Rendering 5

The article published on the website of the newspaper “The Thelegraph” on March 19, 2013 is headlined “Bruce Norris: 'I think we aredoomed’”. The article reports at length that American playwright Bruce Norris has the super-rich in his sights as his latest work prepares to open at London’s Royal Court, says Jasper Rees.

It’s an open secret that theatre-goers should start quaking in their Louboutins as he prepares to give them another bloody nose.

It was revealed that Norris’s speciality is pointing a finger at his well-heeled, self-satisfied audience. “I like to disrupt is what I like to do,” he says as his new play rehearses in the next room. “I just like to disrupt situations. I don’t like when people seem to think they know the answers or their mind is made up about something.” Thus The Pain and the Itch scratched raucously beneath the veneer of smug East Coast liberalism to reveal ugly, unpeaceable instincts, although that was an exercise in throat-clearing compared to Clybourne Park, which shone an interrogative arc light into racial attitudes among both black and white.

The article carries a lot of comment on the fact that playwriting mostly in the not-for-profit sector — the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago has put on seven of his plays – has not made him wealthy, he insists. He rents in Chelsea, New York, and should he so wish, he has enough to down tools for a couple of years. Not that he has. Later this year a new play for the Lincoln Center called Domesticated will feature a philandering US politician. Meanwhile, The Low Road emanates partly from his visceral shock at quite how much money other people have stashed away.

Analyzing this situation it is necessary to emphasize that even the pleasure of lecturing a captive audience for two hours has its drawbacks. “What I like is sitting there while the play is going on because no one takes the megaphone away from you. Then I have to put my clothes back on.”-said the playwright.

As for me I think that musical theatre is a form of theatre that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The story and emotional content of the piece – humor, pathos, love, anger – are communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an integrated whole. Although musical theatre overlaps with other theatrical forms like opera and dance, it may be distinguished by the equal importance given to the music as compared with the dialogue, movement and other elements of the works.I