seats and hosts contemporary productions.

Molière Award award

The Molière Award recognises achievement in live French theatre and is the national theatre award of France. The awards are presented and decided by the Association professionnelle et artistique du théâtre (APAT) and supported by the French Ministry of Culture at an annual ceremony, called the Nuit des Molières in Paris. The awards are given for French productions and performances.

Development

The first season was workshopped with the actors for month before opening, with the season rapidly selling out. Actors included Bruce Hopkins, Michael Lawrence, Shane Dawson, Nigel Harbrow, Ross Duncan and Alison Bruce.

Raymond Bruce Hopkins is an actor from New Zealand, most famous for his portrayal of Gamling in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy by Peter Jackson and for playing the voice of evil alien Choobo on Power Rangers Ninja Storm. He is also the founding director of ActionActors, an actor-specific temporary employment agency.

Full Monty lawsuit

In 1998, McCarten launched a multimillion-pound lawsuit in California, US, against the producers of the 1997 film The Full Monty , which has a strikingly similar theme and was the highest-grossing British film at the time. [2] It was dismissed because the film had been made in England. [3]

<i>The Full Monty</i> 1997 British comedy-drama film

The Full Monty is a 1997 British comedy film directed by Peter Cattaneo, starring Robert Carlyle, Mark Addy, William Snape, Steve Huison, Tom Wilkinson, Paul Barber and Hugo Speer. The screenplay was written by Simon Beaufoy. The film is set in Sheffield, England and, starting off with a travelogue of the city in 1972, tells the story of six unemployed men, four of them former steel workers, who decide to form a male striptease act in order to gather enough money to get somewhere else and for the main character, Gaz, to be able to see his son. Gaz declares that their show will be better than the Chippendales dancers because they will go "the full monty"—strip all the way—hence the film's title.

Thus, McCarten and Sinclair filed a £180 million English lawsuit against the producers of The Full Monty in 1998. [4] They claim that the film blatantly infringed on their play Ladies Night, which toured both Britain and New Zealand. [5] [6] Anthony McCarten and Stephen Sinclair created a website containing their play in response to statements from the producers of The Full Monty that claimed the two productions were not alike. The underlying rights were attributed to co-producer, Paul Bucknor, and the lawsuit was settled out of court; as part of the agreement, the website containing Ladies Night was shut down. [7]

Related Research Articles

Stephen Sondheim American composer and lyricist

Stephen Joshua Sondheim is an American composer and lyricist known for more than a half-century of contributions to musical theatre. Sondheim has received an Academy Award, eight Tony Awards, eight Grammy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, a Laurence Olivier Award, and a 2015 Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Terrence McNally American playwright

Terrence McNally is an American playwright, librettist, and screenwriter.

Joanna Gleason is a Canadian actress and singer. She is a Tony Award-winning musical theatre actress and has also had a number of notable film and TV roles.

Martin McDonagh British-Irish film director and playwright

Martin Faranan McDonagh is an Irish-British playwright, screenwriter, producer, and director. Born and brought up in London, the son of Irish parents, he is considered among the most acclaimed living Irish playwrights. A winner of the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film, McDonagh has been nominated for three other Academy Awards, and in 2018 won three BAFTA Awards from four nominations and two Golden Globe Awards from three nominations for his film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Michael Cerveris American actor

Michael Cerveris is an American actor, singer, and guitarist. He has performed in many stage musicals and plays, including several Stephen Sondheim musicals: Assassins, Sweeney Todd, Road Show, and Passion. In 2004, Cerveris won the Tony Award as Best Featured Actor in a Musical for Assassins as John Wilkes Booth. In 2015, he won his second Tony Award as Best Actor in a Musical for Fun Home as Bruce Bechdel.

David Yazbek is an American writer, musician, composer, and lyricist. He wrote the music and lyrics for the Broadway musicals The Full Monty (2000), Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (2005), Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (2010), The Band's Visit (2017), and Tootsie (2019).

