Macaulay Seminar One at Brooklyn College

Mohammed’s Radio was a great play. I absolutely love how it managed to touch upon women’s rights, the disadvantages of being close-minded, unfair stereotypes, and family morals in just a few short scenes. The plot was fantastic. I was never bored or confused by what was going on, and when I read it for the first time everything clicked and seemed to make sense. The staged reading of the play was also nice, but I didn’t enjoy it so much. The acting was believable and it brought the play to life, but I would rather just read the play to myself or see the full, finished version of it. I think that I would have been able to offer more insight if I saw the play being physically acted out instead of just listening to actors as they sat in front of us on chairs. I did, however, enjoy the Question and Answer panel at the end. It was exciting for me to learn about a work of art from the person who poured so much of their talent into creating. I figured that we would only be talking to the playwright, so I was pleasantly surprised when all of the actors started chiming in to the discussion.  I was also excited to learn that my theory on Little Joe representing hope for the future was correct!

Although I was unable to attend the play reading this week, I was able to return to my high school to watch their plays with my sister. Each year 2 grades will pair up with each other and come up with their own original musicals. They will take popular songs and remix them and rewrite them to fit their musical. Before I took Macaulay, I always thought they were talented but after taking the class and learning about art, beauty, and music, I had a new profound respect for the musicals. I realized just how talented everyone in the production was from the actors, to the band, to the tech crew, and stage crew. I was blown away by the production and esp. after this class, I’ve looked at everything with a deeper meaning and learned to appreciate the beauty of art and am getting closer to understand what art really means.

For a few years, my brother and I have been fans of a band called Il Divo. However, to say that Il Divo is simply a band is a colossal understatement. Il Divo consists of four men who have the most angelic and perfect voices you will ever have the pleasure of listening to, whether it be on recording or live. The band sings operatic pop in many different languages. They do covers of songs and original songs with only some of the choruses in English. Luckily for me, I was able to hear these angels sing live on November 8th. My brother had gotten tickets for my birthday to their concert at the Marquis Theatre. The concert was part of the tour for their new album titled, “A Musical Affair.” This album was comprised entirely of Broadway show tunes, which, needless to say, was perfect for me. The combination of hearing Il Divo sing and hearing them sing Broadway songs was absolutely incredible. They also had guest singer, Heather Headley, who is featured on the album. Her voice is absolutely incredible and she has starred in many Broadway productions, such as The Lion King. I got chills after every single song they sang. This concert was very different from the other concerts I’ve been too. People dressed up and sat in a theatre with chairs made of red velvet, whereas in other concerts, I was standing in a crowd of young people jumping up and down and screaming. Another thing that really intrigued me about the concert was the fact that the members of the band strongly discouraged people from using their cell phones to take pictures or videos. One of the members would even gesture for someone to put their phone away from the stage. The singers really wanted the audience to enjoy the performance and not be caught up in taking pictures and videos. Often times, we do not realize how focused we are on capturing every minute of a concert, and we miss out on actually experiencing the concert.

Although this was not my first round table reading of a play, it was the first time I was not a part of the round table reading I attended. Upon reading “Mohammed’s Radio” I was immediately interested in the story and the many weighty topics that it tries to address. I was even more interested in seeing how the actors would interpret the characters and in seeing the characters come to life before my eyes. One thing that surprised me about the reading was that the story was acted out even more than I thought it would be. I expected all of the actors to be sitting at a panel in front of me and read from the script with emotion and skill. However, this reading had a little more theatricality in it than I expected. The actors entered and exited when they were supposed to and even changed their posture and gestures to match what they were saying. I expected the physical aspect of acting to be more for a stage production and not really included in the reading of a play. I was also surprised to learn that the character of Little Joe had much more significance to the play than I originally thought he had. During the Q&A after the reading, the writer explained that Little Joe embodied the hope of the play and was the only character that had not been tainted by the neighborhood and had a chance of “escaping.” It was also interesting to see Little Joe portrayed by a college freshman. When asked the question of whether Kelly’s conversion to Islam was genuine, the writer combined the ideas that we suggested in class on Tuesday. He said that yes, it was an escape, but after finding this very convenient escape, Kelly really was starting to find spiritual connection and faith with the ideas of Islam. She just needed to continue in her journey on finding out what Islam is really like.
I was really pleased to find out that a lot of the people who worked on and acted in the play are current Brooklyn College students and alumni! In fact, I knew the actor who portrayed Little Joe, who is a freshman in the BFA program.

I genuinely enjoyed the play Mohammed’s Radio and when I read it, I felt like I had fully satisfied how I wanted to view each character in the story, so I didn’t think seeing the play act out in front of me would make a huge difference. I was wrong. I really enjoyed the reading of the script of each character in front of me. It was very intimate, because it wasn’t the set that was being shown or the over the top stage and lighting, it was just the talented actors all sitting together and acting out this wonderful play and giving the spotlight to each character. Very beautiful. A distinguishing aspect that I discovered from how I read the play and seeing it played out in front of me was how different I pictured the “high and low” of the dialogue. It’s not really something I can explain by typing, but the way the character decided to stretch out the sentences was very different than how I read it, so that was very interesting. All in all, even though I had already read the play I was fully engaged throughout the whole performance and even teared up when Alice was talking about Joe being the first one to say sorry, it got to me when I read the play, and I told myself not to but I caved. I couldn’t help it, that part was so important to me. My favorite part of the trip however was after the performance when all the actors came out of their character and began to explain the significance of each character. I loved that we got to ask questions and have a one on one with the writer and director, it made the performance all the more memorable. I had a lot of fun and there were some funny moments. I even got Stephen Gracia to sign my program! I’m actually going to look into these kinds of events and see if I can go in my free time because I got so into it, I would definitely go to these “script-reading” aka work of art sessions again. This and the Juilliard Jazz Quartet are neck to neck the best trips so far in my Macaulay journey. Thank You Professor Ugoretz.