Christiane Asschenfeldt and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, nominee Best Foreign Language Film for “Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)” / Wireimage
Barry Weissler Exclusive:
Day 17
By Barry Weissler, The Lives of Others
Wed Feb 6, 2008
I saw the most incredible film several weeks ago called The Lives of Others. It is the story of an East German Stassi officer who is assigned to spy on a playwright. He is instructed to find a reason to imprison him, so the officer bugs his home and sets up round-the-clock surveillance. He watches the life the playwright has with his beautiful actress girlfriend and his circle of literary friends. He watches this man’s struggle, his battle for integrity and creative fulfillment under often very difficult circumstances. The officer becomes intimate with even the most secret details of this man’s life, and it changes him completely.
I was moved by this story. I thought it was the perfect metaphor for great theater. As an audience, we become secretly intimate with the details of some people’s lives and through this discovery there is a hope that we can be transformed into something beyond anything we imagined.
Until tomorrow…
Broadway producers Barry & Fran Weissler are the recipients of five Tony Awards®. Their numerous Broadway credits include acclaimed productions Othello with James Earl Jones and Christopher Plummer, My One and Only with Tommy Tune, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Kathleen Turner and Charles Durning, Gypsy with Tyne Daly, and the Tony Award-winning productions of Falsettos and Annie Get Your Gun with Bernadette Peters and Reba McEntire, among others. They are currently represented on Broadway – and across the globe -- with the international smash hit Chicago, which earned six 1997 Tony Awards® including Best Musical Revival, as well as countless other awards in the U.S. and abroad.