Three quick unrelated articles
Aug. 12th, 2011 01:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
Hopefuls Sing Out From Afar as Broadway Scouts Go Online
The article has pictures and some audition tapes.
Julia Tan, a 10-year-old actress who dreams of belting like Barbra, auditioned for her first Broadway show last month — 2,500 miles away, in her family room in Kuna, Idaho. As her older sister fumbled with a video camera and her mother beamed nearby as a cue (keep smiling!), Julia performed “Born to Entertain” from the musical “Ruthless!” for one of the three-minute audition tapes that little girls worldwide are sending in to the online casting call for the 2012 revival of “Annie.”
“I did two takes,” Julia admitted by telephone, “but only because the camera cut off my head and then my feet the first time around.”
A rite of passage for young actors — waiting in long lines to be seen by Broadway casting directors, clutching head shots with I-hope-I-get-it fervor — has faded, as more producers and directors have abandoned the long-held assumption that they need to be in the room to assess stage presence and other qualities. While some casting directors have looked at audition tapes here and there over the years, the advent of YouTube, Skype, Facebook, Flip cameras and widely available video equipment has recently given technology a greater role in theater casting, providing a foot in the stage door for the technically savvy.
So far 320 young actresses have auditioned by video for “Annie” and 20 of them have been picked for in-person auditions by the casting director, Bernard Telsey, who has shepherded countless careers in the theater. (The online call for Annie and her fellow orphans is open through the fall.) While those numbers are smaller than the 1,250 girls who jammed the June open auditions in Manhattan and the 140 who received callbacks, Mr. Telsey said the taped auditions, which he collected with the aid of a specialist agency, ActorCast, were nevertheless a growing way for actors to become breakouts stars.
Another major musical revival, of the Streisand vehicle “Funny Girl,” also held an online call this summer and received 308 videos from women in the United States, Britain, France, Israel, Vietnam and elsewhere, though the title role ended up going to the television and stage actress Lauren Ambrose, the producers announced last week.
Such formal casting searches are still rare online compared with the hours that casting offices and some directors spend surfing the Internet nowadays for fresh faces. While no breakout theater star has been discovered solely through online auditions, several casting directors said it was only a matter of time. Mr. Telsey recently helped cast an inexperienced actor, Derek Klena, in the coming Off Broadway revival of the musical “Carrie” after Mr. Klena sent in a video for another job, as an understudy in “Catch Me if You Can.” The “Catch Me” creative team liked his tape, so he flew in from Los Angeles for a live audition; while he didn’t land the understudy part, the process led to a plum supporting role in “Carrie.”
“Many talented and hardworking actors, people we want to cast, are increasingly shrewd about using technology to get in front of us,” Mr. Telsey said.
YouTube, for instance, has become a go-to research tool on Broadway. A casting director for the hit musical “Billy Elliot” regularly hunts for talented children from their homemade videos on the site. The producers of the new musical “Sleepless in Seattle” added the songwriter Michelle Citrin to their creative team last year after seeing performance numbers that she posted to YouTube. And executives at Disney Theatrical Productions used YouTube to find and compile potential Ariels when “The Little Mermaid” was running.
“I ended up collecting 20 possible Ariels on my YouTube ‘Mermaid’ account, and then Disney executives around the country were able to log on and assess each of them,” said Jen Rudin, a former casting director with Disney Theatricals. That search yielded Megan Campanile, a college student from Cincinnati who ended up on Broadway as an ensemble performer and Ariel understudy in “Mermaid.”
For the musical revue “Sondheim on Sondheim” last year the director James Lapine constructed a montage of “Send in the Clowns” partially from clips he found while browsing for talent on YouTube and Facebook.
Mr. Lapine, who is also directing the “Annie” revival, said that videos can sometimes help him notice talent that he might not otherwise see at live auditions.
“Actors, especially young actors, can be very nervous when they’re performing live in front of us,” he said. “Video auditions can reveal a level of focus, concentration and confidence. But most of all videos can introduce you to skilled actors from all over the world who might not be able to get themselves to New York for an open call.”
The rise of online auditioning has bred, in turn, a coaching industry focused on training actors for Web-based tryouts. Ellen Lettrich, founder and director of Musical Theater College Auditions, said her company has expanded from a few coaches to 26 in the last five years thanks to growth in online business.
“Our business is now 40 percent Skype,” she said. “I was working with a client in North Carolina at midnight recently over Skype because that’s the time that worked best for her schedule and because she can’t get regularly to New York,” where the company is based.
Over Skype Ms. Lettrich said she and her coaches can help develop breathing techniques, posture and muscle use for performers as they sing and act facing computer cameras. “The technology has reached such a point of sophistication that we can do the same work online that we could do in person,” she said.
Homemade auditions only reveal so much, of course, and surely some of them obscure the guiding hand of stage mothers and fathers. Bartlett Sher, who is directing the “Funny Girl” revival, said that he appreciated the effort of the young women who sent in videos for lead role of Fanny Brice, but that he also wondered at times if he was watching canned performances or spontaneous talent from preternaturally gifted actresses.
“You just don’t know how many takes the performers did to get their perfect audition tape,” Mr. Sher said. He ended up not calling in any actresses who submitted videos.
Like Julia Tan, two other girls who created “Annie” videos, 11-year-old Caroline Ellis of Keller, Tex., near Fort Worth, and 10-year-old Kristen Dowling of Perkasie, Pa., said in telephone interviews that they did a couple of takes each. For the tapes girls were asked to perform a song (not “Tomorrow” or any other from the show) and to speak briefly on topics of their choice.
Kristen said that while her parents had some ideas for the audition, like describing a beach trip, she opted to talk about something more personal: her affection for her dog, Linus. Caroline too showed some independence by trying to focus on the camera and her performances rather than family members who had gathered to watch.
“I tried to remember that this audition was for professionals and not just making my family smile or sing along,” Caroline said. “But I’m glad my family was there. It’s nerve-racking to go into a strange room for an audition. If I had the choice, I’d always do it by video first.”
