Philo finally finds Broadway...

[Pete Deksnis]

The Farnsworth Invention

...a new Broadway play by Aaron Sorkin.

The following synopsis is from the press release: "The Farnsworth Invention centers around the bitter conflict that pitted Philo T. Farnsworth, a boy genius who invented television as a high school student in 1927, against David Sarnoff, the head of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). The legal battle between Farnsworth and RCA would later become known as one of the great, tragic examples of legal and industrial force combining to crush a rightful patent owner. In a race that would change humanity forever, two men battle one another for honor, glory, and a place in the history books."

ON STAGE at the:
Music Box Theater
239 West 45th Street
New York, NY 10036

OPENS: November 14, 2007

PERFORMANCES: Mon - Sat at 8 pm; Sat at 2 pm

starting 11/19/2007: Tue at 7 pm; Wed - Sat at 8 pm; Wed & Sat at 2 pm; Sun at 3 pm

TICKETS: $51.50 - $101.50
212-239-6200

Who would have guessed?

Pete

[fsjonsey]

The story of the Sarnoff empire definitely contains enough drama for a theatre piece.

[Sandy G]

Look up "Meglomaniac" in the dictionary & you'll likely find Sarnoff's picture. What he also did to Maj. Armstrong, inventor of the superheterodyne circuit, & frequency modulation, was nothing short of criminal...And Armstrong was, at one time at least, a FRIEND....

[oldtvman]

As I siad in an earlier thread, the battle for color had enough drama that it would make a great movie or mini series on PBS.

[fujifrontier]

imagine all the roundies they would commission, as props!

[Phil Nelson]

Originally Posted by Pete Deksnis

The Farnsworth Invention
...a new Broadway play by Aaron Sorkin.

Interesting. Sorkin created "The West Wing," which won about a zillion TV awards.

Phil Nelson

[Dave A]

There is a nice article about Sorkin and this new show in today's New York Times. The writer speaks favorably about the show in previews. A real review in the NYT will come when it opens at the Music Box. I'm trying to find time to get there for it.

Dave A

[fsjonsey]

Originally Posted by Sandy G

Look up "Meglomaniac" in the dictionary & you'll likely find Sarnoff's picture. What he also did to Maj. Armstrong, inventor of the superheterodyne circuit, & frequency modulation, was nothing short of criminal...And Armstrong was, at one time at least, a FRIEND....

Couldn't agree more. I mean, he drove EH Armstrong to suicide. Sarnoff is the embodiment of the ruthless, power hungry businessman.

[Einar72]

Can we trade our beer and cigarette money for a performance in Seattle? Philo was an unsung hero that no student today is likely to have heard of.

Sarnoff may have been an ugly, ruthless monster, but his death spelled the end of RCA. Would Armstrong have given us more gifts had he been allowed to? So many years wasted in court, with Armstrong's wife seeing a bittersweet victory after his suicide. We have no more like either one of them today, and with our current political/educational/economic structure, no Great American Genius will likely blossom anytime soon, let alone be encouraged or rewarded. (I'll bet I'll hear a quote from that guy on the tube above before the thread is through).

[Pete Deksnis]

A stagehands strike has kept two new Broadway plays from opening, one of which is The Farnsworth Invention.

[Pete Deksnis]

We should be getting a review soon. The "highly anticipated" The Farnsworth Invention will be opening on Broadway soon now that the stagehand strike is history.

[Pete Deksnis]

Newsday and The New York Times review "The Farnsworth Invention." The first reviewer reviews the play, the second reviewer mostly shows off his New York 'insider' status.

================================================== ======

BY LINDA WINER
newsday
December 4, 2007

"The Farnsworth Invention" - which finally opened at the Music Box Theatre last night after the prolonged delays of the Broadway strike - is vintage Sorkin and crackling prime-time theater.

Breezy and shrewd, smart-alecky and idealistic, the quick-moving drama presents two sides to the still-contentious story behind the invention of television. Sorkin is positively gooey-eyed about the scientific and entrepreneurial buccaneers in America between the world wars. As the creator of "West Wing," arguably the best expository political fiction on popular TV, he manages to relate both to the purity of the little guy and the corrupting happenstance of big-foot corporate power.

