Here’s the thing: I have spent the better part of my career in media relations work. And most of the last decade or so on media relations work in colleges and universities. I have been a spokesperson during tragedies, I have answered questions when good things have happened, I have stood up in front of God and the New York Times and punted like a son-of-a-bitch over and over and over again and managed to look like I knew what in the hell I was saying.
And I know one thing about Pasadena City College and Dustin Lance Black: there is something bad, bad wrong here. And I will guarantee you — I will absolutely back it up with money that I do not have — that somebody at Pasadena City College is lying through their damn teeth and it probably has nothing to do with Mr. Black.
This is an object lesson in how to do public relations wrong. This is how stupid people get institutions in hot water. And this is about how when you are the stupid party and the other party is whip smart, you will look like an even larger dumbass. And that bit of ‘dumbassery’ imprints.
Dustin Lance Black won the friggin’ Oscar. He’s one of our finest writers. He’s a great activist. He has a compelling story about community college helping him to get to the top. And you don’t embrace that for everything that it’s worth?
I had never heard of Pasadena City College before this. Now, whenever I hear the name, I’ll think, “Oh, yeah. That’s the place that fucked over Dustin Lance Black.” Morons.
Kieran Turner’s Wallflowers is fast becoming one of my favorite web series. Smart and funny are a combo that I find very, very hard to resist. And, if you like that, too, you should definitely be watching.
New guy Wade (Daniel Abeles) throws himself on the grenade that is Janice to win a job at Hunter Casting in Wallflowers, now on stage17.tv.
Episode 3 of Season 2 debuted last week and featured plenty of earnest wackiness from Janice (Christianne Tisdale) and the continued pursuit by Martin (Gibson Frazier) of his married and pregnant co-worker. I think this is going to be a sweet — albeit a bit twisted — plot and I’m eager to see what transpires here. It may end up being a complete train wreck for poor Marty, but either way, I’m strangely invested.
Daniel Abeles debuted as Wade, the eager new receptionist at Bryce’s agency. He’s a “fresh piece of lamb,” according to Janice, who announces that it’s quite obvious that he’s gay and “it’s carefree; I like it.” Tisdale owns this little scene and it’s a treat to watch her work, especially playing against such an excellent ensemble.
As I said, everyone is so well-drawn and crispy performed, it’s really hard to find much fault here. Marcia DeBonis, as Bryce’s office manager, Leslie, is dead solid perfect, if underutilized and her line, “You need to be more afraid of me,” is delivered with so many layers, you know it’s the truth!
John Halbach and Patch Darragh fog up the lens in episode 3 of the second season of Wallflowers.
Alex (EastSiders’ John Halbach) and Bryce (Patch Darragh) button the episode with a short scene that artfully uses a monitor to add depth to the moment. It is awfully damn sexy for being very much a PG scene. Whatever is happening under those end credits?
P.S. — Mad props to Mr. Turner for the episode names.
Catch up on back episodes at Stage 17 and watch this episode below.
You know that old saw, right? The one about taking a village to raise a child? Well, it takes an army to produce a show. And we need some foot soldiers.
This is not really light-hearted banter; this is fact. If you want to see something that you can’t get anywhere else, you will need to help make it happen. What does that mean, “make it happen?”
It means, you need to bring cash to the table. And you need to click HERE right now to make EastSiders Season 2 happen by supporting this Kickstarter.
Will your $5 or $10 contribution help? Yes, absolutely. In fact, if every single person who reads this blog gave $10; they would be done.
There’s a counter-intuitive tipping point of information vs. action. If you’ve been around long enough, like I have, you’ve seen it before: a lot of terrific press, but you want to see even more momentum in the crucial front end of a campaign. This is because people assume that if they read excellent press about a production at every turn, then they don’t have to support it. That someone else will pick up the slack. That there is some big donor lurking. That their $20 doesn’t matter. And it does. It absolutely does.
If you want to make sure this series has even more of an impact than the first season, you need to give now AND you need to tell a friend.
And you need to make sure your friend both gives and tells their friends.
Twenty bucks and a couple of tweets or Facebook posts or Instagrams. That’s all. That’s a couple of trips to Starbucks. Sure, you want another caramel macchiato, but is that worth more to you than making this program happen?
If EastSiders raises 80% or 95% or 99% of their goal, THIS SERIES DOES NOT GET MADE. That’s how Kickstarter works. You meet your target or exceed it. There are no do-overs. One shot.
If everything goes well and with two minutes left in the campaign it stalls at $124,980, it was your $20 bill that caused EastSiders Season 2 not to get made.Don’t be that person.Support this now.
