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• Five Questions About ‘The Last Smoker in America’  

Yes, disgruntled smokers, there is a new musical for you.

“The Last Smoker in America” is making its premiere as a full stage production on Monday at the 45th Street Theater as part of the New York Musical Theater Festival.

The show's book and lyrics are by Bill Russell, who was nominated for a Tony Award for his book of the 1997 musical “Side Show,” and the composer Peter Melnick (“Adrift in Macao”), a grandson of Richard Rodgers.

During a break in rehearsals, Mr. Russell shared his thoughts on smoking in the 21st century, his passion for outsiders and the legacy of “Side Show.” Following are excerpts from his conversation. . . .

What’s ironic is that the theater we’re performing in used to be called the No Smoking Playhouse, at least 20 years ago. I remember that vividly.

Q.

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• State of Minnesota, Respondent, vs. Thomas Eugene Marinaro, Appellant. (PDF) 

S Y L L A B U S

The district court did not err by concluding that customers of appellant's bar were not engaged in a "theatrical performance" while smoking in the bar on the date of the alleged offense. Accordingly, the district court did not err by finding appellant guilty of allowing smoking in a public place in violation of Minnesota Statutes section 144.417, subdivision 2(a) (Supp. 2007). . . .

The district court did not err by concluding that the conduct of the customers of Tank's Bar on the afternoon of March 14, 2008, was not within the theatrical-performance exception to the Minnesota Clean Indoor Air Act's prohibition on smoking in bars. Therefore, the district court did not err by finding Marinaro guilty of the charged offense. 

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• Appeals Court: Bar Violated Smoking Ban 

The Minnesota Court of Appeals has agreed with a judge's ruling that "theater nights" in a northeastern Minnesota bar were violating the state's smoking ban.

Tank's Bar in Babbitt had allowed patrons to smoke under a loophole in the smoking ban that allows actors to smoke as part of a theatrical production.

But a St. Louis County judge ruled in May that wearing a badge that says "Actor" doesn't make it a theatrical production. On Tuesday, the appeals court agreed.

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• Fight Against Tobacco Consumption Stepped Up  

THE Tobacco Free Association of Zambia (TOFAZ) has resorted to the use of performing arts in its campaign to discourage the cultivation and consumption of tobacco.

TOFAZ executive director Brenda Chitindi said during a tobacco control workshop in Lusaka yesterday that the organisation intended to use all effective means to free the nation from tobacco.

Ms Chitindi said the organisation wanted to sensitise the tobacco consumers through the use of drama groups to get the message across.

She said using artistic means to sensitise the nation would be the easiest way of delivering the message to the nation.

She said most of the youth lacked knowledge on the dangers of consuming tobacco and needed to be sensitised. . . .

She said the programme would be funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) under the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Meanwhile, Institute of Economic and Social Research researcher Richard Zulu said that there was need to implement the World Health Organisation framework convention on tobacco control.

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• Comedian may be charged for smoking at Bismarck show 

A popular comedian could face charges in Bismarck for a regular part of his routine.

Ron White, the Scotch-swilling, cigar-smoking Blue Collar Comedy Tour comedian, performed at the Belle Mehus Auditorium on April 30. But prior to that, a Bismarck citizen tipped off police that part of White's routine might run afoul of a Bismarck city ordinance prohibiting smoking in public places.

Gary Semmel, 55, wrote a letter dated April 17 to the Bismarck Police Department, letting them know White smokes a cigar during his act, which seems to be at odds with the city ordinance prohibiting smoking in public places, Sgt. Dwight Offerman said.

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• The Last Cigarette at the Chichester Theatre, review  

Addiction is a subject Gray knew all about. I believe posterity will come to recognise the four volumes of The Smoking Diaries as his masterpiece.

Gray's descriptions of his heroic devotion to cigarettes, the horribly inevitable diagnosis of lung cancer, and his determination to look back on his life with ruthless honesty even as he describes the panic and humiliation of terminal illness, are all blessed with a startling mixture of comedy and candour that can only be described as heroic.

Often cryingly funny, The Smoking Diaries are also intensely moving . . .

