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Christopher Lee was the definitive working actor. His career was long, and he appeared in more films than any major performer in the English-speaking world — over 250. What distinguishes him, though, and should make him a role model for anyone seeking a life on stage or screen, is not that he worked so much but that he worked so well. He took that work seriously as both job and art, even in the lightest or most ridiculous roles, and he gave far better, more committed performances than many, if not most, of his films deserved.

Inspired by Stanley Wells' recent book on Great Shakespeare Actors, we asked OUP staff members to remember a time when a theatrical production of a Shakespeare play shocked them. We discovered that some Shakespeare plays have the ability to surprise even the hardiest of Oxford University Press employees. Grab an ice-cream on your way in, take a seat, and enjoy the descriptions of shocking Shakespeare productions.

The post Which Shakespeare performance shocked you the most? appeared first on OUPblog.

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Father’s Chinese Opera

Written and illustrated by Rich Lo

Sky Pony Press         6/01/2014

978-1-62873-610-6

Age 4 to 8       36 pages

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“The Chinese opera is anything but boring. Songs, acrobats, acting, and costumes make the opera a truly spectacular show to behold. Spending the summer backstage at his father’s Chinese opera, a young boy yearns to be a part of the show. Rehearsing his acrobatic moves day and night with the show’s famous choreographer, the boy thinks he is soon ready to perform with the others. But the choreographer doesn’t agree. Upset, the boy goes home to sulk. What will he do next? Will he give up on his dream, or will he persevere and work his way up in the show?”

Opening

“Father was the band leader and composer of the Chinese opera in Hong Kong. Sometimes I sat on top of the instrument cases and watched the actors onstage.”

The Story

A young boy admires his father and the Chinese opera. He wants to become a famous acrobat. He asks the best acrobat in the troupe to teach him some acrobatic moves. Gai Chui agrees. The two exercise and practice acrobatic moves, such as the praying mantis and the drunken monkey. The young boy is good and he knows it. At school, he brags that he will soon be an acrobat in the Chinese opera. The boy decides it is time to tell Gai Chui he is ready for a performance assignment. Gai Chui laughs and calls the young boy presumptuous. That evening, the young boy sulked. His father shows his son pictures of himself at the beginning his career. To be a band leader, the father explains, he had to learn every instrument so he could compose songs, which he also needed to learn to write. Does the young boy understand the message his father had imparted? Will he continue to dream of becoming an acrobat in the opera?

Review

The first thing I noticed about Father’s Chinese Opera was the beautiful illustrations. The watercolor scenes are bright kaleidoscopes of color. The back and fore grounds are washes of orange, blue, green, and reddish-purple. The Chinese opera comes alive on the pages. The young boy, immersed in the opera through his father’s work, wants to be on stage as an acrobat. The famous, and real, Gai Chui agrees to mentor the boy. The acrobatic moves fly around the pages as student and teacher strike identical poses. Father’s Chinese Opera is simply a gorgeous picture book.

The young boy knows he is good. He brags to school friends, and then tells Gai Chui he is ready for his acrobat assignment. Being told he is disrespectful, unqualified, and overconfident the boy sulks, proving Gai Chui correct. I love how the boy’s father, the leader of the Chinese opera, explains to his son why Gai Chui said what he did. The boy wants to start at the top, or near the top, rather than earning his way as others must do. I had no idea a composer, at least for the Chinese opera, must know how to play every instrument. That feat in itself is amazing (and screams picture book story).

The boy’s indomitable spirit brings him back to the stage, this time as a flag carrier. You can see the joy on his face as he weaves towards the edge of the page. Learning to work your way up to where you want to be is a difficult lesson for a young child. Children live in the here and now, wanting what they want now. Delayed gratification is not a message in the story, but it falls in line with waiting your turn, working your way up, persevering, and keeping a colorfully bright spirit as you work toward that dream.

Children will love Father’s Chinese Opera. It will be a treat for their young eyes. At first, many will think of a circus because of all the color and movement. Boys will connect with the acrobatic moves the young boy learns from Gai Chui, looking at it as karate. It will be up to the reader to explain to the children the story is about a Chinese opera. But those problems are not due to story or art, but rather American culture. Father’s Chinese Opera is a wonderful book for school and classroom libraries.Children need to read about other cultures and Father’s Chinese Opera is a good book to start their journey.

The author’s note explains more about the Chinese opera, his father’s journey, and their move to the U.S. The note is an interesting read and quite informative. Adults will enjoy the author’s life story, though abbreviated. If the author expounded on this note, he would have a captivating memoir.

FATHER’S CHINESE OPERA. Text and illustrations copyright © 2014 by Rich Lo. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Sly Pony Press, New York, NY.

Purchase Father’s Chinese Opera at Amazon—B&N—Book Depository—Sky Pony Press—your local bookstore.

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Learn more about Father’s Chinese Opera HERE.

Meet the author/illustrator, Rich Lo, at his website:  http://greatsketch.com/

Find other multicultural books at the Sky Pony Press website:   http://www.skyponypress.com/

an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing Inc.   http://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/

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copyright © 2014 by Sue Morris/Kid Lit Reviews

By Bianca Schulze, The Children’s Book Review
Published: November 19, 2011

Gloria Spielman

Gloria Spielman is the author of two picture books Janusz Korczak’s Children and Marcel Marceau: Master of Mime which has been awarded a Silver Medal in the 2011 Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards in the category of Non-Fiction Picture Book. A former high school English teacher, Gloria has also written English teaching books and contributed to multi-media English courses. She has many more wonderful books in the works that we can look forward to reading soon.