Ladies' Night may refer to:

Jack O'Brien is an American director, producer, writer and lyricist. He served as the Artistic Director of the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, California from 1981 through the end of 2007.

Emily Skinner, also known as Emily Scott Skinner, is a Tony-nominated American stage actress and singer. She has played leading roles in such Broadway productions as Prince of Broadway, 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'The Cher Show'. She has sung on concert stages around the world and on numerous recordings.

Tony McHale is a British actor, writer, director and producer, who is known for starring in Coronation Street and also known as a "stooge" to Jeremy Beadle on Game For A Laugh and later Beadle's About. He trained at the Rose Bruford College. He also enjoyed a long stint as a writer/story consultant/director on the top rated BBC1 soap opera EastEnders from its conception to the mid 1990s. He co-created BBC medical drama Holby City, and served as its executive producer and showrunner from 2007 to 2010. Tony also served as a core writer on numerous other TV dramas.

Jason D. Danieley is an American actor, singer, concert performer and recording artist. He was married to fellow performer, Marin Mazzie.

<i>The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency</i> (TV series) television series

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency is a television comedy-drama series, produced by the BBC in conjunction with HBO, and based on the novels of the same name by Alexander McCall Smith. The novels focus on the story of a detective agency opened by Mma Ramotswe and her courtship with the mechanic Mr. JLB Matekoni. The series was filmed on location in Botswana and was seen as one of the first major film or television productions to be undertaken in Botswana..

McCarten is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:

<i>The Theory of Everything</i> (2014 film) 2014 film by James Marsh about physicist Stephen Hawking

The Theory of Everything is a 2014 biographical romantic drama film which is set at Cambridge University and details the life of the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. It was directed by James Marsh and adapted by Anthony McCarten from the memoir Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen by Jane Hawking, which deals with her relationship with her ex-husband, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, his diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and his success in physics. The film stars Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones, with Charlie Cox, Emily Watson, Simon McBurney, Christian McKay, Harry Lloyd, and David Thewlis featured in supporting roles. The film had its world premiere at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival on 7 September 2014. It had its UK premiere on 1 January 2015.

Philip Bulcock is an English actor who has appeared in numerous award-winning film and theatre productions. He was part of the original cast of the Olivier Award-winning UK West End production of Jersey Boys in which he played The Four Seasons' bassist and vocal arranger, Nick Massi.

<i>The Full Monty</i> (play) Play

The Full Monty is a comedy play written by Simon Beaufoy, from his original screenplay for the 1997 film The Full Monty. It made its world premiere at the Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield in February 2013, before touring the United Kingdom. A West End production was launched at the Noël Coward Theatre in February 2014. A new production opened at the Manchester Opera House on Thursday 11 September 2014 and tours the UK through to May 2015.

Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures Theatre arm of WarnerMedia

Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures is the live show, stageplay and musical production arm of WarnerMedia. The company forms a part of Warner Bros., one of three major business segments of WarnerMedia. Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures is led by Mark Kaufman.

References

  1. ↑ Stephen Sinclair, The Oxford Companion to New Zealand literature . Retrieved 2010-05-10.
  2. ↑ "Writers sue over The Full Monty". BBC News. 1998-03-04. Retrieved 2010-05-10.
  3. ↑ "Writers lose Full Monty copyright case". The Scotsman. June 12, 1998. Archived from the original on November 4, 2012. Retrieved 2010-10-09.
  4. ↑ "Full Monty Producers Sued by 2 New Zealand Playwrights". Playbill . Playbill.com. 3 March 1998. Archived from the original on 23 March 2014. Retrieved 22 March 2014.
  5. ↑ "Writers sue over The Full Monty", BBC News, 4 March 1998.
  6. ↑ 'Ladies' fight.', Campbell, Gordon. New Zealand Listener p. 25-26; 26 September 1998.
  7. ↑ "Hollywood Plagiarism", Weird Realm Film Reviews. Retrieved 1 October 2007.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.