Next time around, however, it will be in person: Caroline, Kristen and Julia are among the online talents who are being invited to Broadway for the next round of auditions.
Redefining the Hot Dog, a Cart at a Time
This one also has pictures.
Comments are over here.
GET this: There are children in New York who have never eaten a hot dog.
Seriously. A couple of them showed up in Central Park the other day.
Andrew McDonnell, the entrepreneur behind the Good to Go Organics carts that have begun popping up in the city, was standing next to one of his three wiener stands and talking about the provenance of the toppings that grace his organic dogs. The grass-fed beef for his chili comes from Kinderhook Farm in Columbia County, N.Y. The sauerkraut, which Mr. McDonnell’s team picks up in person at the Union Square Greenmarket each week, hails from another Hudson Valley grower, Hawthorne Valley Farm.
As Mr. McDonnell talked about how “people in general are just looking for a better quality of food,” a young Manhattan mother ordered her two children what she said would be the first hot dog they had tried.
Another mom, Shephali Gupte, lined up with her two children moments later and said that in her household, too, the street dogs that had won her stamp of maternal approval came from Good to Go Organics. “I’m a big fan of street food, but it has to be more wholesome,” Ms. Gupte said. “I wish there were more of these kinds of carts around the park.”
But wait. What about that classic pushcart up the way, capped with the red-and-yellow umbrella? “I’d choose this over that, even though this is more expensive,” she said.
If you’ve passed through the city in the past century or so, you might expect that pushcart to be serving what everyone (even a drooling aficionado) likes to call a “dirty-water dog,” a hot frank plucked with tongs from a metal vat full of warm, salty liquid.
The delivery system is simple. The cooking method is rudimentary. And the result, with the way that soft bun sops up spare droplets of broth, is so essential to the New York gestalt that visiting world leaders must take a ceremonial bite for the cameras when strolling our sidewalks.
Water-heated wieners can be found on countless blocks of the city, and plenty of people are still ordering and devouring them. The other day, Gerri Queren, an airline employee from Queens, was picking up one with sauerkraut and mustard near the southeastern corner of Central Park.
“This is like a staple of New York,” she said. “It’s a little soggier, but it’s the way New York is.”
But the way New York is has been changing. Parents who insist on wholesome, natural franks in Central Park are one of many challenges quietly, slowly chipping away at the street-corner dominance of the dirty-water dog.
Upgraded versions have turned up at sit-down restaurants like Bark Hot Dogs in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and Crif Dogs in the East Village, in Manhattan, and in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where some of the franks are served Jersey style, deep-fried and swaddled in bacon. Customers might encounter kimchi, habanero sauce and other unconventional toppings, many with a multicultural bent. Sidewalks where a hot dog swaddled in a paper napkin was once the only available protein source are now crowded with vendors hawking biriyani, dumplings, tacos and lobster rolls.
There’s even a movement afoot to bear down with fussier scrutiny on the carts, whose hygienic standards have often belonged, in the minds of hungry and hurrying New Yorkers, to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” category.
“People want to know that their food is safe and clean and free of bacteria and vermin,” said Daniel R. Garodnick, a city councilman who represents parts of Manhattan, and who has proposed giving food carts the same health-department letter grades given to restaurants.
The suggestion seems to be gaining momentum, having received Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s official endorsement last week.
Mr. Garodnick is 39 and concedes that, like many New Yorkers of his vintage, he is no stranger to the pleasure of a salty impulse buy. “I’ve always enjoyed a dirty-water dog from time to time,” he said. “But I would like to know that it’s hopefully not that dirty.”
None of this means that hot dogs are disappearing from city streets. Boyd Adelman, the president of Sabrett, the company that supplies most of the hot dogs to New York carts, said he was not especially anxious about the threat of haute dogs or other fancy newcomers. Although he would not give any numbers, Mr. Adelman said there had been “no real decline in our sales as a result of new dining options.”
“New people are sampling the alternatives,” he added. “The regulars stand firm.”
What seems to be on the wane, though, is the practice of heating hot dogs in liquid, and one key reason is the evolution of the carts themselves.
“All the carts looked pretty much the same in New York for a long, long time,” said Wayne Sosin, the president of Worksman 800-BUY-CART, which manufactures many of the stainless-steel carts on the city’s streets. The carts might have had a hinged bin for the dirty water, a shelf for squeeze bottles of mustard and an anchor for the umbrella. That was about it.
Gradually, vendors began to catch their own street-corner strain of expansion fever, and strangely enough, it had something to do with permits. With what is known as a nonprocessing permit, they could sell only premade treats like dirty-water dogs, ice cream or pretzels. But if they had a processing permit, they could cook food: kebabs, falafel, fried eggs, you name it. As more vendors came to understand, that variety magnified their potential income.
“As a pure business decision, people want to upgrade what they have because they can gross more,” Mr. Sosin said. Larger, more elaborate carts are on the rise on the streets, he explained, while “just the simple, generic hot dog cart is less and less popular.”
Of course, once a street vendor has a grill or a griddle and a license to use it, it is only a matter of time before hot dogs are rolled on it, giving them a nice coat of char.
Skin-crisping methods are hardly unfamiliar to New Yorkers. Griddled versions, with that perfect between-teeth snap, can be found at landmarks like Katz’s and Papaya King. Traditionally, carts were supposed to stick to water.
Lately, though, they have been upping their game. Memmed Chaaibi, who oversees the gastronomy at a cart parked on the corner of Third Avenue and 86th Street, on the Upper East Side, has the little metal vat where the water is supposed to go, but said he doesn’t use it anymore. Instead, Mr. Chaaibi prepares his dogs the same way he cooks his shish kebabs: on the griddle.
Mr. Chaaibi described the two-dollar Catch-22 when it comes to dirty water: The health department mandates that hot dogs must be kept floating in 140-degree liquid, but when a hot dog stays submerged for too long, its flavor and texture can start to erode.
“The hot dog should not pass 15 or 20 minutes in the water,” Mr. Chaaibi said. “If it goes past this, no more hot dog.”