It also seems downright cowardly that they mime smoking their cigarettes rather than taking actual drags on real, sparked-up Silk Cut. There's a price to be paid in every job and the price to be paid for appearing in The Last Cigarette ought to be that you actually have to smoke the bloody things.

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• Should smoking on stage be banned? 

A BUSINESSMAN has claimed that actors who smoked cigarettes on stage during a theatre play in Barnstaple might have sent out potentially worrying "subliminal messages" to children in the audience.

Financial advisor Philip Milton, from Georgeham, said his family thoroughly enjoyed watching Spider's Web -- which was written by Agatha Christie in 1953 -- at the Queen's Theatre last week.

"It was an excellent production and it was good to see the theatre full on a Friday night, especially in view of the weather," he said.

But he said the smoking by actors on stage during the atmospheric murder mystery sent out "subliminal messages" to children in the audience, not to mention an "unpleasant smell", and the play would not have suffered if no tobacco had been burnt in the theatre that night.

He said the ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces should now be extended to include theatre stages. "I'm not trying to be a party pooper," he was keen to add.

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• State high court to review stage smoking ban  

The Colorado Supreme Court has agreed to review the constitutionality of the statewide smoking ban as it is applied to live theater performances. This is the first victory in a 2-year legal battle between three local theater companies and the Colorado Department of Health.

Curious Theatre, Paragon Theatre and Boulder's Theatre 13 argue that smoking onstage is expressive behavior protected by the First Amendment. A Denver District judge rejected that argument in October 2006, and a three-member appellate court followed suit last March.

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• Ban on smoking gains overwhelming response in Kerala  

Earlier, you could at least find a few puffing cigarettes furitively at bus stands and railway stations as there is already a Court directive against smoking in Kerala, but the Centre's recent ban is fast ensuring that such incidents do not occur anymore, thanks to the special initiative taken by police.

"Smoking in public places is even otherwise punishable in the state since 1999, following a High Court directive. But what the recent ban has done is to take up the issue more seriously, demanding the police to be more effective', says City Police Commissioner Anoop Kuruvilla John.

`The ban has been reasonably well-enforced in the state even earlier, when the guilty had to personally appear in the Court to pay a fine upto Rs.500', he says, adding that on an average, about 350 cases were booked a month in Kozhikode alone till recently. . . .

Interestingly, many hotels and restaurants have come up with signboards issuing warnings against smoking, thereby solely leaving it to the customer to run the risk of being apprehended in case of violating the ban.

Reports from neighbouring Malappuram district say that the `urge' for smoking has driven smokers even to use-and-pay public toilets.

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• Smoking onstage, and other murky subjects around The Plain Dealer's theater desk  

We on the theater desk are trying to quit smoking. Fortunately, the Cleveland Play House is not.

Ohio's ban on smoking in public places has, on balance, turned out to be a good thing. No matter how tasty it would be to have a cigarette with a martini, the bar is a far pleasanter place without the secondhand smoke.

But the ban makes no exception for actors who have to smoke onstage or else fail to portray their assigned characters, leaving theaters a choice to self-censor or break the law.

The Play House is continuing to light up in its fine new production of Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie."

We applaud the civil disobedience.

Play House artistic director Michael Bloom is no lobbyist for recreational smoking. . . .

Tom, the narrator in Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie," has a smoke on the fire escape of the family fire escape while his mother, Amanda, wishes on the moon. But to pull off the scene, the actor, Daniel Damon Joyce, has to smoke inside the Cleveland Play House, which doesn't seem to bother actress Linda Purl. . . .

Ohio legislators say they don't want to open a Pandora's box by giving theaters a pass, because bars might suddenly try to pull a fast one by calling themselves theaters.

The New York solution looks like the best: Each individual production that uses smoking has to apply for a permit, which allows for a screening process.

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• Smoking ban ruling is appealed 

A Cambridge, Minn., attorney is hoping to get the topic of smoking in bars back on the main stage.

Criminal defense attorney Mark Benjamin has filed an appellate brief with the Minnesota Court of Appeals to overturn the petty misdemeanor conviction of Tom Marinaro, owner of Tank's Bar in Babbitt, who was ticketed for allowing smoking in his establishment in March. . . .

