By Harry Haun
Logan took his play idea to the Donmar Warehouse and its artistic director, Michael Grandage, who agreed to stage it there. "Michael's brilliant approach to the play was to treat it as a work play. Rothko and his assistant are constantly working. They are doing the things an artist does. They're mixing paints, they're priming canvases, they're building canvas-stretchers. All that detail is in my text, but he completely embraced it so that, when the audience goes into the theatre, they're going to get a privileged view of what it might have been like to see a great artist at work doing his job. I worked so closely with Michael and the two actors and the designers it really feels like a shared project of passion that we now get to share with the audience."
Because Logan had been so deeply into the popcorn and so far away from a proscenium, he was afraid his stage technique had gotten rusty. "I had some trepidation about the muscle memory and going back into the theatre, but, once you go to that first rehearsal — and every theatre rehearsal-room the world over is exactly the same — the process is exciting, and everyone is in for the right reason. It was like riding a bike, and, happily, this bike took me from London to Broadway."
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Read the earlier PlayBlog item about Alfred Molina in Red.
27 Mar 2010
All sorts of favorable variables converged to get Logan back to theatre, he feels. "The play is actually dedicated to Stephen Sondheim. All the time we were working on 'Sweeney Todd,' in his own magnificent and benevolent way he kept nudging me toward theatre, saying 'You should write a play.' So, when the idea of the Seagram murals and Rothko and those themes all crystallized in this play, I went for it."
Alfred Molina in Red. photo by Johan Persson
STAGE TO SCREENS: "Sweeney Todd" Screenwriter John Logan Paints Broadway Red
Next up for Logan? A new HBO series pilot called "The Miraculous Year," about a Broadway composer-lyricist. Read the recent Playbill.com story.
