Summary: At first glance, sports and theater might seem incompatible. For example, a player in the NBA can actually be penalized for theatrics. Miami Heat forward Chris Bosh felt the full weight of that policy during the NBA Finals this year. After he pretended to get hit on a play and drew a foul, the league retroactively fined him $5,000 for his flop. No one will get fined for bringing athletic prowess into a theater, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to turn big games and big athletes into stage dramas, musicals, and operas. David Cote, theater editor of Time Out New York, joins Soundcheck guest host Erin McKeown to talk about some of the sports stories that have been adapted for the stage. David Cote, on why sports tend to work as subjects in the theater It’s sort of an exotic world that theater folk might not necessarily know that much about. I don’t want to make any judgments of course — there’s plenty of people who love baseball and Stephen Sondheim, probably. But I think that when you bring sports into the theater, it’s like, “What is this world?” It’s very visual. There’s a lot of kinetic movement — there’s a lot of costuming and movement. I think it inherently works on stage as a spectacle. On ROCKY, a musical adaptation of the classic Sylvestor Stallone film, arriving on Broadway in 2014: How do you stage a boxing match without killing your actors every week? I was talking to [Rocky director Alex Timbers] about it recently, and he was saying that he and choreographer Steven Hoggett have come up with a full-contact choreography for the fights. Meaning that the actors actually make contact, but they’re not hitting each other, if that makes any sense. It’s highly coordinated, it’s highly safe I guess, but it’s realistic. On bear-baiting, a blood sport that was the main competitor to the theater in Shakespeare’s time: You take a bear and you chain it to the center of a ring and then you set some dogs on it. And occasionally, for extra fun, you tie a monkey to its head. And the Elizabethans loved this! It was either, “Do I go see Julius Caesar or do I go see the bear get torn apart by dogs?” It was a culture of contradictions, you could say. Watch the trailer for ROCKY below:
