Thom Dunn is a Boston-based writer, musician, and utterly terrible dancer. He is the singer/guitarist for the indie rock/power-pop the Roland High Life, as well as a staff writer for the New York Times’ Wirecutter and a regular contributor at BoingBoing.net. Thom enjoys Oxford commas, metaphysics, and romantic clichés (especially when they involve whiskey), and he firmly believes that Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" is the single greatest atrocity committed against mankind. He is a graduate of Clarion Writer's Workshop at UCSD ('13) & Emerson College ('08).
Not much has changed in the last 50 years, including Bostonians' horrible driving habits.
A (very) short film directed by Chronicle director Josh Trank, who's just been tapped to direct one of the upcoming Star Wars stand-alone spinoffs. Sure, this fun little clip is more than seven years old now, but we can only hope that his contribution to the Star Wars universe is even half as awesome.
Thanks to The AV Club for the find.
If you're still having trouble extrapolating how this is an issue, consider how the narrative structure of television continued to evolve in response to our binge-watching habits. I'm not here to argue about whether or not we are in a "Golden Age of Television" right now, but the truth is, there are some pretty great shows out there right now. The expectations have been raised, as narratives have matured. Networks used to prefer sitcoms because they had a better chance of new viewers tuning in every week. But now, with fewer people relying on live broadcasts, it's changed the way that we interact with TV shows — with episode pacing, exposition, serialized story details, etc. — and those narrative structures will continue to change and evolve.
That is, unless Comcast starts to restrict your bandwidth. Then you only get about 70 hours of streaming a month (to say nothing of the data limitations on the millions of other things you do online). If that happens, then not only are you less inclined to catch up on Game of Thrones, but the writing team on Game of Thrones is less inclined to create quality programming that really grabs you because it's more financially viable for them to create formulaic programming instead, thereby returning television to the "Boob Tube" status of audio-visual brainwashing instead of a compelling narrative medium*.
Perhaps more importantly, if Comcast begins to limit streaming, then my fiance won't be able to listen to Law & Order: SVU every night in order to get to sleep. "How does Law & Order: SVU help her get to sleep," you ask, "when it's a procedural show that mostly consists of horrible, horrible acts of rape and violence against women? Doesn't that give her nightmares or something?" Look, man, I don't understand it either. But if it works for her, then it works me, and then everyone wins, because everyone gets to sleep, so everyone's happy.
DO YOU HEAR THAT, FCC?! MAINTAIN NET NEUTRALITY SO THAT I CAN SLEEP IN PEACE.
*Some folks would argue that binge-watching is in fact the greatest accomplishment of television brainwashing, and that we're even worse off now than we were before. They're probably right, and I'm probably so brainwashed at this point that I'm blindly spouting propaganda in their favor. Oh well.
Here's a little video I put together for the upcoming world premiere of Lydia R. Diamond's Smart People at the Huntington, which starts previews this Friday and runs through June 29. Check it out!
We've also got one of those fancy 35 Below parties planned for it, after the Friday night performance on May 30. $25 gets you tickets + access to the party, including free drinks and live music. So it's basically a pretty sweet deal. Woohoo!
This past weekend, my fiancé closed her production of Becoming Cuba at the Huntington. It was a fantastic for her, as well as a fantastic play — even if some of the reviewers had trouble grasping the idea that a play could have a Latina female as a protagonist (God forbid!), or be set in an historical context without being a "history lesson." I've seen various incarnations of this show...6 times now? And I still don't know anything about the Cuban War of Independence, other than that it happened, and that, in an incredibly over-simplified way, it's kind of the same conflict as what we call the Spanish-American War (meanwhile, we have done shows at the Huntington that could be described as "history lessons," but those were all about white dudes).
ANYWAY, in the end, the show was beautiful and successful, and that's what matter. I previously shared some of the earlier promotional videos that I made for the show, but over the course of its run, I made a few more as well, focusing on the relationship between Bevin and the playwright, Melinda Lopez, as well as the eerie synchronicity between the play and some of the actors' personal lives. Check 'em out:
Meanwhile, fellow playwright / bacon lover / renaissance man John J. King — the so-called "Child Wrangler" on Becoming Cuba — had some fun backstage (no, not like that) with "Chucho," the kid in the play. The two of them wrote a parody of "Royals" by Lorde sung from Chucho's point of view in the play, and I whipped together a quick video for it. I think it's pretty amazing (of course, it could be one of those "you-had-to-be-there" things, but c'mon — Lorde would be way cooler if she sang about guerrilla warfare and syphilis amiright?)