Nicki Richesin: Congratulations on your lovely Marcel Marceau: Master of Mime. It’s a beautifully compelling book about his legendary career and how he brought the world’s attention back to the ancient art of pantomime, but it’s also the story of how he survived World War II. What inspired you to create this well-deserved homage to Mr. Marceau?

Gloria Spielman: Thank You, Nicki. I always enjoy reading The Children’s Book Review; it’s such a terrific resource for anyone in the world of children’s books, so I was thrilled to talk to you.

I’d much rather tell you what inspired me to write my first book, Janusz Korczak’s Children, it’s a far better story. My then third grade daughter had to do a project on Korczak for Holocaust Memorial Day, and that got me reading and thinking.

The truth is, the original inspiration for Marcel Marceau actually came from my friend Mandy. She was looking at Janusz Korczak and said “You know, you should write about Marcel Marceau. He was really interesting.” She told me of his work with the resistance and after she left I did some reading. Mandy was right. I started to imagine the pictures. I often imagine a picture book in pictures as well as words. My editor agreed. So did the publisher. And I started to write. I wish could say I saw a wonderful mime performance when I was a child and fell in love with it, but that would be a lie.

I was astonished to learn that Marceau was a part of the French resistance. He bravely smuggled Jewish children through the forests to safety and entertained allied troops. He led such a fascinating life. Did you discover anything that surprised you when doing your research?

It was all fascinating.  But there is only so much that can go into a 32 page book. One anecdote that would have made a great picture book illustration is when Marceau came face to face with the man he called his creative father, Charlie Chaplin. He told Chaplin how he paid tribute to him in his American performance and began to imitate him in the middl

King of Shadows by Susan Cooper. Personal copy. Read for the Scholar's Blog Book Discussion. This discussion took place in February of 2007; I'm going thru old books that I enjoyed but didn't post about when I read.

The Plot: Present-day Nat is a teenager and actor who is in a staging of one of Shakespeare's Plays. Then, boom! Time slip happens and he's back in the day, meeting the real Bard.

The Good: I love time slip novels. I love Shakespeare.

Nat meets Shakespeare and they bond. Nat's father is dead; and Nat sees Shakespeare as a quasi father figure.

OK, true confession time: when I read the Nat/Shakespeare relationship, I thought, "hm. gay." There was something about the intensity of Nat's feelings towards Shakespeare that just seemed -- well, not as a son to a father. Or a friend to a friend. And I thought, OK, that's just my reading, I've read too much slash fanfiction. But then I saw that Roger thought the same thing!

Tho, part of my reading may also be because of Susan Cooper and Hume Cronyn. I think this, in a way, is her love story to him; with SC's feelings about HC projected onto Nat's feelings for WS.

Anyway, I also liked this book because of the theatre! angle, a world that Cooper knows. The present day theatre, trying to recreate the Shakespeare plays; and then the world of Shakespeare, putting them on for the first time.

Arby's word convey the heart of this book: "Nothing is more important than the company; nothing is more important than the play." Is it the people or the play that is more important?

Final worlds: I was really, really frustrated by the non-explanation for the timeslip. It turns out that Babbage/ Burbage sends Nat back in time to save WS; but it never explains how B/B manages to learn the secrets of a long life/ time travel.

It’s Tony season and who better to educate us about the wonderful world of theatre than Thomas S. Hischak, author of The Oxford Companion To The American Musical: Theatre, Film and Television. Hischak is a Professor of Theatre at the State University of New York College at Cortland. He is the author of sixteen books on theater, film, and popular music as well as the author of twenty published plays. In The Oxford Companion To The American Musical Hischak offers over two thousand entires on musicals, performers, composers, lyricists, producers, choreographers and much more. Below are the answers to this morning’s quiz. Be sure to check back next week on Tuesday for another quiz about the Tonys.

1. The musical Passion (1994) ran only 280 performances, the shortest run on record for a Best Musical winner. Hallelujah, Baby! (1967) ran only two weeks longer but it had closed before it won the Tony so the award could not help business.

2. Poet T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) won when his light verse was set to music by Andrew Lloyd Webber for Cats (1982).

3. Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Mostel won for the original 1962 production, Silvers and Lane won for the 1972 and 1996 revivals, and Alexander won when he played Pseudolus and other roles in Jerome Robbins’ Broadway (1989).

4. The Threepenny Opera (1954). In 1956 the American Theatre Wing gave a special Tony to the long-running Off Broadway musical.

5. It was their Broadway debut. Bosley in Fiorello! (1959), Smith in Follies (1971), Holliday in Dreamgirls (1981), Martin in My Favorite Year (1992), McDonald in Carousel (1994), Heredia in Rent (1996) and Foster in Thoroughly Modern Millie (2002).

6. Chicago. The 1997 production won the Revival Tony and is still running.

7. Ethel Merman lost to Mary Martin in The Sound of Music in 1960. Bernadette Peters lost in 2004. Angela Lansbury won in 1975, Tyne Daly in 1990. Will Patti LuPone follow suit?

8. Best Orchestrations. Jonathan Tunick won for Titanic.

9. Frankie Michaels as Young Patrick in Mame and Daisy Eagan as Mary Lenox in The Secret Garden.

10. Tommy Tune. He has Tonys for Best Leading Actor in a Musical, Best Featured Actor in a Musical, Best Director of a Musical, and Best Choreographer. Harvey Fierstein has also won Tonys in four different categories but half were for nonmusicals: as author of Best Play, Best Actor in a Play, Best Actor in a Musical, and Best Book for a Musical.

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