I’ve made my pledge because I believe in this work. Kit has already proven that he can turn out a fascinating, relevant, entertaining, smart product, so I have no doubt that this group will do it again. I’ve joined the army (because we can do that now, you know) and I’m not asking you to pledge; I’m just telling you to do it.
You can’t be shocked. Our postal service is more than a little bit too conservative for THAT!
No, Finland is giving Tom of Finland a place in philatelic history. And the images are, according to The Guardian article, some of the most daring ever put on a stamp, even if they are tame by T of F standards.
Finland’s Tom of Finland stamps, some of the most overtly homoerotic images to appear on an official government-issued postage stamp.
A nation’s stamps often mirror the nation’s culture and Finland is notoriously more open-minded to LGBT issues than other countries in the West. Still, times are changing. The Royal Mail issued a stamp commemorating Alan Turing in 2012. And next month, the USPS honors Harvey Milk with a stamp bearing the slain San Francisco councilman’s visage and a small rainbow flag. There is an effort currently underway to get the postal service to commemorate civil rights leader Bayard Rustin on a stamp as well.
Leather gloves and bare asses are, we can safely assume, not going to happen in the US mail anytime soon.
What follows is the text of an e-mail. I have friends — curiously, a great many really good friends — whip smart people — who work in and are passionate about the world of opera. To butcher Austin Powers, opera ain’t my bag, baby, but I appreciate it as an artistic expression. My particular tastes never get in the way of making sure that others can tell a story and impact lives by doing so.
Anyhow, this is in response to the whole hub-bub that’s happening at San Diego Opera. You can read a primer in this article from the LA Times. Meanwhile, all outrage and expletives below are my own.
—–
*sigh* JESUS FREAKIN’ CHRIST
I will attempt brevity, but I probably will not succeed because this pushes all of my arts management buttons.
It’s not over, you know, until the fat lady sings. Here’s Amalie Materna as Brunhilde in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen nearly 140 years ago. People are still coming to hear this music. Should we preserve it?
Here’s the bottom line: this is 100% — ONE HUNDRED PERCENT — about the mis-, mal- and non-feasance of this Board. Period. End of. Do not pass “Go.” Accept and move on to the next task. Because….
This is NOT the general director’s organization. This is NOT the audience’s organization. This is NOT the employees’ organization. This is the BOARD’S organization. That’s reality. That’s the legal reality of the situation.
The BOARD let Ian Campbell fail — spectacularly fail — at his job. Why? Because they were lazy. Because they forgot what they were supposed to do. Because they forgot their charge. Because they forgot — or did not know — what their job was. At at the very essence, their job was to shitcan him a decade ago.
Why? Because no one — NO ONE — should be allowed to make a career out of one artistic organization. Why? Because the art gets flabby. OR the leadership gets flabby. OR the Board gets flabby. OR all of the above.
When an arts Board forgets that they are supposed to make ART happen instead of make MONEY happen, well, they’ve lost the plot already.
So, what happens now? If no one pulls their fat out of the fire? Lots of people who can ill afford it lose their jobs. San Diego loses one of California’s/America’s/the world’s cultural treasures. And an art form dies a little. And we’re all a little bit worse off because we’ve contracted the amount of space in our world that we are willing to allot to art. And, thus, we become less and less human. That’s the esoteric nth degree, but it makes it no less sad.
This, friends, is the sad intersection of art and commerce where, unless you are the deftest of traffic cops, commerce always runs roughshod over art.
And I find the greatest of ironies in [redacted – the signature file of the original sender]: Audiences Reimagined? Okay. Good luck with that. But, I will leave you with this tiny tip: that’s a false construct. Audiences are audiences. They do not change. If you want to reimagine something WORTHWHILE THAT CAN BENEFIT SOMEONE, reimagine MARKETING to the audience. And Boards.
This fuckin’ thing raised my blood pressure too high for 10pm on a Tuesday.
Alert readers will already know that there’s not too much that I like more than discovering a really well written and well-produced show. And I’ve got another one for you: Wallflowers, the charming comedy from Kieran Turner (Jobriath A.D.) that’s just launched its second season on Stage17.tv.
According to the site, Stage17 is a new “digital platform offering captivating original, executive-produced and curated entertainment for the world’s largest stage — the Internet.”
John Halbach and Patch Darragh in Wallflowers. The second season opener is now available at Stage17.tv.
You’re going to see more of these types of platforms coming online as smart entrepreneurs, producers and, eventually, the mainline ‘creativity oligarchy,’ begin to understand where their audiences are getting entertainment.
