This year, we had the pleasure of making the following conversations and performances available to our viewers:
· Billy Elliot's librettist Lee Hall and director Stephen Daldry (shown right with co hosts Michael Riedel and Susan Haskins) explain - in separate half-hour interviews - the process of transferring their beloved film into Billy Elliott: The Musical, the most celebrated show of 2009.
· British journalists Baz Bamigboye of London's Daily Mail and Charles Spencer of London's Telegraph assess new Broadway productions, including Shrek. Speed-The-Plow with Jeremy Piven & Raul Esparza and Billy Elliot.
· Theater critics John Heilpern (left) of The New York Observer and Vanity Fair, Mike Kuchwara of The AP Wire, and Jacques le Sourd, of CBS Radio bemoan the state of journalism and their profession. This episode was taped three days after le Sourd was laid off from his job of 35 years as Gannett's drama critic. Mr. le Sourd will not be replaced; the positioning of theater critic having been eliminated by the newspaper chain.
· Director Garry Hynes and actress Marie Mullen of Ireland's Druid Theatre talk about the Atlantic Theater's revival of Martin McDonagh's play The Cripple of Inishmaan.
· Actor Christopher Plummer (right) discusses his best-selling memoir, In Spite of Myself with Bloomberg News critic and Plummer fan, John Simon.
· Playwright Gina Gionfriddo analyzes her new comedy, Becky Shaw, based in part on Thackeray's Vanity Fair, at Second Stage.
· The Guthrie Theater's Artistic Director Joe Dowling, actor Charles Keating, and members of the Guthrie staff guide us through the history and the beautiful new building of this venerable 50-year-old institution in Minneapolis, founded by Sir Tyrone Guthrie.
· 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage (left in Theater Talk's greenroom) and actress Saidah Arrika Ekulona tackle the grave subject of Ruined, Nottage's searing drama, about brutality towards women in the war-torn Republic of The Congo.
· Music historians David Jasen and Robert Kimball examine the rise and fall of 'Tin Pan Alley,' the center of the music industry at the beginning of the 20th Century.
· Critics John Simon of Bloomberg News and Linda Winer of Newsday struggle to decipher the work and mind of recently-deceased playwright and dramatic prophet, Harold Pinter.
· Comic actors Jackie Hoffman and Richard Kind (shown right with director Elvin Badger) perform excerpts from Celebrity Autobiography: In Their Own Words, the Drama Desk Award-winning "Unique Theatrical Experience of 2009." They are joined on the panel by their co-stars, the show's producers Eugene Pack and Dayle Reyfel.
· Writer/director Arthur Laurents explains why he revived the 1957 musicAl West Side Story this year, and reminisces about his complicated relationships with the other members of the show's original creative team: Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins and Stephen Sondheim.