At the Fahima Halal cart near the corner of 45th Street and Avenue of the Americas, in Midtown Manhattan, Mohammed M. Rahman nearly winced when asked whether he cooked his hot dogs in water. “I do the grill,” he said with pride. “My hot dog and other people’s hot dogs are 100 percent different. My hot dog is halal. And when I cook my hot dogs, I use butter. They’re more tasty.”
This is not to say that a griddled-hot-dog entrepreneur cannot make a few extra dollars pushing boiled dogs.
“I have both; I have a grill, and I have the water,” said Saleh Gobran, a seller at the corner of Broadway and 43rd Street. “Customer wants it grilled, I grill it for him. The customer every time is right.” And if that customer prefers the water-heated variety, Mr. Gobran has a surprise in store, a technique that might be seen in a three-star French kitchen.
“Look,” he said, popping open the water vat and lacing it with a few pro-bono dashes of Trappey’s Louisiana Hot Sauce. “To avoid the lost flavor, I put in some lemon slices and hot sauce. Makes it tasty.”
Bruce Kraig, the author of “Hot Dog: A Global History,” surmised that wooden pushcarts might have switched to water instead of an open flame toward the end of the 19th century and in the early years of the 20th century, possibly to avoid going up in smoke.
“They had fires all the time,” Mr. Kraig said. “They went to hot water because it’s safer, and then people came to like that.” Stainless-steel carts rarely burn down, of course, and now, over time, dirty-water dogs could “decline because of the rise of griddling,” Mr. Kraig said.
If so, there are eaters, and cooks, who would miss them. “If they started disappearing, I would be annoyed, because I like a boiled-water dog,” said Eddie Huang, the New York chef behind Baohaus. “Certain things you just like cheap.”
So does Brian Shebairo, even though he’s a competitor. “I love them, I do,” said Mr. Shebairo, an owner of Crif Dogs. “As much as they probably are filthy and disgusting, I ate one two weeks ago. I came out of a concert a few months ago and probably ate three.”
Change is a metropolitan constant, but the prospect of a citywide low tide for dirty water seems, to some, like a threat to the very identity of New York. “I’m a Brooklyn kid,” said Curtis Sliwa, the activist and radio host. “I grew up on dirty-water hot dogs. Now people look at you like, ‘Oh, my God, what are you putting into your body?’ ”
Mr. Sliwa doesn’t pull any rhetorical punches about what he sees as the rise of “trendoid, new-jack hot dogs.”
“This really is the class warfare of New York,” he said. “Beer. Hot dogs. What’s next? It seems like every arena that used to be traditional, blue-collar, working class, now it’s like: ‘Oh no, we’ve got to have our own. God forbid we eat what common folks eat! And we have to pay a premium price to prove to you it’s the best.’ ”
Any change in the demographic of dogs will probably lead to the most New York concept of all: tense coexistence.
“I just consider those gourmet hot dogs a different experience,” said Alexandra Guarnaschelli, the chef at Butter and the Darby, who says that she, too, grew up on dirty-water dogs.
“Just because a Porsche and a Honda are both cars doesn’t mean they offer the same things,” Ms. Guarnaschelli said. “If we gather all the hot dogs around a campfire, metaphorically speaking, and strum a little ‘Kumbaya’ on the guitar, we can achieve world peace among all hot dogs. I do think it’s possible.”
Pass the Ketchup’ Could Bring Surprises
Here's a recipe for, get this, cherry ketchup. Now I'm hungry!
THE chef José Andrés says that it’s time for America to face a hard truth, one that all of Alice Waters’s goat cheese salads and Thomas Keller’s fried chicken cannot change.
“Everyone else in the world still thinks of American food as ketchup,” said Mr. Andrés, who was born in Spain but has been living and cooking in Washington for 20 years.
He said that European colleagues still tease him about finding success here, among diners whose palates are corrupted by ketchup. The low prestige of ketchup hits Mr. Andrés hard.
Now he is on a quest for redemption. He (and a few other chefs and entrepreneurs) are challenging the hegemony of the red, corn-syrup-sweetened product. “It is time to embrace and celebrate ketchup, not be ashamed of it,” he said.
And so his new pop-up restaurant, America Eats Tavern, has a separate menu of traditional ketchups, made from local and foraged ingredients and served on everything from fried chicken to bison steak to hot dogs. (Some, it should be noted, consider ketchup on hot dogs an abomination.)
The restaurant opened in June in the space that formerly housed Café Atlántico, and grew from an exhibition at the nearby National Archives that runs through January. “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?” illustrates the history of government influence on the American diet, from handwritten rations for Revolutionary War soldiers (one pound each of beef and bread per day) to the ill-starred 1981 proposal by the Department of Agriculture to reclassify ketchup as a vegetable in federal school-lunch programs.
Last week, America Eats Tavern had eight ketchups on the menu, and still more fermenting in the mind of Jorge Luis Hernández, who leads Mr. Andrés’s culinary research team. Mr. Hernández said that in searching the archives, the team found dozens of ketchup recipes in tomes like “Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt Book” (1846) and “The Virginia Housewife” (1824).
“Today we think of ketchup as just one thing: Heinz, or Hunt’s, for those of us who grew up in the South,” he said. But over the years the term has been used for a variety of strongly seasoned condiments.
“We started making whortleberry and barberry and oyster ketchup from the original recipes,” Mr. Hernández said, “and we were shocked by how diverse and modern the flavors were.” Indeed, the tart-sweet balance of the fruit ketchups, and the cold brininess of the oyster version (fresh oysters blended into a base of wine, butter, shallots and mace) could have come out of any of the professional kitchens where Mr. Andrés first trained as a chef.
Some of the ketchups were red (cherry and spiceberry), one was made from tomatoes (yellow, from the greenmarket outside the restaurant’s door) and two (oyster and anchovy) were brightly fishy. They tasted of spices and fruit, of peppercorns and vinegar, but not particularly like the syrupy tomato blast that has come to represent America’s primary contribution to world cuisine (whether Americans like it or not).