We also had our annual Gala fundraiser at the Huntington last week (in addition to some other, less uplifting news), for which I shot & edited a tribute to MacArthur "Genius" Mary Zimmerman, whom we honored at the event, and shot the footage for our new education video:
So, ya know. I've been busy. What else is new?
Last night was the official opening of Becoming Cuba at the Huntington, which is not only a fantastic show, but also just so happens to be directed by incredibly talented fiancé M. Bevin O'Gara (also I totally made her a website isn't that neat?).
If you're in Boston in the next month, it is absolutely worthy seeing (all personal bias aside). But if that's not enough to convince you, here are a few videos I put together about the show that could do the job just as well.
(And for the record: being paid at your job to edit video with your fiancé's face on a 36" screen is every bit as awkward as it sounds)
Everyone knows I love St. Padraig's Day. And so to celebrate this year, I decided to record cover versions of a few of my favorite Irish folk songs (also the Pogues, which counts). Enjoy!
This past weekend, we began previews for our production of The Seagull at the Huntington. I can say without bias that this is the funniest Chekhov play I've ever seen (and possibly the first time I've actually looked Chekhov to be humorous). But on top of that, the production also features Kate Burton (aka Vice President Sally Langston on Scandal plus like a million other things) and her real-life son, Morgan Ritchie, as the onstage mother-and-son Arkadina and Konstantin, which is pretty cool. Here are two videos I put together about the show, which runs through April 6 at the BU Theatre:
We've got one week left of The Jungle Book (now officially our highest-grossing show of all time), and previews began tonight for The Power of Duff, a new play by Stephen Belber (and featuring, among others, Jennifer Westfeldt, writer of Kissing Jessica Stein and wife of Jon Hamm). Here's a little video I put together about it:
Here's another brief video I made for our Annual Fund ask, which hopefully gives a glimpse of the size and scope of our productions (and makes clear that even when shows are selling well, we still need money because, well, theatre this good don't come cheap, y'know?)
I'm also trying to up my blogging quotient for the company -- because hey, I enjoy writing sometimes, believe it or not -- and here's one of my latest posts, about our new young donor program "The Hunt."
Man, life was so calm and easygoing for that first month after I got back from Clarion. What the hell happened? Oh yeah. The Jungle Book, our new world premiere musical adaptation of the Disney animated film, directed and adapted by the incredible Mary Zimmerman. We've just extended the show a second time, so it now closes on October 20 (but tickets are going fast, so get 'em while you can!). It's been a pretty crazy time at work, but luckily, all in a good way, with lots of special promotional events for the show that have kept me pretty busy. But here's a little glimpse at a few of the things I've been doing for it:
Our "audience testimonial" video, with some B-Roll from the production, and interviews with real audience members who cannot stop raving about the show (so you don't just have to take my word for it).
We also took the cast of the show to Fenway Park, where they performed the National Anthem before the Red Sox totally obliterated the Stankees. Here's their actual performance...
...and here's a fun little overview of their entire (did I mention they had soundcheck at 10am for a 1pm game, plus a two-show day starting with a 2pm matinee performance? Yeahhhh it was kinda nuts)
On top of that, I've been doing some video editing work for Project: Project's upcoming production How May I Connect You (Or, Scenes in The Key of D:/), a really cool devised theatre piece full of hilarious sketches about communication and human interaction in a digital era. That show goes up this coming weekend only, Sept. 26-29, at the South End / Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA, so see while you still can!
(oh, and plus, my girlfriend just directed this incredible production of Nina Raines' Tribes at SpeakEasy Stage Company, which is getting absolute stellar reviews, so you should go see that as well. It runs through Oct. 12.)
