Category: theatre

“The goal wasn’t just artistic satisfaction, but how can we leave Puerto Rico a little better than we found it,” said Miranda, who is largely of Puerto Rican descent and frequently visited the Commonwealth as a child and teenager.

Howard Sherman: “While I don’t look forward to watching plays while holding up my mobile phone (ringer off, of course) for two hours, technology is beginning to offer ways for companies to create more immersive worlds without the construction of physical scenery. As work increasingly bursts out beyond prosceniums, augmented reality may offer possibilities to performances anywhere people can congregate, but without the need for lugging scenery into parks and playgrounds.”

“Lee’s work is about wrongness: about being the wrong kind of man, woman, Asian; about saying the wrong thing; about getting other people wrong. Her characters are ill at ease in their bodies and in the world and, sometimes, in the very play they’re starring in. … With each production, she begins by asking herself, ‘What’s the last play in the world you would ever want to write?’ Then she casts actors and builds a play for them and with them, incorporating their feedback.”

These shows are important – but we can’t be uncritical of them. When an all-new Broadway version of West Side Story was recently announced that Ivo van Hove will direct with new choreography by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, its lyricist Stephen Sondheim said: “What keeps theatre alive over time is reinterpretation, and when that reinterpretation is as invigorating as [Ivo van Hove’s] productions of A View from the Bridge and The Crucible, it makes for something to look forward to with excitement.”

Producer Richard Jordan, citing Bartlett Sher’s current Lincoln Center Theater production of My Fair Lady: “While critics enthused over Sher’s new ending, referencing it back to the issues of today, watching it play before a regular audience you felt a sense that the musical no longer gave them a pay-off. Instead, it felt as though they had been waiting more than three hours for the ‘I love you’ moment only to then be denied it – it’s not how Lerner intended this scene to play and it was surprising his estate allowed it. We should be concerned about a growing attitude that classics can be ‘fixed’ to match today’s agenda – one risks changing the very essence of the work itself.”

The genre known as Karagyoz (meaning “black eyes,” after the trickster character at the center of the shadow plays) developed in the 14th century in the Ottoman Empire and became especially popular in Armenia in the 1700s. Now a troupe called Ayrogi is reviving the traditional art, often traveling through Armenia on horseback to perform in villages throughout the country.

The new complex, which opens in October, will have 535-, 250-, and 100-seat performance spaces as well as a production area and a tech space that are each over 10,000 square feet. “The facility will house the REP, a professional theatre company; a theatre for young audience; and the students of Point Park University’s theatre and dance departments.”