As I started watching Wallflowers, I began to think about the title of the show. And, of course, I did what any self-respecting researcher would do: I turned to that specialist bastion of lexicography, urbandictionary.com. (Don’t judge.) UD defined wallflower this way, in part: “…some of the most interesting people if one actually talks to them.”
And that’s a pretty good jumping off point for this series; the central conceit of which is following a fairly tight-knit yet wildly diverse group of people who, for whatever reason, can’t get dates. They are all members of the support group, “Navigating the Relationship Waters in the New Millennium,” sort of an AA for the hopelessly single.
It’s a thesis that could get really old really quickly, but creator Turner is a smart writer, who uses the group meetings sparingly and effectively to advance the narrative. Janice, the group leader, sets the tone and Christianne Tisdale plays her with deadpan hilarity. Janice is doggedly earnest, even when her group members think she may have gone ‘round the bend.
Patch Darragh (Mercy, Boardwalk Empire) is the third actor to take on the central role of Bryce in the short history of the show and I believe he really nails the character in a way that neither of his predecessors (both quite good, by the way) did. Darragh has a marvelous world-weary, overly cynical, screw-you-guys, every cloud has a black lining kind of — what? — ennui, maybe — that just drips beautifully from every line he delivers.
John Halbach as Alex opposite Patch Darragh as Bryce in the second series of Wallflowers. The duo has their first encounter in a smartly written ‘pas de deux with Marlboros’ in episode 1.
This season, Bryce has a new love interest — after a riotously bad blind date from hell in Season 1 — in the form of piano player Alex, played by EastSiders’ John Halbach.
Halbach plays endearing all-American wide-open genuineness so well that, set against Darragh’s mordant darkness, you know sparks are soon coming.
Their main interaction in the first episode is a short, but important scene where you learn just about everything you need to know about them. It’s adorable. The mating rituals of the smoker.
Bryce fights against his acid edge here while Alex displays the same genuineness that Halbach had playing opposite another caustic love interest (the fantastic Constance Wu) in EastSiders. Smart writing. And the scene follows the old axiom “let picture tell story;” something forgotten by so many. It’s the moment when I definitely decided to come back for the next episode.
I have a clip of this scene that I put in and took out I don’t know how many times. Ultimately, though, I think you need to watch the entire episode to watch it all gel.
To keep you coming back: more cute boys, less clothes. John Halbach as Alex in an upcoming episode of Wallflowers.
Rounding out the principal cast are Sarah Saltzberg, Gibson Frazier, Jolly Abraham, Susan Louise O’Connor (an out-and-out screaming hoot), Max Crumm and Marcia DeBonis. All are actors with serious theatre chops. I’m sure I’m biased, but I find that’s where most substantial ensemble players come from.
Anyhow, watch it. Turner is a clever one and a deft weaver of all of humanity’s various foibles and failures — and those tiny glimmers of hope that make us get out of bed each day — into a well-turned story. Also, Wallflowers looks lovely; so props to cinematographer Zachary Halberd.
I have a short list — a very short list — of favorite series that I go back to again and again because they never seem to get old. That list has now grown by one.
Something Else:
It turns out that Turner is the man behind a little holiday flick called 24 Nights. I had no idea. You should check it out, as well. It, too, is delightful. Plus, as an added bonus, it features the lovely David Burtka, so young he’s barely out of short pants!
I’ll be honest with you: I used to hate weddings. Now, because I can have one of my own, I guess, I’ve come to embrace them — real or pretend. For example, I’ve done a lot of television watching and crying for the last week as Will Horton and Sonny Kiriakis got married on the daytime drama Days of our Lives.
This is NOT normal behavior. Certainly not from this curmudgeon!
But I can’t help it.
A veritable ‘Who’s Who’ of Days of our Lives’ royalty flank Sonny (Freddie Smith) and Will (Guy Wilson) at their wedding. On the far left: Marlena Evans (Deidre Hall) and Justin and Adrienne Kiriakis (Wally Kurth and Judi Evans). On the right: Sami Brady (Alison Sweeney), Lucas Horton (Bryan Dattilo) and Kate Roberts (Lauren Koslow).
And it’s a perfect example of why I’ve always been a fan of the genre of serial storytelling. It’s not because of any giant spectacle or sweeps month ratings grab: it’s because these important stories, told slowly over time can fundamentally alter behavior, lead public perception and change people’s lives.
I came out as a soap opera lover as a teen — years before I came out as gay — and I even studied soaps in college! Often, it’s been a maddening relationship. While soaps have sometimes been on the cutting edge telling some sociologically important stories, in others they have been unbearably slow in embracing a changing society.