“Why, as a society, have we let this diversity go away?” Mr. Andrés lamented via cellphone from Spain — where, he said, it would be unthinkable to find just one version of a classic sauce like romesco. “Why would we go from a rainbow to black and white?”
American foodies and chefs generally dismiss ketchup, deeming it fit only for children and burgers.
The apotheosis of ketchup shame is the gastropub Father’s Office in Santa Monica, outside Los Angeles, a serious burger town where condiments, especially mayonnaise, are deeply loved. The chef Sang Yoon’s Office Burger, and its salty-sweet topping of bacon and caramelized onions, is the centerpiece of his menu. Yet since opening in 2000, he has refused to serve ketchup with it, or with anything else in the restaurant.
Many Angelenos remain irritated by what they see as the chef’s snobbery, and some have maintained a boycott. “My wife would not go until this year, when I begged her to go with me on Father’s Day,” said Cesar Ramirez, who lives in Hacienda Heights, Calif. To appease her, he smuggled in some packets of Heinz and put it on the sweet-potato fries, then posted pictures of the contraband plate online. “I respect the integrity of the chef,” he said. “But I also respect the power of ketchup because I can put it on anything, even vegetables, and my kids will eat it.”
Many chefs who take burgers seriously (now including Mr. Yoon, as he wrote in The Los Angeles Times last week) make their own ketchup, with “good” ingredients like fresh ginger, ripe figs and whole spices. But few have tried to make a Heinz-like product. (“It’s too dangerous to try to do that and not nail it,” Mr. Hernández said.)
That has recently changed. From an undisclosed location in Lancaster County, Pa., two serious young entrepreneurs are working to undermine what they call “one of the last monopolies” in American food. “Heinz is not just the market leader but the market definer,” said Mark Ramadan, who started Sir Kensington’s Gourmet Scooping Ketchup last year with Scott Norton. It is the first alternative ketchup to be aggressively marketed to restaurant chefs and upscale hotel chains, and via Twitter.
If such a thing is possible, Sir Kensington’s is also the first ironic ketchup.
“There’s something absurd in the whole notion of gourmet ketchup,” Mr. Norton said. “ ‘All-natural,’ ‘farm-fresh,’ ‘local’ — all that stuff is great, but it doesn’t speak to us about ketchup.” Instead of selling the virtues of the product, they sell a persona: an elusive top-hatted roué who Tweets his location in cool locales and slips fetching little jars of ketchup to those in the know.
Sir Kensington’s, like other upscale versions such as Katchkie Ketchup and Stonewall Kitchens’ Country Ketchup, is less sweet and less salty than Heinz. “The point of ketchup is the balance,” Mr. Norton said. “You want to taste the earthiness of tomatoes first, rather than the sweet sting of corn syrup.”
Even within the tomato ketchup category, American once had dozens of regional brands. Mike Gassman, a lifelong ketchup fan, lives in Collinsville, Ill., once home to a cannery that produced a chile-infused local ketchup called Brooks Brothers that was popular in the Midwest. “The old folks still say they miss the smell of the tomatoes and the spices coming through town,” Mr. Gassman said. (Brooks Rich & Tangy Ketchup is now made in Canada.)
“Ketchup” has gradually taken over from “catsup,” a British spelling.
Ketchup was used on the British table long before tomatoes arrived there. It was described in print as early as 1690, having made its way to Europe either from China (the Cantonese ke-tsiap means, roughly, “eggplant juice”) or from Malaysia (where the Malay word kecap referred to fermented fish sauce). Salty Indonesian soy sauce, tart tamarind chutneys and vinegary English sauces made with unripe walnuts have all been called by the name.
American ketchup was first made with whatever the settlers managed to harvest, flavored with the precious spices they brought with them: nutmegs, ginger, pepper. Ketchups were much thinner and spicier back then, and Mr. Hernández has hewed closely to the original recipes for the America Eats ketchups. “I think that we are currently using more mace than any restaurant in the world,” he said.
Ketchup became an institution because it was one of the first American packaged foods, according to Alice Kamps, curator of the National Archives exhibition. “Early in the industrial food era, ketchup tended to be made from the scraps on the floor of the cannery, with red dye and flavorings” she said. “It was also prone to explode.”
In 1906, faced with increasing fatalities and public outrage, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, leading to the Food and Drug Administration. The Act particularly benefited a cannery in Pittsburgh owned by Henry John Heinz, which was the first to sterilize and bottle ketchup without the toxic preservatives then available.
According to Jessica Jackson, a spokeswoman for the company, Heinz has made many different ketchups since 1876. In 1910, its catalog touted walnut ketchup and mushroom ketchup (both flavored with anchovy juices) as well as “a new condimental table sauce,” mustard ketchup, which regrettably did not catch on.
But along with American power and influence, tomato ketchup spread worldwide in the 20th century, through Western Europe (on baked beans and sausages), Eastern Europe (on pizza) and back to Asia, whence it came.
“I first saw ketchup served in India in the late 1980s,” said the Indian-American chef Maya Kaimal, who, arriving from the United States for a visit, was surprised to be served samosas with a side of ketchup. “It was treated like just another chutney or sauce.”
In Malaysia, ketchup is the main flavoring in the popular street noodle stir-fry mee goreng mamak. In Tokyo and Hong Kong, diners squeeze it onto spaghetti, waffles and tacos at all manner of “American” restaurants. Sweet ketchup with Indian spices is used in Germany for the weird but popular currywurst; and ketchup, amped up with garlic, has become a signature ingredient in Chinese-Indian hybrid dishes like Manchurian cauliflower. Ms. Kaimal said that the Indian relationship with ketchup inspired her to make a more fragrant version, with warm spices like cumin, cayenne and coriander seed.
Mr. Andrés grew up with American ketchup and still uses it. “I mix mayonnaise, ketchup and brandy and a little bit of mustard,” he said. “This is a heck of a good sauce for seafood.”
The article has pictures and some audition tapes.
