August 2010 - Posts

Tweet

Girl on the Go

• Final Fry at Varsity Jr.

   

  Crowds packed into the Varsity Jr. on Lindbergh yesterday, patiently waiting to get their final F.Os, naked dogs and chili cheese steaks at one of Atlanta’s favorite fast food spots. The crowd was a mix of people who weren’t even born when the burger joint opened 45 years ago, along with many who had most likely been coming every decade since it first opened.

  A beloved little sister of the multi-roomed and much larger Atlanta landmark The Varsity, which first started asking Atlantans and out-of-towners “What’ll ya have?” 82 years ago, the Varsity Jr. fell victim to its inability to meet the city’s zoning requirements. One of these mandates indoor bathrooms.

  Like any of us cared about walking around the outside to use the facilities after downing a gallon-sized Varsity Orange or washing the grease off our fingers after an overflowing order of French fries?

  People who live in Atlanta are used to our favorite spots closing down – it happens more often than a backup on the connector. But this one – well it just seemed more personal, as evidenced by the number of notes people wrote and plastered along the front  glass window professing their sadness at its closing. Some recounted their decades of memories there. One wrote that three generations of their families had dined there.

  For the rest of the post, please click here.
  

  Posted Aug 23 2010, 11:30 AM by Jan Schroder with no comments

• Come Dunce with Me!

  Hey, I admit it. I’m deeply shallow when it comes to the theater. I go to a play to be uplifted and want to leave after two plus hours feeling upbeat and happy, not wallowing in the angst and hopeless despair of the human condition. I can get that from reading a few depressing status updates on Facebook.

  So I can’t wait to go see A Confederacy of Dunces at the Theatrical Outfit this weekend. This production is a world premiere of an adaptation by Tom Key, so you already know it’s going to be amazing. Plus it’s directed by Richard Garner, co-founder of Georgia Shakespeare.

  Take these two talented theater people, add in one of the funniest and most memorable books I’ve ever read, and you’re got the makings for unforgettable theater.

  If you haven’t read the book, add it to your wish list. Just the way the book got published is a story in itself. In 1969 the author killed himself at the age of 31. His mother found a copy of the carbon-smeared manuscript, and certain it was a Great Novel, convinced Walker Percy to take a look. In a twist that sounds like only-in-the-movies, the book wins a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981.

  For the rest of the post, please click here. 
  

   

  Posted Aug 13 2010, 02:01 PM by Jan Schroder with no comments

  Filed under: Tom Key, A Confederacy of Dunces, Theatrical Outfit

• Taking a Chance Again – on Cats

  “Where’s the plot? Where is the dialogue?” I kept wondering as I sat through song after soaring song of the production of “Cats” in Chicago. When I finally read the program and saw it was based on a collection of poems by T.S. Eliot I felt a bit better about my inability to discern what was really going on beyond the fact that a bunch of crazy-wild costumed characters were dancing and singing in a junkyard.

  Perhaps my confusion is a bit more forgivable if I tell you this was way back in the early 1980s, not long after Cats opened on Broadway in 1982 and well before it become a musical theater phenomenon and later the longest running musical on Broadway, a record it achieved in 1997.

  The national tour of Cats is playing at the Fox Theatre August 4-8, presented by Theatre of the Stars.  This tour, the only one sanctioned by Andrew Lloyd Webber, recently celebrated its 27th year.

   For the rest of the post, please click here. 
  

   

  Posted Aug 04 2010, 02:42 PM by Jan Schroder with no comments

  Filed under: Theatre of the Stars, Cats, Fox Theatre