Category: theatre

How Can Theatres Deal With Generational Changes, Take Risks, And Work With Failure?

Two artistic directors try to figure it out. Joanna Pfaelzer is the soon-to-be incoming AD of the Berkeley Rep: “When we look at the twenty-year-olds and the thirty-year-olds in our field, they’re thinking about collaboration, about the process of how and why and you make work together, in a much broader way. They’re going to demand that of the institutions, and the structures are going to have to adapt to their vision, and they should.” – HowlRound

Facing Campus Protests, ‘Hamilton’ In Puerto Rico Moves Into The City Of San Juan

Lin-Manuel Miranda is set to return to the stage in this version, which abruptly moved to a theatre in the capital city after producer Jeffrey Seller determined that there wouldn’t be enough police protection on campus. Seller “said he welcomed activism — noting that Hamilton, a show about the American Revolution, is essentially a celebration of protest.” – The New York Times

How Do You Put Conrad’s ‘Heart Of Darkness’ Onto A Stage In 2019? Interrogate It — Hard.

“Heart of Darkness is, to use today’s parlance, problematic. … Whether [the novel] is ‘offensive and totally deplorable’, as [Chinua] Achebe insisted, or a searing critique of colonialism trapped in its time, putting it on stage pulls it into the present. Literature might be excused, though not absolved, by context. Theatre isn’t.” Matt Trueman looks at the approaches two directors are taking with their adaptations. (And some of the commenters administer thoughtful interrogations of the projects’, and the article’s, premise.) — The Guardian

New Awards, And A New Sense Of Community, For Chicago’s Latinx Theatermakers

“Latinx theatre and theatremakers in Chicago are consistently ignored, erased, or misunderstood by both critics at mainstream publications and the city’s one major awards body, the Joseph Jefferson Awards. And this is not to mention the wider demonization of Latinx people by the current political administration and the long history of racism and state violence facing people of color that is endemic to the United States. The ALTAs” — presented and produced by the Alliance of Latinx Theater Artists of Chicago — “were a response to a deeply felt need by the community and offered an alternative to majority-white modes of professional recognition and prestige.” — HowlRound

Please: Transgender Theatre That Isn’t Strange

“To many playwrights, the very existence of trans people is enough to make up an entire plot, because it’s just that strange. It often doesn’t end up mattering where we come from, who we love, what we think—to be trans is so new and bizarre that everything in the play must be dedicated to parsing that, with almost no attention given to the other important factors that make up our lives.” – Howlround

Inside The Lives Of Understudies

They get less rehearsal than the principal cast, they have to keep the lines and (crucially) the blocking straight in their minds while rarely getting the chance to use them, and they’re pinned down to one place for all of a show’s run. But even without star-is-born moments, the job is a terrific opportunity for actors fresh out of school to launch careers. Young reporter Zoe Grossinger talks with some Philadelphia actors who are living the understudy life. — The Philadelphia Inquirer

Director Quits Broadway ‘All My Sons’ Because He Wasn’t Allowed To Cast Two Black Actors

“Director Gregory Mosher said in an interview that his association with the Roundabout Theatre Company revival — which will star Annette Bening and Tracy Letts and begin performances at the American Airlines Theatre on April 4 — ended after the Arthur Miller estate, overseen by his daughter, filmmaker Rebecca Miller, objected to the casting” of black actors as brother and sister Ann and George Deever. — The Washington Post