actor61

Phrases I just never want to hear again:
 
At the end of the day
In terms of
How did this impact you?
 
and finally,
 
Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims and their families and friends.

The Boathouse Scene. Sigh.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p0wzNZTa6g

The last scene of Maurice when he and Rupert Graves finally find each other in the boathouse is one of the most erotic and romantic gay scenes ever filmed and has become my happy place! I go there whenever I think romance has died.

Phrases I just never want to hear again:
 
At the end of the day
In terms of
How did this impact you?
 
and finally,
 
Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims and their families and friends.

Phrases I just never want to hear again:
 
At the end of the day
In terms of
How did this impact you?
 
and finally,
 
Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims and their families and friends.

Phrases I just never want to hear again:
 
At the end of the day
In terms of
How did this impact you?
 
and finally,
 
Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims and their families and friends.

Back in the dark ages, I took a secretarial course and there was a large emphasis on proper letting writing form. We were taught to almost always open a letter with "I hope this letter finds you well", and to close with "Yours very truly." I never understood if "I hope this letter finds you well" meant I hope the letter arrived unharmed or if it meant I hope you're feeling well. Similarly, how could I be yours very truly if I'd never met you?

I love this thread! I moved to Los Angeles from London in 1977 and saw some of the productions quoted above. I had seen The Beaux Stratagem at the Old Vic in London but thought the L.A. production was somehow better; maybe because Maggie Smith by then was world famous and people were so happy to see her being so funny, and she seemed very relaxed. The Crucible with Heston was horrendous. I also saw him do A Man for All Seasons and Long Day's Journey Into Night. I just always thought he was terrible in everything he did. Streetcar with Dunaway and Voight was very odd. She was so over-the-top that I lost interest, and he was far too cerebral. You mentioned seeing musicals in their pre-Broadway tryouts and I saw a lot of those too. They're Playing Our Song was at the Ahmanson prior to moving to New York and it was delightful with Lucie Arnaz and Robert Klein. Evita at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was thrilling and everybody knew it was going to be a huge hit. Raul Esparza and Brooke Shields did a musical version of a Steve Martin film about a huckster preacher that was so horrible I can't remember the name. They replaced her and took the show to New York but it still flopped - deservedly. I also saw the pre Broadway tryout of Nine to Five at the Ahmanson with Alison Janney in the Jane Fonda role. The night I was there, Dolly Parton was in the audience taking notes. I mentioned seeing the musical version of Gone With the Wind in London and there was a production of it at the Dorothy Chandler with Leslie Ann Warren as Scarlett that closed in L.A. It was as dreadful as the London production had been. I liked Night of the Iguana quite a bit and think Chamberlain can be quite splendid in the right roles. I have also seen him in Cyrano, The Sound of Music, and he was excellent as the malevolent father in a production of The Heiress at the Pasadena Playhouse a few years ago. The Geffen Theatre used to be called the Westwood Playhouse and they did some very interesting things. I worked there when it was still the Westwood and it was a jewel box of a theatre. I saw David Hyde Pierce and Uta Hagen in Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks there (did I get that right?). Lousy play but they were magnificent together. Streamers had Richard Thomas, Bruce Davison, Pat Hingle and Ralph Meeker and was chilling and powerful. Annette Benning did Hedda Gabler there and was lovely but badly directed. One of the best performances I have ever seen on a stage was given by Laurie Metcalfe as the mother in All My Sons at the Geffen with Len Cariou and Neil Patrick Harris. Speaking of Richard Chamberlain, he and Brooke Shields did a stage version of The Exorcist at the Geffen that was pretty awful. While the Westwood was undergoing its transformation into the Geffen Playhouse, they used a theatre near the Veterans Hospital and that's where I saw a superb production of Take Me Out with Jeremy Sisto.
 
The Pasadena Playhouse can be interesting but it's hit or miss. They tend do do "star casting" and some of the stars just shouldn't have been offered contracts. Chamberlain was good in the aforementioned production of The Heiress but the soap opera star, Heather Toms, who played Catherine was really bad. They did a terrible production of The Glass Menagerie with Susan Sullivan as Amanda. The apartment looked like it had been done by Design on a Dime - all shabby chic - and Sullivan didn't have a hair out of place. They did a revival of Camelot as a sort of chamber production; no ensemble, and 3 major characters - King Pellinore, Merlin and Morgan Le Fey - were cut. Guinevere and Lancelot had a nude scene at the end of Act One. I'm still shuddering. I quite liked 110 In the Shade there with Marin Mazzie. She was far too pretty for the role but she sang the hell out of it. There was a superb performance by the man who played her oldest brother, and the rain at the end of the show was very moving in an odd way.
 