As Sorkin's idea of David Sarnoff says at the start, "The ends do justify the means. That's what means are for."

Two men - one famous, one forgotten - tell one another's stories. It is a canny device, directed with exuberant economy by Des McAnuff, who stripped down a related chunk of American mythology in the wildly entertaining "Jersey Boys."

Hank Azaria plays Sarnoff, the Russian shtetl immigrant who, while building RCA, NBC and Radio City Music Hall, saw the potential of radio and, later, TV. Newcomer Jimmi Simpson is equally marvelous as Philo Farnsworth, the hayseed savant and self-taught electrical engineer who dreamed up the most influential invention in history. It was 1921 and he was in the ninth grade in Indian Creek, Utah.

Sorkin, who first envisioned this as a movie, employs 19 actors to play 150 characters in more than 50 locations. McAnuff arranges them in a clean double-decker set (designed by Klara Zieglerova) with black banisters connected by a skinny red winding staircase.

As his TV series prove, Sorkin loves to show us men in suits as they walk fast and talk faster. Sarnoff is a slick operator in blue-black hair and a tailored three-piece blue-black suit (costumes by David C. Woolard). Farnsworth - the quirky genius - has a seriously sweet face, wheat-colored hair and a haphazard three-piece wheat-colored suit.

The two, who challenge each other's versions of the facts, are surrounded by lots of versatile experts, including Alexandra Wilson as Farnsworth's wife.

For all the double and triple casting, nobody is generic. Sorkin can pile more details than the mind can process about the mechanic versus the electronic TV. But he makes sure we get it. He also can set the stage for the Great Depression and the moonwalk with a few miraculously brief bursts of information.

Sorkin sprinkles anachronistic profanities as liberally as he makes up fiction about real people's lives. Farnsworth historians are already incensed about big and small inaccuracies. See thefarnsworthinvention.com for specifics. I appreciate the concern. I just wish someone had cared half as much about the world-altering distortions in last season's hit, "Frost/Nixon," alas, soon to be a major motion picture.

============================================

A Farm Boy and a Mogul, and How They Changed the World


By BEN BRANTLEY
The New York Times
Published: December 4, 2007

With billionaire parents now producing bar mitzvah celebrations and sweet-16 parties as if they were major motion pictures, it’s only a matter of time before this spare-no-expense approach is applied to their kids’ school projects. Imagine that Mr. Hedge Fund, with money to burn and many favors to call in, imports a crack combination of writer, director and actors to put across Junior’s oral report with envy-making, A-worthy flair.


The resulting effort might well be something like “The Farnsworth Invention,” the new play by Aaron Sorkin that had its strike-delayed opening last night at the Music Box Theater. This information-crammed, surface-skimming biodrama about the creators of television suggests nothing so much as a classroom presentation on a seven-figure budget.

The show certainly deserves high marks for all those traits that exacting schoolteachers hold dear: conciseness, legibility, correct use of topic sentences, evidence in defense of two sides of an argument and colorful examples to support the main thesis.

Such virtues are given efficient life onstage by a team that includes Des McAnuff, a director known for melding slickness and liveliness (“The Who’s Tommy,” “Big River”), and two appealing stars who hold your attention even when the subject is cathode-ray tubes: Hank Azaria and Jimmi Simpson. Then there’s Mr. Sorkin, who knows from television, having become famous as the originator of the celebrated White House series “The West Wing.” (He is also the author of the pot-boiling military play and movie “A Few Good Men.”)

Whether these combined talents make for compelling theater as well as a peppy educational experience is another matter. “The Farnsworth Invention” — which follows the converging fortunes of Philo T. Farnsworth, a boy genius from Idaho, and David Sarnoff, a New York broadcasting czar born in Russia — is packed with the stuff of high drama: corporate espionage, the death of a child, the Wall Street crash, village-burning Cossacks, even the sinking of the Titanic (which figured in the young Sarnoff’s rise at a telegraph company) and a slew of those eureka moments you associate with easy-reading biographies about scientific discoveries.