Julia Tan, a 10-year-old actress who dreams of belting like Barbra, auditioned for her first Broadway show last month — 2,500 miles away, in her family room in Kuna, Idaho. As her older sister fumbled with a video camera and her mother beamed nearby as a cue (keep smiling!), Julia performed “Born to Entertain” from the musical “Ruthless!” for one of the three-minute audition tapes that little girls worldwide are sending in to the online casting call for the 2012 revival of “Annie.”
“I did two takes,” Julia admitted by telephone, “but only because the camera cut off my head and then my feet the first time around.”
A rite of passage for young actors — waiting in long lines to be seen by Broadway casting directors, clutching head shots with I-hope-I-get-it fervor — has faded, as more producers and directors have abandoned the long-held assumption that they need to be in the room to assess stage presence and other qualities. While some casting directors have looked at audition tapes here and there over the years, the advent of YouTube, Skype, Facebook, Flip cameras and widely available video equipment has recently given technology a greater role in theater casting, providing a foot in the stage door for the technically savvy.
So far 320 young actresses have auditioned by video for “Annie” and 20 of them have been picked for in-person auditions by the casting director, Bernard Telsey, who has shepherded countless careers in the theater. (The online call for Annie and her fellow orphans is open through the fall.) While those numbers are smaller than the 1,250 girls who jammed the June open auditions in Manhattan and the 140 who received callbacks, Mr. Telsey said the taped auditions, which he collected with the aid of a specialist agency, ActorCast, were nevertheless a growing way for actors to become breakouts stars.
Another major musical revival, of the Streisand vehicle “Funny Girl,” also held an online call this summer and received 308 videos from women in the United States, Britain, France, Israel, Vietnam and elsewhere, though the title role ended up going to the television and stage actress Lauren Ambrose, the producers announced last week.
Such formal casting searches are still rare online compared with the hours that casting offices and some directors spend surfing the Internet nowadays for fresh faces. While no breakout theater star has been discovered solely through online auditions, several casting directors said it was only a matter of time. Mr. Telsey recently helped cast an inexperienced actor, Derek Klena, in the coming Off Broadway revival of the musical “Carrie” after Mr. Klena sent in a video for another job, as an understudy in “Catch Me if You Can.” The “Catch Me” creative team liked his tape, so he flew in from Los Angeles for a live audition; while he didn’t land the understudy part, the process led to a plum supporting role in “Carrie.”
“Many talented and hardworking actors, people we want to cast, are increasingly shrewd about using technology to get in front of us,” Mr. Telsey said.
YouTube, for instance, has become a go-to research tool on Broadway. A casting director for the hit musical “Billy Elliot” regularly hunts for talented children from their homemade videos on the site. The producers of the new musical “Sleepless in Seattle” added the songwriter Michelle Citrin to their creative team last year after seeing performance numbers that she posted to YouTube. And executives at Disney Theatrical Productions used YouTube to find and compile potential Ariels when “The Little Mermaid” was running.
“I ended up collecting 20 possible Ariels on my YouTube ‘Mermaid’ account, and then Disney executives around the country were able to log on and assess each of them,” said Jen Rudin, a former casting director with Disney Theatricals. That search yielded Megan Campanile, a college student from Cincinnati who ended up on Broadway as an ensemble performer and Ariel understudy in “Mermaid.”
For the musical revue “Sondheim on Sondheim” last year the director James Lapine constructed a montage of “Send in the Clowns” partially from clips he found while browsing for talent on YouTube and Facebook.
Mr. Lapine, who is also directing the “Annie” revival, said that videos can sometimes help him notice talent that he might not otherwise see at live auditions.
“Actors, especially young actors, can be very nervous when they’re performing live in front of us,” he said. “Video auditions can reveal a level of focus, concentration and confidence. But most of all videos can introduce you to skilled actors from all over the world who might not be able to get themselves to New York for an open call.”
The rise of online auditioning has bred, in turn, a coaching industry focused on training actors for Web-based tryouts. Ellen Lettrich, founder and director of Musical Theater College Auditions, said her company has expanded from a few coaches to 26 in the last five years thanks to growth in online business.
“Our business is now 40 percent Skype,” she said. “I was working with a client in North Carolina at midnight recently over Skype because that’s the time that worked best for her schedule and because she can’t get regularly to New York,” where the company is based.
Over Skype Ms. Lettrich said she and her coaches can help develop breathing techniques, posture and muscle use for performers as they sing and act facing computer cameras. “The technology has reached such a point of sophistication that we can do the same work online that we could do in person,” she said.
Homemade auditions only reveal so much, of course, and surely some of them obscure the guiding hand of stage mothers and fathers. Bartlett Sher, who is directing the “Funny Girl” revival, said that he appreciated the effort of the young women who sent in videos for lead role of Fanny Brice, but that he also wondered at times if he was watching canned performances or spontaneous talent from preternaturally gifted actresses.
“You just don’t know how many takes the performers did to get their perfect audition tape,” Mr. Sher said. He ended up not calling in any actresses who submitted videos.
Like Julia Tan, two other girls who created “Annie” videos, 11-year-old Caroline Ellis of Keller, Tex., near Fort Worth, and 10-year-old Kristen Dowling of Perkasie, Pa., said in telephone interviews that they did a couple of takes each. For the tapes girls were asked to perform a song (not “Tomorrow” or any other from the show) and to speak briefly on topics of their choice.
Kristen said that while her parents had some ideas for the audition, like describing a beach trip, she opted to talk about something more personal: her affection for her dog, Linus. Caroline too showed some independence by trying to focus on the camera and her performances rather than family members who had gathered to watch.
“I tried to remember that this audition was for professionals and not just making my family smile or sing along,” Caroline said. “But I’m glad my family was there. It’s nerve-racking to go into a strange room for an audition. If I had the choice, I’d always do it by video first.”
Next time around, however, it will be in person: Caroline, Kristen and Julia are among the online talents who are being invited to Broadway for the next round of auditions.
Redefining the Hot Dog, a Cart at a Time
This one also has pictures.
Comments are over here.
GET this: There are children in New York who have never eaten a hot dog.