Los Angeles is a bit of a theatrical wasteland. Apart from the major Equity houses, which don't hire many local actors, there is the dreaded Equity waiver scene, which is undergoing a major overhaul of its policies by the union at the moment. A lot of the theatres are hole-in-the-wall venues that seat under 100 (which means salaries and union conditions are waived) and a lot of them are dues paying companies. I made the mistake of joining one of them out of a desire to do anything in between Equity paying gigs and paid $85 a month for the privilege of maybe being cast in something. That being said, I have seen some really wonderful stuff in Equity waiver houses but usually they were wonderful because of the acting and not any production values. For example, I saw a production of Shakespeare's Henry IV at the Banshee that was done on a tiny stage without sets and was stunning and the Colony in Burbank (before it went Equity) did some very good stuff too but the majority of the non-Union, actor subsidized productions was crap.

Phrases I just never want to hear again:
 
At the end of the day
In terms of
How did this impact you?
 
and finally,
 
Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims and their families and friends.

I have a dentist I like very much. Her office is a 5 minute walk from my place, she's professional, thorough and very pleasant. My problem is the upselling. I go every 6 months for check-up, x-rays and cleaning and she insists every time that I should come in every 3 months because there are some "issues", although she never specifies what these issues are. My dental insurance will not cover visits every 3 months; my 6 month visits are 100% covered. When I tell her this, she says, "We can make a deal with you. My office manager will be happy to make payment arrangements." I always decline. When I'm in the chair, she tells me all the things I could have done, most of them cosmetic, and again states that her office manager will make a payment arrangement with me for what is not covered by my insurance. I decline this as well. I'm 66 years old, I'm in excellent health, take no medications except low dose aspirin, have always had excellent dental hygiene and care and really don't feel the need to have bleaching, plugs, caps, fluoride treatments or any of the other selective treatments she suggests. I had braces in my 50s and wear retainers at night. She looked at them on my last visit and told me she could make new ones for me for $500. When I answered that the ones I'm using worked just fine, her laughing response was "You'll have to pay a lot more if your teeth go crooked again." I left pretty angry that day and considered finding another dentist. I'm really beginning to resent being treated like a customer rather than a patient and politely told her this on my last visit. Have any of you experienced this as well?

I ride the Chicago "L" every day and witness non sexual man and woman spreading on every trip. Women tend to sit in one seat, put their purse on the one next to them and if they have a shopping bag and a third seat is free, then they deposit it there. Then, they pull out their cell phones and plug in their headsets so that they can ignore any comments or looks they might receive. And it's usually younger woman who do this. I have been on trains so crowded that you can barely move and still they won't relinquish the 2 seats occupied by their bags.
 
Man spreading is usually a sprawl. The guy slumps down in his seat, spreads his legs, then drapes his arm(s) over adjoining seats. If he has a backpack, that gets deposited on the empty seat next to him but for the most part, it's the full body sprawl that prevents you from taking the seat next to him.
 
I like the signs posted on the trains that say, "Did your purse buy a ticket?" that everybody ignores.

I was a dancer in a company of "Carousel" about 30 years ago. The music is glorious and it is famous for its "serious" book but I found being in it, in spite of very challenging and beautiful choreography, a chore. It is not a happy show. The revival for which Audra McDonald won her first Tony was remarkably good and beautifully sung but it's still a show that requires a lot of work both onstage and in the audience. Some consider it R&H's best score and the music is thrilling but the spouse abuse, the suicide, Billy's return from heaven only to slap his kid doesn't make it a show you leave feeling happy to have spent 3 hours watching.

I kind of liken it to Hitchcock's "The Birds". You don't know why any of it is happening. You're just plopped into it with little to no explanation. However, "The Birds" is a far superior film to "A Quiet Place."

The Boathouse Scene. Sigh.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p0wzNZTa6g

I think everything she does is calculated, including her support of Trump. I remember when she was married to Tom Arnold and went on talk shows with him where he talked about being sexually abused as a child and she talked about having multiple personality disorder. Then, after she dumped Arnold, she returned to the talks shows to discuss how small his penis is and how lousy sex with him was. She makes the same sexually based, outrageous remarks Trump does to appeal to the base that watches her. As a previous poster remarked, Trump called her the day after the show premiered but it took him a while to call the soldier's widow and then opened his remarks to her with "I hear you're a big fan of mine" or some such. I have a feeling that in "real" life, Barr is probably a decent person - I don't think actors of the caliber of Goodman and Metcalf would put up with her for 5 minutes if she weren't. But she knows exactly what she's doing in her professional life - she knows how to target her audience, she knows how to raise hackles, she knows how to get laughs and she knows how to get rich in the process. I don't plan on watching the show because I just found the first 2 episodes so ponderous and heavy with issues; some of it was funny but she's a terrible actress. She's lucky to be surrounded by a lot of talented pros on the show. As the above poster said, she looks like a comic reading cue cards most of the time.

