Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Herding Cats in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ on Broadway
NYTimes.com: Four days before previews, the cast and crew of the new Broadway version of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” were putting the finishing touches on the show’s blocking, lighting and costumes. But on this final day of February, there remained one gaping hole: the director still hadn’t cast the role of Holly Golightly’s cat.
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4 comments:
This article is actually really comical in some ways. I find it funny how so much can go into the casting of one "character" in a play, especially when that character has no lines in the play. This article also really showed how intricate the casting process can be when incorporating animals or young children into a production. Animals and children seem to complicate a production's process on all accounts. Usually trainers and child wranglers are necessary when an animal or child is in a production. Regardless, being an animal trainer for Broadway seems like a really interesting and all around cool job. I wonder how much the presence of this cat changes the production from night to night on Broadway.
I agree with Jess, this was pretty funny. I have never heard of someone bringing chicken with them to a theatre performance, thats rather comical in itself, but to have a dog run on stage toward it is even funnier. I am actually rather surprised that you can successfully "teach" a cat a role in a theatre production at all. From my experience they really dont care about humans or what humans want them to do no matter what the reward is, but thats great that they were able to find a suitable cat.
As fun and interesting as it is to have live animals on stage, I still think you are playing with fire when you put one on especially in front of an audience. As much training and preparedness as you can give the animal things can still surprise it and at pretty much anytime it can just decide to stop moving and refuse to do anything it is told. Also I feel like it is pretty unfair to the animal because it cant tell you wether or not it actually enjoys being on stage like a human can.
I agree with April, I have never heard of someone bringing chicken with them to a theatrical performance. I think this is extremely comical. I would never imagine a person being able to train a cat to be in a theatre piece. I am intrigued and want to see this now!
However, I have heard nothing but terrible of things about this piece. I have heard that the cats are interesting part of the show, but that the show has nothing to offer except a cat... Live animals onstage are often hard but fun to work with. I have worked with them now on two productions of Legally Blonde and two productions of Wizard of Oz. They are really cool if they work, but they are HORRIBLE if they do not.
I agree with everyone because it is very comical and interesting to see an real animals on the stage. I always thought it would be very difficult to train even a dog to film a dog movie. However, thinking of how it should be transferred into a production, a live performance, it would have been very tough. However, I think that they had no choice, but to bring a cat to the stage because it is impossible for a human to take that role, which will definitely take away the reality of the show. Especially for cats, they are the animals who do not care about others and rather do whatever they want to do, so it would be challenging to find a suitable character as April said. However, it sounds very amazing to have a trainer and use cat as one of the characters in the play.I hope that this keeps working so that other audiences also find this fascinating.
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