Seriously. A couple of them showed up in Central Park the other day.
Andrew McDonnell, the entrepreneur behind the Good to Go Organics carts that have begun popping up in the city, was standing next to one of his three wiener stands and talking about the provenance of the toppings that grace his organic dogs. The grass-fed beef for his chili comes from Kinderhook Farm in Columbia County, N.Y. The sauerkraut, which Mr. McDonnell’s team picks up in person at the Union Square Greenmarket each week, hails from another Hudson Valley grower, Hawthorne Valley Farm.
As Mr. McDonnell talked about how “people in general are just looking for a better quality of food,” a young Manhattan mother ordered her two children what she said would be the first hot dog they had tried.
Another mom, Shephali Gupte, lined up with her two children moments later and said that in her household, too, the street dogs that had won her stamp of maternal approval came from Good to Go Organics. “I’m a big fan of street food, but it has to be more wholesome,” Ms. Gupte said. “I wish there were more of these kinds of carts around the park.”
But wait. What about that classic pushcart up the way, capped with the red-and-yellow umbrella? “I’d choose this over that, even though this is more expensive,” she said.
If you’ve passed through the city in the past century or so, you might expect that pushcart to be serving what everyone (even a drooling aficionado) likes to call a “dirty-water dog,” a hot frank plucked with tongs from a metal vat full of warm, salty liquid.
The delivery system is simple. The cooking method is rudimentary. And the result, with the way that soft bun sops up spare droplets of broth, is so essential to the New York gestalt that visiting world leaders must take a ceremonial bite for the cameras when strolling our sidewalks.
Water-heated wieners can be found on countless blocks of the city, and plenty of people are still ordering and devouring them. The other day, Gerri Queren, an airline employee from Queens, was picking up one with sauerkraut and mustard near the southeastern corner of Central Park.
“This is like a staple of New York,” she said. “It’s a little soggier, but it’s the way New York is.”
But the way New York is has been changing. Parents who insist on wholesome, natural franks in Central Park are one of many challenges quietly, slowly chipping away at the street-corner dominance of the dirty-water dog.
Upgraded versions have turned up at sit-down restaurants like Bark Hot Dogs in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and Crif Dogs in the East Village, in Manhattan, and in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where some of the franks are served Jersey style, deep-fried and swaddled in bacon. Customers might encounter kimchi, habanero sauce and other unconventional toppings, many with a multicultural bent. Sidewalks where a hot dog swaddled in a paper napkin was once the only available protein source are now crowded with vendors hawking biriyani, dumplings, tacos and lobster rolls.
There’s even a movement afoot to bear down with fussier scrutiny on the carts, whose hygienic standards have often belonged, in the minds of hungry and hurrying New Yorkers, to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” category.
“People want to know that their food is safe and clean and free of bacteria and vermin,” said Daniel R. Garodnick, a city councilman who represents parts of Manhattan, and who has proposed giving food carts the same health-department letter grades given to restaurants.
The suggestion seems to be gaining momentum, having received Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s official endorsement last week.
Mr. Garodnick is 39 and concedes that, like many New Yorkers of his vintage, he is no stranger to the pleasure of a salty impulse buy. “I’ve always enjoyed a dirty-water dog from time to time,” he said. “But I would like to know that it’s hopefully not that dirty.”
None of this means that hot dogs are disappearing from city streets. Boyd Adelman, the president of Sabrett, the company that supplies most of the hot dogs to New York carts, said he was not especially anxious about the threat of haute dogs or other fancy newcomers. Although he would not give any numbers, Mr. Adelman said there had been “no real decline in our sales as a result of new dining options.”
“New people are sampling the alternatives,” he added. “The regulars stand firm.”
What seems to be on the wane, though, is the practice of heating hot dogs in liquid, and one key reason is the evolution of the carts themselves.
“All the carts looked pretty much the same in New York for a long, long time,” said Wayne Sosin, the president of Worksman 800-BUY-CART, which manufactures many of the stainless-steel carts on the city’s streets. The carts might have had a hinged bin for the dirty water, a shelf for squeeze bottles of mustard and an anchor for the umbrella. That was about it.
Gradually, vendors began to catch their own street-corner strain of expansion fever, and strangely enough, it had something to do with permits. With what is known as a nonprocessing permit, they could sell only premade treats like dirty-water dogs, ice cream or pretzels. But if they had a processing permit, they could cook food: kebabs, falafel, fried eggs, you name it. As more vendors came to understand, that variety magnified their potential income.
“As a pure business decision, people want to upgrade what they have because they can gross more,” Mr. Sosin said. Larger, more elaborate carts are on the rise on the streets, he explained, while “just the simple, generic hot dog cart is less and less popular.”
Of course, once a street vendor has a grill or a griddle and a license to use it, it is only a matter of time before hot dogs are rolled on it, giving them a nice coat of char.
Skin-crisping methods are hardly unfamiliar to New Yorkers. Griddled versions, with that perfect between-teeth snap, can be found at landmarks like Katz’s and Papaya King. Traditionally, carts were supposed to stick to water.
Lately, though, they have been upping their game. Memmed Chaaibi, who oversees the gastronomy at a cart parked on the corner of Third Avenue and 86th Street, on the Upper East Side, has the little metal vat where the water is supposed to go, but said he doesn’t use it anymore. Instead, Mr. Chaaibi prepares his dogs the same way he cooks his shish kebabs: on the griddle.
Mr. Chaaibi described the two-dollar Catch-22 when it comes to dirty water: The health department mandates that hot dogs must be kept floating in 140-degree liquid, but when a hot dog stays submerged for too long, its flavor and texture can start to erode.
“The hot dog should not pass 15 or 20 minutes in the water,” Mr. Chaaibi said. “If it goes past this, no more hot dog.”
At the Fahima Halal cart near the corner of 45th Street and Avenue of the Americas, in Midtown Manhattan, Mohammed M. Rahman nearly winced when asked whether he cooked his hot dogs in water. “I do the grill,” he said with pride. “My hot dog and other people’s hot dogs are 100 percent different. My hot dog is halal. And when I cook my hot dogs, I use butter. They’re more tasty.”