Some Gay Soap History Let’s take LGBT issues, for instance. In the seven years — yes, only seven — since the first gay male kiss on daytime, we’ve come to the first same-sex wedding*. That’s an impressively short amount of time, especially given how late Days came to the party by introducing Sonny Kiriakis in 2011 as an openly gay man and developing the long, sometimes painfully slow arc of Will Horton coming to terms with his own sexuality and falling for Sonny.
No, I won’t fault Days for finally coming to the table around the desert course, because they seized the zeitgeist by the horns, stopped the music and reset the conventions of the genre and committed to telling a contemporary love story in modern terms using today’s social norms and not relying on unfounded paralytic fears of an older, less wiser, generation. When so many people were predicting the end of soaps, Ken Corday did the right thing in trying to save his: he decided to shift the focus to contemporary values, begin to compress the time it took to tell stories in serial drama and let the naysayers be damned.
It’s the only way you make change happen. It’s the only way you become relevant.
No one should wonder — at all — why Days of our Lives won the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Drama last year.
Freddie Smith and Guy Wilson portray Sonny Kiriakis and Will Horton, daytime’s happiest gay supercouple. Would that we all looked this good in our own wedding pictures!
Why We Love Them
Nick Fallon, nefarious ‘smarmy’ evildoer — assayed brilliantly by Blake Berris — tried, in the days leading up to the wedding, to undermine Will’s confidence, something that was pretty easy to do in the past. He said that the reason that people in Salem were captivated by Will and Sonny was that it was a good old-fashioned romance where the worldly guy (Sonny) came back home and fell in love with the golly-gee wholesomeness of the hometown “total newbie” (Will). And, do you know what? He was right.
That’s why we love this story. It IS a good old-fashioned romance. We love this story for the same reasons that people have been crying at the end of romantic movies, plays and television shows since those media were invented: humans fall in love with love and we love nothing more than watching people fall in love. Oh, and we love happy endings.
The Grooms
When Sonny begins to come up the aisle, on the arm of his mother, there’s a moment when you think he may bolt and run up to Will. His is a character that knows his own mind and he knows what he wants and he has always known that he wanted Will more than anyone or anything else.
When Will sees Sonny coming up the aisle, realizing that he’s there for him, it almost takes his breath away. Forever questioning, forever wondering about his self-worth, forever feeling inferior, you realize at this moment that Will gets all of his strength from Sonny. Sonny has infused him with power, allowed him to be himself, allowed him to grow up and become his own man.
When Will says at the end of his vows, “But most of all, Sonny, I love you,” everyone knows how full of truth and how redolent with meaning that short sentence is.
Wilson and Smith’s off-screen friendship and chemistry along with their respect for Will and Sonny’s relationship infuses and elevates their on-screen portrayals.| Image: @THEguywilson
Telling the Tale
The writing of the wedding arc has been as superlative as it gets throughout — careful and nuanced — and, in the very best traditions of serials, reaching deep into the story for anchors to bring everything together. Tad references getting told off by Victor Kiriakis in his best man speech; that’s from the summer of 2011, when Sonny came to town. Victor’s own arc from telling Tad “no one talks to a Kiriakis like that” to showing a bigoted associate the door with a “Family values, my ass!” has shown masterful continuity.
And more than that, the short scene in the park on the way to the wedding with Will and T seems like a throwaway, but, without saying it aloud, what Will is remembering is exactly where Sonny kissed him for the first time — an occurrence that began after Tad disowns Will. Then comes Sonny’s kiss, which Will is not ready for, leading Will to sleep with Gabi, T punching out Sonny, Gabi getting pregnant and setting the whole plot in motion.
In other words, they played the long game. Soaps NEVER play the long game. It’s so astonishing, I can’t even think of a time when a story was so well plotted and so well written in a multi-year arc. I was infuriated — just infuriated — when Gabi got pregnant by Will because it seemed an easy way to bust up Will and Sonny’s nascent relationship with every tiresome, hackneyed, eye-rolling, old-fashioned soap opera cliche in the book. Why? Because soaps NEVER play the long game. But here? Son of a bitch, if they haven’t neatly tied up every loose end.
As such, OF COURSE a reformed T is the best man, standing up for them proudly. OF COURSE Lucas has become one of Will and Sonny’s biggest champions. OF COURSE Marlena is the one to marry them, her long arc with Will’s struggles comprising some of the most special scenes over the last several years. OF COURSE EJ DiMera saves the day for a Kiriakis wedding. OF COURSE Sami, however inadvertently, throws a spanner into the gearbox. OF COURSE Justin and Adrienne are the most supportive parents in the world. OF COURSE there’s no “DAYSaster” event [Sami’s wedding is coming!] because it would ruin everything that’s absolutely, positively right about this story.