Benjamin filed the appeal on Friday and made the following points within it:

• The police chief was pressured by a city councilor to issue Mr. Marinaro a ticket, even though the chief himself wasn’t sure Mr. Marinaro was breaking the law.

• The trial judge thought it “absurd” to consider Mr. Marinaro’s production to be a real play because it didn’t have any costumes or scripts and wasn’t performed on a stage.

• A 1970 U.S. Supreme Court case stated that theatrical productions didn’t have to be performed on a stage by professional actors, or be heavily financed or elaborately produced.

• When the Legislature slipped the “theatrical productions” exception into the smoking ban bill at the last minute, it did so as a favor to the Guthrie Theater.

• When a legislator pointed out that that bar owners might use the “theatrical productions” exception to host their own plays and smoke indoors, the other legislators laughed, instead of tightening up the language. Now they want the courts to clean up their mess.

• The language of the exception is clear and unambiguous.

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• Author and playwright Gray dies 

English playwright and diarist Simon Gray has died aged 71.

The author penned more than 30 plays for stage and TV, including Butley, Quartermaine's Terms, Melon and The Common Pursuit, as well as five novels.

Gray recently gained in notoriety for his series of witty memoirs, The Smoking Diaries and The Last Cigarette.

The Cambridge graduate, who often wrote about the trials and tribulations of educated intellectuals, is survived by a wife and two children.

Gray, who once admitted smoking 65 cigarettes a day, was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2002.

"I've always been terrified of the consequences of smoking. Now I'm a year older and more terrified than ever," he told the Guardian newspaper last year.

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• Like 'Jersey Boys,' some plays need to smoke 

And then there is Violet Weston, the principal character in Tracy Letts' recent Pulitzer- and Tony Award-winning play "August: Osage County." She may be suffering from mouth cancer but she is "unreformed." . . .

Would live theater be the same without the subtle choreography involved in lighting up and breathing in what everyone knows is toxic? That is a recent question raised by the city's ban on smoking, which includes Chicago stages, that went into full force following complaints lodged by a "Jersey Boys" theatergoer. And it's a question now being pondered by playwrights, directors and actors.

For example, Shattered Globe Theatre will be remounting its superb production of Williams' play "Suddenly, Last Summer" July 30 through Aug. 3 at Theater on the Lake. Smoking is specifically written into several scenes. . . .

A recent statement from the Dramatists Guild of America, the advocacy organization for playwrights, outlined what might well be the legal argument, explaining: "States can claim a legitimate public interest in protecting its citizens from exposure to known carcinogens. As a result, smoking bans are constitutional when limited to regulating such behavior in public places, like restaurants and office buildings. But when a government goes beyond regulating behavior to regulating the content of expressive speech, such laws are subject to the much stricter scrutiny required of limitations on the First Amendment."

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• Glyndebourne Breaks "Illegal" Tobacco Sponsorship Link, UK 

The organisers of the Glyndebourne opera festival have been forced to distance themselves from British American Tobacco, sponsor of their production of Carmen and the world's second largest cigarette producer, after an investigation by local Trading Standards Officers branded aspects of the partnership illegal. The decision came just two days before the Government launched a wide reaching consultation on tobacco marketing including removing cigarette displays and branding on packs.

Sponsorship deals where "the purpose or the effect" is to promote a tobacco product in the UK are illegal under the Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Act 2002. In sponsoring a production of Carmen, the multinational giant used its corporate "BAT" logo rather than any one of its cigarette brands and so gave the impression of remaining just within the letter of the law.

However, an investigation by leading tobacco campaigner Lord Faulkner of Worcester discovered that Glyndebourne were providing a link from their website to BAT's and so to product promotions. . . .

"BAT appears to have believed that sponsoring Carmen would present the company in a positive light while promoting its products at the same time. They were wrong on both counts."

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• Smoking on film faces extinguishment  

Films, plays and other arts projects that feature smoking would see their government funding extinguished under a radical proposal by the Australian Medical Association.

The AMA is calling on state and federal governments to amend arts funding guidelines to prohibit government support for any projects that "glamorise, feature or promote smoking".

The AMA's Victorian branch has declared that the arts should not "act like a de facto affiliate of the tobacco industry".

"The Victorian government, through Arts Victoria, should not support any program that features smoking," it states in its draft tobacco policy.

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