This is not to say that a griddled-hot-dog entrepreneur cannot make a few extra dollars pushing boiled dogs.
“I have both; I have a grill, and I have the water,” said Saleh Gobran, a seller at the corner of Broadway and 43rd Street. “Customer wants it grilled, I grill it for him. The customer every time is right.” And if that customer prefers the water-heated variety, Mr. Gobran has a surprise in store, a technique that might be seen in a three-star French kitchen.
“Look,” he said, popping open the water vat and lacing it with a few pro-bono dashes of Trappey’s Louisiana Hot Sauce. “To avoid the lost flavor, I put in some lemon slices and hot sauce. Makes it tasty.”
Bruce Kraig, the author of “Hot Dog: A Global History,” surmised that wooden pushcarts might have switched to water instead of an open flame toward the end of the 19th century and in the early years of the 20th century, possibly to avoid going up in smoke.
“They had fires all the time,” Mr. Kraig said. “They went to hot water because it’s safer, and then people came to like that.” Stainless-steel carts rarely burn down, of course, and now, over time, dirty-water dogs could “decline because of the rise of griddling,” Mr. Kraig said.
If so, there are eaters, and cooks, who would miss them. “If they started disappearing, I would be annoyed, because I like a boiled-water dog,” said Eddie Huang, the New York chef behind Baohaus. “Certain things you just like cheap.”
So does Brian Shebairo, even though he’s a competitor. “I love them, I do,” said Mr. Shebairo, an owner of Crif Dogs. “As much as they probably are filthy and disgusting, I ate one two weeks ago. I came out of a concert a few months ago and probably ate three.”
Change is a metropolitan constant, but the prospect of a citywide low tide for dirty water seems, to some, like a threat to the very identity of New York. “I’m a Brooklyn kid,” said Curtis Sliwa, the activist and radio host. “I grew up on dirty-water hot dogs. Now people look at you like, ‘Oh, my God, what are you putting into your body?’ ”
Mr. Sliwa doesn’t pull any rhetorical punches about what he sees as the rise of “trendoid, new-jack hot dogs.”
“This really is the class warfare of New York,” he said. “Beer. Hot dogs. What’s next? It seems like every arena that used to be traditional, blue-collar, working class, now it’s like: ‘Oh no, we’ve got to have our own. God forbid we eat what common folks eat! And we have to pay a premium price to prove to you it’s the best.’ ”
Any change in the demographic of dogs will probably lead to the most New York concept of all: tense coexistence.
“I just consider those gourmet hot dogs a different experience,” said Alexandra Guarnaschelli, the chef at Butter and the Darby, who says that she, too, grew up on dirty-water dogs.
“Just because a Porsche and a Honda are both cars doesn’t mean they offer the same things,” Ms. Guarnaschelli said. “If we gather all the hot dogs around a campfire, metaphorically speaking, and strum a little ‘Kumbaya’ on the guitar, we can achieve world peace among all hot dogs. I do think it’s possible.”
Pass the Ketchup’ Could Bring Surprises
Here's a recipe for, get this, cherry ketchup. Now I'm hungry!
THE chef José Andrés says that it’s time for America to face a hard truth, one that all of Alice Waters’s goat cheese salads and Thomas Keller’s fried chicken cannot change.
“Everyone else in the world still thinks of American food as ketchup,” said Mr. Andrés, who was born in Spain but has been living and cooking in Washington for 20 years.
He said that European colleagues still tease him about finding success here, among diners whose palates are corrupted by ketchup. The low prestige of ketchup hits Mr. Andrés hard.
Now he is on a quest for redemption. He (and a few other chefs and entrepreneurs) are challenging the hegemony of the red, corn-syrup-sweetened product. “It is time to embrace and celebrate ketchup, not be ashamed of it,” he said.
And so his new pop-up restaurant, America Eats Tavern, has a separate menu of traditional ketchups, made from local and foraged ingredients and served on everything from fried chicken to bison steak to hot dogs. (Some, it should be noted, consider ketchup on hot dogs an abomination.)
The restaurant opened in June in the space that formerly housed Café Atlántico, and grew from an exhibition at the nearby National Archives that runs through January. “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?” illustrates the history of government influence on the American diet, from handwritten rations for Revolutionary War soldiers (one pound each of beef and bread per day) to the ill-starred 1981 proposal by the Department of Agriculture to reclassify ketchup as a vegetable in federal school-lunch programs.
Last week, America Eats Tavern had eight ketchups on the menu, and still more fermenting in the mind of Jorge Luis Hernández, who leads Mr. Andrés’s culinary research team. Mr. Hernández said that in searching the archives, the team found dozens of ketchup recipes in tomes like “Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt Book” (1846) and “The Virginia Housewife” (1824).
“Today we think of ketchup as just one thing: Heinz, or Hunt’s, for those of us who grew up in the South,” he said. But over the years the term has been used for a variety of strongly seasoned condiments.
“We started making whortleberry and barberry and oyster ketchup from the original recipes,” Mr. Hernández said, “and we were shocked by how diverse and modern the flavors were.” Indeed, the tart-sweet balance of the fruit ketchups, and the cold brininess of the oyster version (fresh oysters blended into a base of wine, butter, shallots and mace) could have come out of any of the professional kitchens where Mr. Andrés first trained as a chef.
Some of the ketchups were red (cherry and spiceberry), one was made from tomatoes (yellow, from the greenmarket outside the restaurant’s door) and two (oyster and anchovy) were brightly fishy. They tasted of spices and fruit, of peppercorns and vinegar, but not particularly like the syrupy tomato blast that has come to represent America’s primary contribution to world cuisine (whether Americans like it or not).
“Why, as a society, have we let this diversity go away?” Mr. Andrés lamented via cellphone from Spain — where, he said, it would be unthinkable to find just one version of a classic sauce like romesco. “Why would we go from a rainbow to black and white?”
