The co-founder and recently retired director of DC’s famed theatre company reports from this year’s Golden Mask Festival, where selected companies from all over the vast country meet to show their best work. – HowlRound
Category: theatre
How Do You Bring Hong Kongers Back To Boring Old Cantonese Opera? Write One About Donald Trump, Zombies, And ‘The Sound Of Music’
Trump on Show, which ran for four days last month at the city’s last commercial Cantonese opera theater, “tells a story of Mr. Trump’s long-lost twin, Chuan Pu, who was raised in China and works at a crematory. There he meets the undead corpse of Liu Shaoqi, the Chinese leader who died during the Cultural Revolution. The opera includes a Ping-Pong game between Mao and Nixon, who later gets stumbling drunk at a state banquet; a visit to the White House by a scheming Kim Jong-un; the ghost of Lincoln; Mr. Trump’s disappearance on an extraterrestrial spacecraft; and multiple singings of ‘Edelweiss.'” – The New York Times
Nicholas Hytner To Open New 600-Seat Theatre In Kings Cross
Former National Theatre bosses Sir Nicholas Hytner and Nick Starr will run the venue, which is under construction and is set to open in winter 2021. It will be based on the Bridge Theatre, which the pair opened in October 2017. – BBC
Putting Saul Bellow’s ‘Adventures Of Augie March’ Onstage — Can It Work In 2019?
In Chicago, where Bellow spent his life, playwright David Auburn (who won the Pulitzer for Proof) has reshaped the hefty novel into a single-evening play with 13 actors portraying 40 characters. But will today’s audiences relate to a story by an author who, as one of his biographers puts it, is “lucky he did not live to see the #MeToo movement”? – The New York Times
How, And Why, I Founded One Of The First Site-Specific Theatre Companies
Way back in 1985-86, Anne Hamburger started up En Garde Arts in place of writing a master’s thesis at the Yale School of Drama. (“At the time, no one knew what that was; audiences identified theatre companies with the buildings they occupied.”) In this essay, Hamburger explains how she put together some of her early successes, why she closed En Garde Arts in 1999 and reopened it a decade later, and why that intervening decade completely changed how her company works. – HowlRound
The Nebraska Theatre That Pops Out Of A Storefront On To Main Street
The Storefront Theater is a retractable theatre disguised as a shop. It was built to re-invigorate the main street in the town of Lyons, Nebraska, and create a community space for its residents. – Dezeen
At The World’s Only Ventriloquism Museum
The Vent Haven Museum, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati in northern Kentucky, houses nearly 1,000 dummies, some 150 years old. Most of them, especially those that are or used to be famous, are off-limits to present-day ventriloquists, amateur or professional. – Smithsonian Magazine
The Most Prolific Producer Of New Plays In The Entire UK Is A Lunchtime Series In Glasgow
Since 2004, Òran Mór in Scotland’s largest city has been presenting A Play, a Pie and a Pint, which is exactly what it says: a meat pie and a pint of ale for lunch, along with an hour-long play, all for just £12.50. A new script is produced each week for 35 weeks a year (plus holiday pantos), and the series is about to present its 500th play. Audiences just (ahem) eat it up. – The Guardian
Cancel Culture, Miss Saigon, And Butterfly
Cancel culture is not the same as the rising desire to engage with art’s social implications. But both phenomena are indications of a country that is fundamentally shifting the way it engages with entertainment. As such, the titles in Houston have been criticized for inaccurate and stereotypical portrayals of Asians. Since its premiere in 2017, theater critics have taken issue with the representation of women and Vietnamese people in “Miss Saigon.” And the local production of “Madama Butterfly” was itself a piece of self-commentary. – Houston Chronicle
OK, What’s Going To Be On Broadway Next Season?
Is it too soon after this year’s Tony nominations came out? So what? Bring ’em on: “When it comes to new musicals, looking beyond Broadway can reveal productions that may yet be players in the coming season. It’s also a reminder of the almost inextricable relationship that now exists between non-profit institutional theatres in the US and their commercial counterparts.” – The Stage (UK)