The Guys
What I think elevates it further is the power of the central performers. Guy Wilson, while a seasoned actor, had only been playing this role for a very short amount of time before these scenes were shot and his roughly four months of screen time — including many days where this story has not been shown — is an awfully compressed interval for someone to claim a character, stamp it as their own and make the audience believe in your characterization — especially an important character previously played by a popular actor.
I’ve watched Guy’s performances closely since he began and he started to charm me early on. He’s a subtle performer who commits readily to the material. His innate intelligence and commitment to the role and the story show through in his performances. As Will is now an older and maturing adult, some of Guy’s choices are bolder than his predecessor, but he plays true to the character brief. The character continues to grow.
Freddie Smith as Salem’s ‘white knight.’ Sonny generally keeps true, but we all know he has an edge. His last name is Kiriakis, after all.
On the other hand, he plays most of his scenes opposite Freddie Smith, the young man who created Sonny Kiriakis and who is, for my money, one of the finest young actors on the air, so Guy has had to hit a pretty high bar every time he’s up. (You’ll note that I did not say “on daytime.” That’s because I believe that differentiating between actors on daytime and primetime — or now online — is a meaningless and often demeaning construct.)
Freddie is such an easy performer — smooth, solid, layered, confident — everything that Sonny needs to be. He always matches the show’s veterans note for note and lifts up the entire scene, not merely playing his own sides to showcase himself. It is the hallmark of understanding of what it means to be an ensemble player. And it’s damn rare, in this day and age, to find that understanding and ability in someone so young.
New Order Built on the Past
The thing about serials is that, for an audience to buy into them over the long-term, they need to develop relationships with certain characters and certain families. That multi-generational feeling was very much in evidence in Sonny and Will’s wedding and the powerful turns by veterans Deidre Hall, Wally Kurth and Bryan Dattilo [who made me weep like a baby, damn him!] and a lengthy knock-out of a monologue masterfully delivered by the peerless 86-year-old Peggy McCay, served to cement the couple firmly into the bedrock of this show.
I received a tweet awhile back in which the writer called Will and Sonny the modern day Tom and Alice. It was the perfect response. Perfect.
Frances Reid and Macdonald Carey as Tom and Alice Horton, the original central “tent pole” characters of the long running NBC drama Days of our Lives.
If Days of our Lives is to have a promising and relevant future, its anchors must be placed in characters that both mirror modern life and reflect back on the long history of the show. For decades, Tom and Alice Horton were that center. Plenty of things happened to them, plenty of drama swirled around them, but Tom and Alice as a unit did not waver. Looking back, it’s hard not to think of one without the other. As the show nears the half-century mark, it seems to me that the next generation’s standard bearers of a rare solid soap opera relationship should be Tom and Alice’s great-grandson and the man that he loves.
It is the perfect way to honor the rich history of the program, to honor the genre and to show that the deep, deep roots of serial storytelling have a place in the modern world to tell today’s stories and tackle today’s issues.
In five years, I would love to see Will and Sonny raising their child — or maybe even more than one child by then — and interacting in fundamental ways with the other denizens of Salem while creating a loving and stable home at the center. It would be a powerful statement, one that Days seems to be on the cusp of making. It is certainly one that I would relish.
For the nonce, though, I’m just happy that this story has come into my living room (and smart phone and laptop) and that I was able to share in it. It was simply magnificent.
*Okay, okay, okay, fine! TECHNICALLY this is not the first same-sex wedding. Bianca and Reese on All My Children in 2009 were the first, but that’s a storyline fraught with controversy, not to mention poor plotting and lack of integration into the canvas. Also, their marriage would not have been legal where they lived, because Pennsylvania, where fictional Pine Valley is located, was not — and still is not — an equality state. Days has made Salem’s locale into an equality state in the plot — by fiat — and this is the first daytime TV same sex marriage in the post-DOMA era.
In case you missed it, some very important information from Lambda Legal about life for LGBT couples after Section 3 of DOMA was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Especially important if you are/want to be married.
Very good analysis in the Times. I think we all wish for a rose-colored past where these issues of civil inequality could have been decided years — decades — ago, but it’s a grand time to be alive and to watch the change. A better America awaits us tomorrow. A better one still, the day after that. Keep your eyes on the prize, babies! We’ll get there.
The Supreme Court will be all but forced to decide if, as appears possible, different circuits reach clashing conclusions. The one most likely to decide against same-sex marriage, many experts say, is the Fifth Circuit, which will decide the Texas appeal. That circuit includes Mississippi and Louisiana, and the court is viewed as largely made up of conservative judges.
One Last Word 