THEATER TALK to Welcome SIDE SHOW's Creative Team this Week

Prior to the show's opening on Broadway at the St. James Theatre, the creative team behind the innovative revival of the musical Side Show - director Bill Condon, composer Henry Krieger (Dreamgirls), librettist/ lyricist Bill Russell and scenic designer David Rockwell - visited THEATER TALK to share stories about the remarkable revitalization the 1997 musical has experienced under the stewardship of Condon on its return this fall to Broadway.

The first production in 1997 of Side Show was a commercial failure. Now, having been rewritten and reconceived by its original creators with Condon, an Academy Award-winning film director, it just reopened on Broadway, where New York Times critic Charles Isherwood called it a "beautiful and wrenching musical"' that is "an essential ticket of the fall season."

Side Show is based on the story of real-life conjoined (then called "Siamese") twins, Violet and Daisy Hilton. Born in Brighton, England in 1908 to a single barmaid, they were sold by their mother to a midwife named Mary Hilton, who along with her husband and daughter had the girls learn to sing and dance, and put them into show business, mostly freak shows. After breaking free from this abusive family, the sisters went into vaudeville and became world-famous, when they appeared in the classic film Freaks (1932). They eventually faded into obscurity, however, and ended up in Charlotte, N.C., where they worked bagging groceries, and died in 1969, reportedly of the Hong Kong flu.

This latest edition of THEATER TALK, co-hosted by Michael Riedel of the New York Post and producer Susan Haskins, premieres in the New York metropolitan area on Friday, November 21 (2014) at 1 AM (early Saturday morning) on Thirteen/PBS, with repeats on CUNY TV* on Saturday 11/22 at 8:30 PM, Sunday 11/23 at 12:30 PM, and Monday 11/24 at 7:30 AM, 1:30 PM, and 7:30 PM.

*CUNY TV, the City University of New York television station, is broadcast over-the-air in the New York metropolitan area on digital Ch. 25.3, and cablecast in the 5 boroughs of New York City on Ch. 75 (Time Warner and Optimum Brooklyn), Ch. 77 (RCN), and Ch. 30 (Verizon FiOS). It is also available online at www.cuny.tv and www.theatertalk.org, and via iTunes podcasts.

THEATER TALK is jointly produced by the not-for-profits Theater Talk Productions and CUNY TV. The program is taped in the Himan Brown TV and Radio Studios at The City University of New York in Manhattan and is distributed to 100+ participating public television stations nationwide. THEATER TALK is made possible in part by The New York State Council on the Arts, The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The TDF/TAP Plus Program, The CUNY TV Foundation and The Friends of THEATER TALK.

Photo by Joan Marcus