Fall/Winter 2005 - BMI.com

tion ran six performances at the
Educational Alliance Theatre in
NYC in May. Strange Fruit, adapted
from Lillian Smith’s best-selling
novel, is the story of an secret
interracial love affair in Georgia,
1920. The opera was originally
showcased at New York City
Opera’s VOX 2003: Showcase of
American Composers, and was
commissioned by Long Leaf
Opera of Durham, NC. It will be
premiered in Chapel Hill, NC in
2007.
WAR BRIDES
The York Theatre Company’s
Developmental Reading Series
kicked off Aug. 23 with War Brides,
a new musical that features a book
by Ron Sproat (alumnus), music
by Christopher Berg (alumnus)
and lyrics by Frank Evans (Committee).
The musical concerns the
lives of World War II British war
brides and their struggles to be
reunited with the American soldiers
they love. Playing the lead in
the reading was First Year lyricist
Kristen Maloney.
In Festival
THE BALLAD OF BONNIE &
CLYDE
by alumnus Michael Aman was
presented as part of the New York
Musical Theatre Festival. It
starred country singer Sherrie
Austin and Deven May (Batboy,
York Theatre Weird Romance).
Michael Bush (MTC) directed and
Randy Skinner (42nd Street) choreographed.
BUT I’M A CHEERLEADER
was presented at the Theatre at
Saint Clements, September 13-25,
as part of the 2nd Annual New
York Musical Theatre Festival.
The musical—based on the Lions
Gate film by Jamie Babbit
and Brian Wayne Peterson—features
book and lyrics by Bill
Augustin and music by Andrew
Abrams. Daniel Goldstein directed
the workshop presentation,
which featured choreography by
Wendy Seyb and music direction
by Brian Nash. But I’m a Cheerleader,
according to production
notes, “is a wacky coming-of-age
comedy about Megan, a typical
high school cheerleader who has
the perfect life. That is, until she
finds out that everyone she knows
thinks she’s a lesbian and her parents
send her away to a rehabilitation
camp called True Directions. It
is at this camp, under the strict
tutelage of headmistress Mary
Brown that Megan meets Graham,
a sexy tomboy who shows her
exactly what her ‘true
direction’ is.”
way to own movies. But in that era,
VCDs constituted a luxury medium,
requiring luxury electronics to play
them. You had to own either a laser
disk (LD) player or a “CDi” player
(in turn requiring a special cartridge
into which your VCDs could be
loaded)—both shelf units. This rendered
VCD portability almost moot;
and LDs remained superior. Plus in
that era, home computers (just beginning
to become common) still used
floppy disks as their primary
portable media, grayscale and B&W
displays still common. CD-ROM
drives would not become essential
for several years.
Needless to say, America and the
Western world passed on the VCD
format so quickly that, today, the
average Westerner doesn’t even recognize
the acronym. (I think the only
format that vanished even faster was
the Capacitance Electronic Disk, or
CED—a mid-80s medium whose
video-audio info was stored on
grooved platters played with a stylus,
like vinyl LPs! Google that one sometime,
it’s the grand Edsel of phosphor
dot leisure.) Thus videocassette
players, which also recorded, maintained
their already-viselike hold on
the marketplace without so much as
a minute’s interlude.
Conversely, in Asia it was VCRs
that never really gained a toehold.
But when Video Compact Disks
were introduced, they jibed with the
Asian outlook on what Michael
Crichton called—in a nonfiction
book of the same name—“electronic
life,” and the format took off like a
rocket: cheap VCD players began to
proliferate like bunnies. And a large
proportion of commercial VCD titles
were drawn from American and
British films. That remains so to this
day: Western titles are routinely also
issued in the Asian VCD marketplace,
from Miss Congeniality 2 to
Hellboy to season sets of The West
Wing.
Thus VCDs account for the predominant
commercial video format in
the world, outpacing DVDs by a surprising
margin.
In the interim, of course, DVDs
increasingly took over the Western
marketplace. Right technology, right
marketing, right time for consumer
interest.
Ironically, this granted commercial
VCDs retroactive consumerfriendliness
in the West, because the
format backed into compatibility
with what had become everyday,
household-and-portable equipment.
Now that we live multi-disk-format
lives, DVD players have become
more comprehensive, routinely
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