Maria Aitken is one of our favorite directors at the Huntington, and we're excited to welcome her back to Boston this fall to bring her expertise to AR Gurney's American comedy of manners The Cocktail Hour. Here's a little video I did with Artistic Director Peter DuBois about the production:
One of our other new plays in the Huntington's upcoming season is The Power of Duff, which had its world premiere last summer but is undergoing some extensive re-writes for this fall. I spoke with director Peter DuBois about the production in the video below, and I talk more extensively about the story and script over on the Huntington blog:
The opening show of our 2013-2014 season at the Huntington is a brand new stage adaptation of Disney's The Jungle Book, which we're all pretty excited about. I talk about it more extensively over on the Huntington's blog, and here's a video interview I put together with our Artistic Director Peter DuBois about the production:
Performances of The Jungle Book begin September 7 at the Avenue of the Arts / BU Theatre.
I spoke with a few of the cast members of A Raisin In The Sun about their experience working with director Liesl Tommy and what it's like trying to find a fresh and relevant take on such a well-known classic. Fortunately for me, they had a lot of good things to say:
Previews start this Friday, March 8 at the Avenue of the Arts / BU Theatre (plus we've got a cool little pre-show party with cheap tickets that night if you're interested)
(also? One of the actresses was totally in Batman Forever! Also The Abyss. But more importantly Batman Forever!)
For the past 20 years, Ryan Landry has been making these crazy queer-mash-up-parody plays full of puppets, drag queens, and all kinds of offensive brilliance, and he's established quite a reputation for himself in doing this, consistently selling out 4 or more shows a year which he typically performs in the basement of a gay bar in the Fenway. We're finally teaming up with him at the Huntington to bring his irreverent theatrical style to a larger stage, and give him the opportunity to collaborate with different artists (and hopefully help him to continue to grow as an artist, you know). I spoke with our Artistic Director, Peter DuBois, about the wild works of Ryan Landry, in anticipation of his upcoming adaptation of Fritz Lang's German child murder film noir M, which plays March 29 through April 27 at the Huntington. Check it out:
In case you missed out on seeing Boston's premiere all-male hard rock Lady Gaga cover band at the Midway this past weekend, you're in luck: we got the whole thing on tape! Well, technically on built-on digital flash hardrive but, you know, whatever. The audio quality is a little rough (because isn't it always?), but you get the gist. You can watch a playlist of the full set over on YouTube, but here are a few gems from the night: "You & I"
"Bad Romance"
Plus we had a few surprises this time in the form of non-Gaga female pop artists (because frankly, Gaga's catalog is kind of limited, and we needed new material). Like this:
Here's a little teaser trailer I put together for our upcoming production of A Raisin In The Sun at the Huntington. I didn't have much to work with in terms of resources or time, so I recorded one of our actors reciting the Langston Hughes poem on which the title is based, and added some shots of Chicago in the '50s. Still, I'm pretty pleased with the results.
Busy week here at Thom Dunn industries (when is it now?) so I've shared an older piece for this week's Five By Five Hundred post. This one's inspired by a really terrible episode of the 80s GI JOE cartoon, and a homeless guy named Joe who lives in New Haven. Joe walks around New Haven with a bucket and a mop, and he offers to clean the windows on your building or your car in exchange for food or money. He firmly believes in working for his pay, and refuses to beg for money or take handouts from strangers -- because, if his story is to be believed, Joe used to be a drug dealer and a rapist and was thrown off the top of the New Haven Coliseum in a turf war and somehow survived through the graciousness of some mysterious benefactor who paid his medical bills and now he feels that he has to spend the rest of his life making up for his past mistakes. Or at least that's what he says. So I wrote this little piece about him; obviously it's a comedy.
(...that's how the song goes, right?) Coming up next at the Huntington, Liesl Tommy is returning to direct the classic A Raisin In The Sun, a play which I probably don't need to tell you anything about because you've already read it. But here's a video I made of our Artistic Director Peter DuBois talking about what makes this production special (including a mention of Bevin's next project, the Boston premiere of last year's Tony Award winner Clybourne Park for SpeakEasy Stage).
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERERCo1dI1o]
A Raisin In The Sun plays March 8 - April 7, 2013 at the Avenue of the Arts / BU Theatre, and Clybourne Park runs March 1 - 30, 2013 at the South End / Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA.
