| re: Tony-winning playwright Christopher Durang diagnosed with aphasia | |
| Last Edit: WaymanWong 03:25 pm EDT 07/19/22 | |
| Posted by: WaymanWong 03:16 pm EDT 07/19/22 | |
| In reply to: Tony-winning playwright Christopher Durang diagnosed with aphasia; Sigourney Weaver and more share why the writer has faded from public view - Unhookthestars 01:01 pm EDT 07/19/22 | |
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| Unhookthestars, thank you for posting that. It's so heartbreaking that such a witty playwright suffers from a disorder that robs him of his words. Christopher Durang has always been one of my favorite writers, thanks to his wonderful, one-of-a-kind sense of humor. I imagine most everyone on this board knows his ''Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You.'' But one of my other favorite one-acts of his is ''For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls,'' his hilarious parody of Tennessee Williams' ''The Glass Menagerie,'' in which a sensitive young man collects colored swizzle sticks. And I was so happy when Durang won his Tony for ''Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,'' a comic masterpiece that I saw many times on Broadway. The Broadway News article covers his playwriting at length, but I wanted to add that I loved Durang's merry and delightfully demented cabaret act: Durang and Dawne. It consisted of the jovial playwright and his two backup singers, John Augustine and Sherry Anderson, who made up Dawne. In a 1995 review for the N.Y. Daily News, I quoted Durang as saying, deadpan: ''Most days I'm a playwright. But some days, it's just too hard, so I've become a lounge singer touring Ramada Inns and convention centers across America.'' They would do zany mashups of showtunes and pop songs. Their version of Michael Jackson's ''Bad'' (so ''white'' it could pass for albino) would somehow segue into ''Bali Hai'' from ''South Pacific.'' Durang and Dawne claimed one of their most requested songs was a trio version of ''Aldonza'' from ''Man of La Mancha'' (''I was born in a ditch ...''). And when Augustine sang a peppy tune from ''The Will Rogers Follies'' called ''Never Met a Man I Didn't Like,'' Durang heckled, ''How about Hitler?'' |
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