I was really jazzed by David's post on the films that have had significant impact on his life and so decided to take him up on his invitation to chime in with my own. And I encourage the rest of you to post your own. What's not to love?
I, however, being someone who is pathologically obsessed with my escape from rigid categories as they might define me, have chosen to open my list up a bit to include all works of the performing arts.
1. The original Broadway production of A Chorus Line. In part, because I was 10 years old at the time, this show made a huge impression on me. Specifically, I was thrilled and inspired by its non-traditional structure, its lack of one central protagonist and its in-your-face acknowledgment of the artifice of people singing about their lives, dreams and feelings. I think at the tender age of 10, this show gave me confidence to break rules in my own work and not just try to ape the heroes of that era like Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill... or even Richard Rodgers.
2. All the Bach chorales. For those of you who never suffered through an undergraduate degree in Music, the Bach chorales are culled from virtually everything the composer ever wrote. They are 4-part choral settings of liturgical texts, usually of no greater length than 8 phrases. He used them in almost every choral work he wrote, so there are more than 300. J.S. Bach was prolific (both in and out of the bedroom - he had 20 children). Anyway, I digress... The point is, these little gems contain in them such a concentrated collection of fundamental truths of harmony that no musician can ever hope to fathom all that lies buried within. In the 1980s for a period of less than two years, I made a daily ritual, sitting at the piano for 20 min. to play 3 or 4 of them. It was a wonderful way to clear the head and reconnect to something approximating the "divine." I keep meaning to start back up on that ritual. Who knows how much of a better person I'd be if I were still sitting down with Bach every morning for 20 minutes.
3. Stravinsky's opera, The Rake's Progress. Actually, just the way I've presented the title reveals an unfair bias. This is a great opera, written in a neo-classical style, inspired in large part by the greatest Mozart operas but what really makes this piece a stand out (for me, anyway) is its kick-ass libretto written by William H. Auden. Check it out. It combines humor, British cynicism and transgressive sexuality, all in the telling of a pretty archetypal story of a good boy gone bad.
4. Eugene Ionesco's The Bald Soprano. This was one of the first plays I ever directed and it opened my eyes, ears and soul to the possibility of language being turned on its head in service of some really subversive shit. Check it out.
5. All the films of Buster Keaton. If you haven't spent hours immersed in the wacky endlessly-spiraling worlds of Buster Keaton, then—guaranteed—your ideas of what's possible in film are limited. Anyone aspiring to write, direct, produce, shoot, edit or act in film owes it to themselves to make Buster Keaton your new best friend.
6. The original Twilight Zone TV series. Too many of these kept me up at night for hours and hours pondering their implications. Not sure what, if any, impact they've had on my work per se, but they certainly occupied my mind as a little kid.
7. General Hospital and Dynasty. As a pre-teen, I used to join my sister to watch General Hospital, particularly during whole Luke & Laura insanity. Then in high-school, Dynasty was huge and groups of us would sit around eating pizza and watching that strange cast chew up the scenery. These two TV soap operas gave me a healthy appreciation for broad strokes, big plot points and, of course, big hair.
8. Charles Ives' The Housatonic at Stockbridge from his orchestral suite Three Places in New England. This eerie tone poem always makes me cry and I've gone on record with numerous friends that I insist it be played at my memorial service. It used fragments from some common hymns, but does so in a very modern and unsophisticated somewhat brash way. Like much of Ives' music, it's full of yearning and frustration. It just kills me every time.