I think everything she does is calculated, including her support of Trump. I remember when she was married to Tom Arnold and went on talk shows with him where he talked about being sexually abused as a child and she talked about having multiple personality disorder. Then, after she dumped Arnold, she returned to the talks shows to discuss how small his penis is and how lousy sex with him was. She makes the same sexually based, outrageous remarks Trump does to appeal to the base that watches her. As a previous poster remarked, Trump called her the day after the show premiered but it took him a while to call the soldier's widow and then opened his remarks to her with "I hear you're a big fan of mine" or some such. I have a feeling that in "real" life, Barr is probably a decent person - I don't think actors of the caliber of Goodman and Metcalf would put up with her for 5 minutes if she weren't. But she knows exactly what she's doing in her professional life - she knows how to target her audience, she knows how to raise hackles, she knows how to get laughs and she knows how to get rich in the process. I don't plan on watching the show because I just found the first 2 episodes so ponderous and heavy with issues; some of it was funny but she's a terrible actress. She's lucky to be surrounded by a lot of talented pros on the show. As the above poster said, she looks like a comic reading cue cards most of the time.

I think everything she does is calculated, including her support of Trump. I remember when she was married to Tom Arnold and went on talk shows with him where he talked about being sexually abused as a child and she talked about having multiple personality disorder. Then, after she dumped Arnold, she returned to the talks shows to discuss how small his penis is and how lousy sex with him was. She makes the same sexually based, outrageous remarks Trump does to appeal to the base that watches her. As a previous poster remarked, Trump called her the day after the show premiered but it took him a while to call the soldier's widow and then opened his remarks to her with "I hear you're a big fan of mine" or some such. I have a feeling that in "real" life, Barr is probably a decent person - I don't think actors of the caliber of Goodman and Metcalf would put up with her for 5 minutes if she weren't. But she knows exactly what she's doing in her professional life - she knows how to target her audience, she knows how to raise hackles, she knows how to get laughs and she knows how to get rich in the process. I don't plan on watching the show because I just found the first 2 episodes so ponderous and heavy with issues; some of it was funny but she's a terrible actress. She's lucky to be surrounded by a lot of talented pros on the show. As the above poster said, she looks like a comic reading cue cards most of the time.

I think everything she does is calculated, including her support of Trump. I remember when she was married to Tom Arnold and went on talk shows with him where he talked about being sexually abused as a child and she talked about having multiple personality disorder. Then, after she dumped Arnold, she returned to the talks shows to discuss how small his penis is and how lousy sex with him was. She makes the same sexually based, outrageous remarks Trump does to appeal to the base that watches her. As a previous poster remarked, Trump called her the day after the show premiered but it took him a while to call the soldier's widow and then opened his remarks to her with "I hear you're a big fan of mine" or some such. I have a feeling that in "real" life, Barr is probably a decent person - I don't think actors of the caliber of Goodman and Metcalf would put up with her for 5 minutes if she weren't. But she knows exactly what she's doing in her professional life - she knows how to target her audience, she knows how to raise hackles, she knows how to get laughs and she knows how to get rich in the process. I don't plan on watching the show because I just found the first 2 episodes so ponderous and heavy with issues; some of it was funny but she's a terrible actress. She's lucky to be surrounded by a lot of talented pros on the show. As the above poster said, she looks like a comic reading cue cards most of the time.

I think everything she does is calculated, including her support of Trump. I remember when she was married to Tom Arnold and went on talk shows with him where he talked about being sexually abused as a child and she talked about having multiple personality disorder. Then, after she dumped Arnold, she returned to the talks shows to discuss how small his penis is and how lousy sex with him was. She makes the same sexually based, outrageous remarks Trump does to appeal to the base that watches her. As a previous poster remarked, Trump called her the day after the show premiered but it took him a while to call the soldier's widow and then opened his remarks to her with "I hear you're a big fan of mine" or some such. I have a feeling that in "real" life, Barr is probably a decent person - I don't think actors of the caliber of Goodman and Metcalf would put up with her for 5 minutes if she weren't. But she knows exactly what she's doing in her professional life - she knows how to target her audience, she knows how to raise hackles, she knows how to get laughs and she knows how to get rich in the process. I don't plan on watching the show because I just found the first 2 episodes so ponderous and heavy with issues; some of it was funny but she's a terrible actress. She's lucky to be surrounded by a lot of talented pros on the show. As the above poster said, she looks like a comic reading cue cards most of the time.