American foodies and chefs generally dismiss ketchup, deeming it fit only for children and burgers.
The apotheosis of ketchup shame is the gastropub Father’s Office in Santa Monica, outside Los Angeles, a serious burger town where condiments, especially mayonnaise, are deeply loved. The chef Sang Yoon’s Office Burger, and its salty-sweet topping of bacon and caramelized onions, is the centerpiece of his menu. Yet since opening in 2000, he has refused to serve ketchup with it, or with anything else in the restaurant.
Many Angelenos remain irritated by what they see as the chef’s snobbery, and some have maintained a boycott. “My wife would not go until this year, when I begged her to go with me on Father’s Day,” said Cesar Ramirez, who lives in Hacienda Heights, Calif. To appease her, he smuggled in some packets of Heinz and put it on the sweet-potato fries, then posted pictures of the contraband plate online. “I respect the integrity of the chef,” he said. “But I also respect the power of ketchup because I can put it on anything, even vegetables, and my kids will eat it.”
Many chefs who take burgers seriously (now including Mr. Yoon, as he wrote in The Los Angeles Times last week) make their own ketchup, with “good” ingredients like fresh ginger, ripe figs and whole spices. But few have tried to make a Heinz-like product. (“It’s too dangerous to try to do that and not nail it,” Mr. Hernández said.)
That has recently changed. From an undisclosed location in Lancaster County, Pa., two serious young entrepreneurs are working to undermine what they call “one of the last monopolies” in American food. “Heinz is not just the market leader but the market definer,” said Mark Ramadan, who started Sir Kensington’s Gourmet Scooping Ketchup last year with Scott Norton. It is the first alternative ketchup to be aggressively marketed to restaurant chefs and upscale hotel chains, and via Twitter.
If such a thing is possible, Sir Kensington’s is also the first ironic ketchup.
“There’s something absurd in the whole notion of gourmet ketchup,” Mr. Norton said. “ ‘All-natural,’ ‘farm-fresh,’ ‘local’ — all that stuff is great, but it doesn’t speak to us about ketchup.” Instead of selling the virtues of the product, they sell a persona: an elusive top-hatted roué who Tweets his location in cool locales and slips fetching little jars of ketchup to those in the know.
Sir Kensington’s, like other upscale versions such as Katchkie Ketchup and Stonewall Kitchens’ Country Ketchup, is less sweet and less salty than Heinz. “The point of ketchup is the balance,” Mr. Norton said. “You want to taste the earthiness of tomatoes first, rather than the sweet sting of corn syrup.”
Even within the tomato ketchup category, American once had dozens of regional brands. Mike Gassman, a lifelong ketchup fan, lives in Collinsville, Ill., once home to a cannery that produced a chile-infused local ketchup called Brooks Brothers that was popular in the Midwest. “The old folks still say they miss the smell of the tomatoes and the spices coming through town,” Mr. Gassman said. (Brooks Rich & Tangy Ketchup is now made in Canada.)
“Ketchup” has gradually taken over from “catsup,” a British spelling.
Ketchup was used on the British table long before tomatoes arrived there. It was described in print as early as 1690, having made its way to Europe either from China (the Cantonese ke-tsiap means, roughly, “eggplant juice”) or from Malaysia (where the Malay word kecap referred to fermented fish sauce). Salty Indonesian soy sauce, tart tamarind chutneys and vinegary English sauces made with unripe walnuts have all been called by the name.
American ketchup was first made with whatever the settlers managed to harvest, flavored with the precious spices they brought with them: nutmegs, ginger, pepper. Ketchups were much thinner and spicier back then, and Mr. Hernández has hewed closely to the original recipes for the America Eats ketchups. “I think that we are currently using more mace than any restaurant in the world,” he said.
Ketchup became an institution because it was one of the first American packaged foods, according to Alice Kamps, curator of the National Archives exhibition. “Early in the industrial food era, ketchup tended to be made from the scraps on the floor of the cannery, with red dye and flavorings” she said. “It was also prone to explode.”
In 1906, faced with increasing fatalities and public outrage, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, leading to the Food and Drug Administration. The Act particularly benefited a cannery in Pittsburgh owned by Henry John Heinz, which was the first to sterilize and bottle ketchup without the toxic preservatives then available.
According to Jessica Jackson, a spokeswoman for the company, Heinz has made many different ketchups since 1876. In 1910, its catalog touted walnut ketchup and mushroom ketchup (both flavored with anchovy juices) as well as “a new condimental table sauce,” mustard ketchup, which regrettably did not catch on.
But along with American power and influence, tomato ketchup spread worldwide in the 20th century, through Western Europe (on baked beans and sausages), Eastern Europe (on pizza) and back to Asia, whence it came.
“I first saw ketchup served in India in the late 1980s,” said the Indian-American chef Maya Kaimal, who, arriving from the United States for a visit, was surprised to be served samosas with a side of ketchup. “It was treated like just another chutney or sauce.”
In Malaysia, ketchup is the main flavoring in the popular street noodle stir-fry mee goreng mamak. In Tokyo and Hong Kong, diners squeeze it onto spaghetti, waffles and tacos at all manner of “American” restaurants. Sweet ketchup with Indian spices is used in Germany for the weird but popular currywurst; and ketchup, amped up with garlic, has become a signature ingredient in Chinese-Indian hybrid dishes like Manchurian cauliflower. Ms. Kaimal said that the Indian relationship with ketchup inspired her to make a more fragrant version, with warm spices like cumin, cayenne and coriander seed.
Mr. Andrés grew up with American ketchup and still uses it. “I mix mayonnaise, ketchup and brandy and a little bit of mustard,” he said. “This is a heck of a good sauce for seafood.”
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no subject
Date: 2011-08-12 10:30 pm (UTC)And, when does a fancy ketchup stop being ketchup and start being a different sauce?
no subject
Date: 2011-08-13 12:54 am (UTC)But nowadays I mostly get felafel if I want street food, or of course gyros.
And that's a darn good question. Probably when you take out the tomatoes, to be honest.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-12 10:46 pm (UTC)