About two years ago, I translated into English excerpts of some of my father’s 2000 pages of letters that he had written from Occupied France to my mother during WWII.  I then compiled the most relevant parts of those documents as part of the Metronome Ticking docudrama.  Faced with the task of finding the German originals for a German version of this play, I found that neither the Google Desktop Search nor Microsoft Windows Indexing did an adequate job. 

However, as soon as I had downloaded Copernic, the “mother of all search engines”—free or charge from download.com—I found everything I was searching for within seconds, without even having to scroll down as this software is so user friendly that it took me immediately to the relevant file and the relevant section with the keyword highlighted.  Copernicus himself, no doubt, would have been delighted about this modern brain child from Copernic, Inc. in Montreal, another international city where both French and English co-exist, just as Copernicus connects German and Polish culture and history. 

“Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 – 1543) was the first astronomer to formulate a scientifically based heliocentric cosmology that displaced the Earth from the center of the universe. His epochal book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), is often regarded as the starting point of modern astronomy and the defining epiphany that began the Scientific Revolution.  His work stimulated further scientific investigations and became a landmark in the history of modern science that is known as the Copernican Revolution” (Wikipedia).

Copernic is a desktop search utility for the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems. It allows the user to instantly find a wide variety of items including documents, pictures, music, videos, e-mails, contacts, browser bookmark favourites, and entries in the Internet browser history on the computer, external drives, and network shares.  After installation, Copernic creates an initial index, a process which can take up to several hours depending on the number of items to be indexed, but this is a one-time event. As items are added, changed or removed from a user's computer, Copernic Desktop Search makes incremental changes in the background using idle system resources.

"While driving from Philadelphia to Michigan, I found it difficult to imagine a conference that could match last year's spectacular International Theatre Conference in Vienna, Austria.  However, the Association for Jewish Theatre (AJT) and the Jewish Ensemble Theatre’s (JET) Artistic Director Evelyn Orbach ensured that this year’s conference in Detroit brought together some of the best Jewish and pro-Jewish theatre professionals and board members from the US and Canada, and from as far as Berlin, Sao Paulo, and Tel Aviv, who conducted many engaging workshops, eye-opening performances, challenging seminars, and one enlightening discussion after another.  Because of the diversity and caliber of their work, I witnessed a range of outstanding performances and a depth of discussion that at times challenged me deeply."   

You just won in an arts lottery and have a choice: Either (1) winning a cheap, three day deal on Priceline, going from Philadelphia to London on American Airlines and staying at the Holland Court Hotel for three nights and getting one ticket to a Ray Cooney show (Tom, Dick, and Harry at the Duke of York theatre in London’s West End) for a total of $1160, or (2) winning a subscription to the Hedgerow Theatre in Media with six shows of your choice each year for the next nine years with at least one Ray Cooney show per summer where you can laugh your head off, won’t get aggressively searched by airline security, and don’t have to wait in line for many hours.   Which of the two prizes would you accept? 

Those of us who enjoy British drawing-room comedy, especially entertaining farces by Ray Cooney like There Goes the Bride (which he co-wrote with John Chapman) would definitely prefer to spend a delightful evening at the Hedgerow Theatre, an equity house and America’s oldest continuously operating repertory theatre.  Zoran Kovcic’s stage design turned the old grist mill into an elegant scene out of the Wedgewood Studios, with different shades of blue, matched by Cathie Miglionico’s exquisitely designed costumes,  and directed with Penny Reed’s trademark élan that combines elegance and humor.  Ms. Reed knows how to tickle one’s funny bones through a wide palette of nuanced movements, gestures, and facial expressions by the actors—above all Anthony Marsala as Timothy Westerby, who could be described as a mixture of an elegant jester and a bungling chameleon, a perfect match for his straight-laced wife, the exquisitely beautiful Sonja Robson, and her mother, the always engaging Susan Wefel, whose every movement, every facial expression, and every word brought out howls of laughter from the audience. 

As someone who teaches international accents for students at the Media Theatre, I was particularly intrigued by the way a cast member reached out to Australia to find a language coach via Craigslist.  Jim Fryer—who played Mr. Babcock, the Australian father-in-law—shared the process of finding a vocal coach who would help him acquire an Australian accent.  He posted a notice on Craig's List/Sydney under "Talent," entitled: “Yank needs to hear Aussie accent (Philadelphia, PA).”  He proposed sending his lines from the script, and having the Australian actor record it as a WAV file, compensating him with a $30 gift certificate.  Fryer received the following reply from a drama student in Sydney: “G'day, I'm a 24 year old male with an interest in acting/comedy. I could read these lines for you mate.  I currently am at uni and we are in our exam period, but I could have something to you when that finishes. Cheers, James Brechney.”

Fryer reports that he received a file a week later with both a heavy and a light authentic Aussie accent.  The seasoned American actor even cited the young Aussie actor as his vocal coach in the program.   Who knows: as part of this intercontinental theatre collaboration among actors, we might see more actors around the world contact each other via Craigslist—to the benefit of theatergoers at the Hedgerow or any other theatre where local actors need to switch into a foreign accent. 

The Hedgerow Theatre frequently presents plays where the audience knows that they will be entertained, but on this day, the Artistic Director Penny Reed and her husband, the multi-talented Zoran Kovcic, appeared on stage and surprised the audience even more when they shared that this evening they were celebrating their 27th wedding anniversary.  The audience applauded with great enthusiasm, now ready to watch There Goes the Bride.  I just talked to the Artistic Director at the Hedgerow Theatre, and she very much liked the idea that people could take out a subscription for nine years at today’s price, provided you contact her ASAP—a real bargain compared to the rapidly rising prices in the airline industry, not to mention the hotel costs.  In short, you get the better deal by far at the Hedgerow Theatre in Media. 

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Sunday, August 3, 2008

I was happy to see that Brenda had chosen to quote part of my article on her website: "We were taken to the edge of human existence . . . Brenda Adelman's My Brooklyn Hamlet, relived her mother's murder by her father (who then married the victim's sister), a drama that created a classical Greekcatharsis in a modern Brooklyn setting."  On a lighter note, I was intrigued to see that the Ophelia-like victim had become a survivor, a woman stronger than Hamlet, who could never make up his mind: Brenda Adelman, by contrast, could now be considered the libertated Ophelia at the court of Male Chauvinism. 

If the West Coast has Hollywood, the East Coast features an equally large number of spectacular homes of the rich, the famous, and the infamous in Miami's harbor, which offers them instant access to their private yachts, especially on Fisher Island, which is only accessible by boat or helicopter.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Fisher Island had the highest per capita income of any place in the United States in 2000.  Once a one-family island home of the Vanderbilts, and later several other millionaires, today, Fisher Island is occupied by a very exclusive, wealthy, and international community, including tennis players André Agassi and Boris Becker, singer Ricky Martin, actress Julia Roberts, talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, and only 462 other residents.  I wonder where their cleaners, maids, and cooks reside.