For the most part, I enjoyed the new "Roseanne", but I really think they overloaded the opening episodes with "issues" - effeminate (for lack of a better term) grandson, mixed race granddaughter, Trump supporter versus Hillary supporter, limited health care coverage, surrogacy and bullying. I loved the original show and often admired how some episodes were just very funny depictions of daily life. This new version is just top heavy. Admittedly, some of it was funny but I felt like I had been lectured to by the end of the 2nd episode.
 
What was a big surprise was the new show that followed "Black-ish" (now THAT'S a great show), with Oliver Hudson and Jenna Fischer. I think it's called "Splitting Up Together" ? It's produced by Ellen de Generes. I thought it was going to be a generic sitcom with wacky grown-ups and sassy kids and it did have elements of that but it was also very subtly moving at moments, made a lot of sense, and its depiction of the relationship between the parents was really incisive. I also found it very well acted. I'm going to be interested to see how it develops because I think it has potential. I'm also looking forward to the new Zach Braff show - I've always found him very charming and a really good comedic actor without the shlocky sitcom mannerisms that often come with episodic shows. He and Neil Flynn sure have found their niches since "Scrubs" as t.v. and movie dads.

For the most part, I enjoyed the new "Roseanne", but I really think they overloaded the opening episodes with "issues" - effeminate (for lack of a better term) grandson, mixed race granddaughter, Trump supporter versus Hillary supporter, limited health care coverage, surrogacy and bullying. I loved the original show and often admired how some episodes were just very funny depictions of daily life. This new version is just top heavy. Admittedly, some of it was funny but I felt like I had been lectured to by the end of the 2nd episode.
 
What was a big surprise was the new show that followed "Black-ish" (now THAT'S a great show), with Oliver Hudson and Jenna Fischer. I think it's called "Splitting Up Together" ? It's produced by Ellen de Generes. I thought it was going to be a generic sitcom with wacky grown-ups and sassy kids and it did have elements of that but it was also very subtly moving at moments, made a lot of sense, and its depiction of the relationship between the parents was really incisive. I also found it very well acted. I'm going to be interested to see how it develops because I think it has potential. I'm also looking forward to the new Zach Braff show - I've always found him very charming and a really good comedic actor without the shlocky sitcom mannerisms that often come with episodic shows. He and Neil Flynn sure have found their niches since "Scrubs" as t.v. and movie dads.

It is one of the corniest, over sentimentalized pieces of crap I've ever watched and I'm thoroughly addicted to it. Last night, there were 2 new episodes on PBS and as always, I found myself grabbing for a hankie before the first episode was halfway over. I knew that the Jewish lady was going to die and her husband would find God again. I knew that the racist hairdresser would end up friends with the Jamaican midwife. I knew the weakling husband would grow a pair and tell off his mother-in-law. I knew the squeamish, macho husband would end up delivering his wife's baby, and I knew Timothy would develop a crush on the hot au pair from Hungary. And yet I just couldn't stop watching. What is wrong with me???

Boy, have you pushed a button on this one! The use of the word "like" actually makes me angry and it has become so commonplace that it is no longer a fad or a tic. Some of the worst offenders are intelligent people in literate professions. Just listen to Terri Gross on "Fresh Air" or Ira Glass on "This American Life." The 2 best female comics working - Amy Shumer and Tiffany Hadish - use like so much that I can't listen to them for longer than 2 minutes without getting so annoyed that I turn off the t.v.

I was a dancer in a company of "Carousel" about 30 years ago. The music is glorious and it is famous for its "serious" book but I found being in it, in spite of very challenging and beautiful choreography, a chore. It is not a happy show. The revival for which Audra McDonald won her first Tony was remarkably good and beautifully sung but it's still a show that requires a lot of work both onstage and in the audience. Some consider it R&H's best score and the music is thrilling but the spouse abuse, the suicide, Billy's return from heaven only to slap his kid doesn't make it a show you leave feeling happy to have spent 3 hours watching.

I was a dancer in a company of "Carousel" about 30 years ago. The music is glorious and it is famous for its "serious" book but I found being in it, in spite of very challenging and beautiful choreography, a chore. It is not a happy show. The revival for which Audra McDonald won her first Tony was remarkably good and beautifully sung but it's still a show that requires a lot of work both onstage and in the audience. Some consider it R&H's best score and the music is thrilling but the spouse abuse, the suicide, Billy's return from heaven only to slap his kid doesn't make it a show you leave feeling happy to have spent 3 hours watching.