And yet you’re likely to leave “The Farnsworth Invention” feeling that you have just watched an animated Wikipedia entry, fleshed out with the sort of anecdotal scenes that figure in “re-enactments” on E! channel documentaries and true-crime shows. This two-hour play is a fast-moving sequence of reflex-stimulating information- and emotion-bites. It never pauses long enough to find depth in any of them.

Mr. Sorkin clearly had higher intentions. His model appears to have been two works by the British playwright Michael Frayn that turn dry academic subjects into juicy explorations of human mystery: “Copenhagen” (about atomic physics per Bohr and Heisenberg) and “Democracy” (German parliamentary politics in the age of Willy Brandt).

Like those plays “The Farnsworth Invention” uses multiple narrators and alternative versions of the truth. Sarnoff provides a running commentary on the events in Farnsworth’s life, from boyhood on, while Farnsworth does the same for Sarnoff, with each occasionally interrupting the other on disputed matters of fact.

Both men, in different ways, might be considered the fathers of television. Farnsworth, working on his own in San Francisco, was the first to transmit a moving image, while Sarnoff saw and quickly developed the technology’s potential as a cultural and commercial phenomenon.

Though they never met (despite a scene in the play imagining a meeting), each was acutely aware of the other, and their interests collided in court over the patent to what was essentially Farnsworth’s invention. They neatly embody the ever-popular dichotomy of the wool-gathering genius and the hard-minded pragmatist. And while the script never allows Mr. Azaria and Mr. Simpson to venture far beyond this dualist setup, they strike their characters’ single notes with euphonious charm.

Mr. Sorkin and Mr. McAnuff deftly guide you through a labyrinth of scientific and legal exposition, with the ensemble members providing a sort of time-line choral commentary on historical happenings. (Mr. McAnuff’s staging of these sequences brings to mind Michael Blakemore’s direction of “Democracy,” while Klara Zieglerova’s two-tiered set recalls Peter J. Davison’s for the same production.)

Detours into the personal lives of the play’s antithetical leading characters (especially that of Farnsworth, a heavy drinker who was devastated by the death of his young son) are delivered with telegraphic expediency. And there are pithy asides on Sarnoff’s losing battle with the encroaching commercialization of radio and television, via the selling of advertising time.

That’s a lot of territory to cover in two hours. It’s understandable that Mr. Sorkin resorts to the shorthand of biopic clichés to convey his characters’ states of mind. But, oh, how they cloy as they accumulate.

Sarnoff on Farnsworth’s future wife, Pem (Alexandra Wilson): “She thought he was crazy, but she wanted to be with him no matter what absurd future he had in mind for electrons.” An excited Farnsworth to his assistants: “You go get a generator. Cliff and I are going to start building a lab.” Sarnoff’s wife, Lizette (Nadia Bowers), to her husband (witheringly of course): “I think you just stole television.”

The script is also fat with brand-name references that, when first used, cause the audience to go “oooh” in recognition. (Of Sarnoff’s new corporate headquarters: “He called it Radio City.”) A similar response is elicited by the trafficking in statements that, seen in hindsight, acquire the synthetic sheen of easy irony, as when an idealistic Sarnoff says, of television, “It’s gonna change everything. It’s gonna end ignorance and misunderstanding.”

Having made a great success in television, Mr. Sorkin knows its pitfalls and limitations inside out. But it’s hard to avoid the impression that, for all its high-reaching ambitions, “The Farnsworth Invention” often shares the glibness and reductionism of which mainstream television is regularly accused. Besides, in recent years, many television dramas — including Mr. Sorkin’s “West Wing,” in its first seasons — have exhibited far more complexity and shading than “The Farnsworth Invention” ever allows.

[Dave A]

You can also read a scene-by-scene analysis of the play here.

http://www.thefarnsworthinvention.com/

It is hosted by the author of the book "The Boy Who Invented Television". Judge for yourself.

Dave A