Author: Matthew Westphal

Is Upright Citizens Brigade Circling The Drain?

Just three years ago, it seemed (at least to the outside world) that the company was turning into an improv empire: multiple locations in NYC and LA, a TV deal, corporate workshops, thousands of paying students, and hundreds of comic actors willing to perform for free. Now some of those locations are closing, staff are being laid off, and the owners signed a lease on a new flagship space without knowing that the company was running at a deficit. Writer Seth Simons looks at whether UCB can be saved and whether it should. – Slate

Deep Engagement

As a result of the centrality of government funding for the arts in South America, the emphasis in much of the work in the arts there appears to be on developing connections with communities. Here are several projects I learned of at a conference this month in Santiago, Chile. – Doug Borwick

Propwatch: the telephone in ‘Present Laughter’

Did you see that video of two teenagers baffled by a dial phone? Nothing is guaranteed to make you feel jurassic like watching the routine technology of your childhood appear irrefutably foreign. But cometh the play, cometh the phone. The defining prop, sound effect and plot device of Present Laughter, Noel Coward’s 1942 comedy of vanity, is an ink-black dial phone. – David Jays

What Happens To Modern Dance Companies — And What Happens To Modern Dance Itself — When The Founders Are Gone?

Joan Acocella: “A lot of modern-dance companies are talking about ‘legacy’ and trying to come up with ways to perpetuate it. Why? Well, the art form is more than a century old. Many modern-dance companies are now big institutions, prestigious features of our cultural landscape. If they disband, a ton of people will lose their jobs. More important, there will no longer be anyone to perform the dances properly, in the style passed down through generations of dancers. The work will cease to exist. It would be as if, when Rembrandt died, all his canvases were taken out into the back yard and burned.” – The New Yorker

Oregon Bach Festival’s Executive Director Out, Two Years After Firing Of Artistic Director Matthew Halls

A Friday afternoon announcement said that Janelle McCoy would be leaving after this year’s festival (which begins Friday) and that her job is being eliminated due to budget cuts. In 2017, she was behind the dismissal of Halls, ostensibly for a racist remark made to a singer who insisted that the remark wasn’t racist and he wasn’t offended (except by the firing). – Eugene Weekly

David Esterly, Self-Taught Master Wood Carver, Dead At 75

He’d completed a doctorate in literature at Cambridge and wasn’t sure what to do with himself next when, on a visit to London, he saw the 17th-century woodcarvings by Grinling Gibbons in St. James’s Church, Piccadilly. He was so amazed by them that he taught himself the craft, and he got so good that he was eventually commissioned to recreate some of Gibbons’s own work, lost in the 1986 fire at Hampton Court Palace. – The New York Times

How The Mueller Report Was Turned Into A Play And Live-Streamed By A Superstar Cast

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan (The Kentucky Cycle) adapted the special counsel’s notoriously careful report into a drama titled The Investigation: A Search for the Truth in Ten Acts — each act covering an act of possible obstruction of justice detailed in the report. And on Monday, a cast featuring Annette Bening, Kevin Kline, Michael Shannon, Alfre Woodard, Jason Alexander, and many others read and streamed the play live; John Lithgow played Donald Trump. – Los Angeles Times