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Review content:
Modern Love’s World Premiere
Since 2006, Anthony Mora , whose works have been compared to Mamet, LaBute and Pinter, has served as the playwright in residence at the Sidewalk Studio Theatre, POP: The Principles of Perfection marked the first collaboration between Anthony and producer Kurt Swanson of the Sidewalk Studio theatre. That was followed by Bang! A Love Story, which Anthony adapted from his award-winning novel of the same name. Scenes from the work featuring Linda Cardenelli, were showcased in Los Angeles and in New York. The full play premiered at the Sidewalk Studio Theatre in 2006. Originally released in hardcover in 1998, by Dunhill Publishing, Dragonon Inc. published the revised softcover edition of Anthony Mora’s controversial novel, in 2005. From the run at the Sidewalk, the Bang! was optioned by producer/director Anderson Seal of Anderson Seal Media.
Unlike Bang!, whose trajectory was from novel to play to film, Modern Love, which world premiere’s at the Sidewalk Studio Theatre on January 16, 2009, takes a different route. The play, which follows an L.A.-based film producer turned writer/director whose obsession with his directorial debut takes him down a dark, precarious path, is now being written as a novel.
"The novel will not follow the exact storyline of the play but will use the play as its starting point,” Anthony explains. “I became intrigued by the character of Jillian. She was originally written as a thirty year old film star, but then I read a twenty two year old actress for the part (who eventually was cast) and realized how much more compelling the story would be, if this superstar was in that place where she's neither a woman nor an adolescent. She tries to play it as though she was thirty, but she can't quite pull it off, so to speak. It’s interesting in that the casting of the play changed the character which the novel is now based on.”
Modern Love premieres on January 16, 2009 at The Sidewalk Studio Theatre in Toluca Lake, Cali
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