“The pop singer’s estate, along with Columbia Live Stage, said Tuesday that it had agreed to develop a stage musical about his life, aiming for Broadway in 2020. … The book is to be written by Lynn Nottage, a playwright who has won two Pulitzers, for Ruined and Sweat. And the show is to be directed and choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon, the artistic associate of the Royal Ballet in London, who won a Tony Award for An American in Paris.”
Category: theatre
The Theatre Critic/Blogger Model Is Probably Finished, So Let’s Make Peace With That
Sean Douglass: “I think we have to accept that the former critic and blogger landscape is gone, because there just isn’t enough interest to sustain it. … While many blogs may be gone, the social media that has replaced them can be a far more powerful tool for reaching people than what we’ve ever had before. Let’s not lament the migration to social media and theaters-as-content-distributors. Let’s embrace it.”
Billionaire Buys One Of London’s Oldest Theatres
“[Leonard] Blavatnik’s company Access Entertainment, headed by Danny Cohen, the former director of BBC Television, announced it had purchased the Theatre Royal Haymarket for an undisclosed sum. … The theatre has an interesting history going back to 1720. It opened in its current John Nash-designed grade I-listed building in 1821 with a production of Sheridan’s The Rivals followed by a season which included Edmund Kean as King Lear.”
One Man’s Quest To Get Black Theatre Going In The Middle Of California
Tommie Muhammad, a 72-year-old actor and director, has been trying to find a home for African American theatre in Stockton since 1983. He “still wants to produce black plays, but it’s proving more and more difficult as time passes. Every so often, he gets the opportunity to put on a production, but not with the consistency he had hoped for.”
A Director Who’s Finding Her Family Even As She Branches Out In The Theatre World
May Adrales, who has been a director and collaborator with Qui Nguyen and his play Vietgone for several years, is just finishing up a season as an associate artistic director at the Milwaukee Rep. What has she learned? “It’s hard to initiate change, and it’s hard to start to reframe things differently.”
Has Broadway Become Just A Cynical Theme Park?
What happened? Only a few seasons ago, Broadway was celebrating powerful and urgent new US plays on Broadway such as Eclipsed, Sweat, Clybourne Park and August/Osage County. It had been the same with a renaissance of powerful, groundbreaking, original and diverse US musicals such as Hamilton and Dear Evan Hanson. In contrast, all of this year’s best musical nominations were adapted from films – Mean Girls, SpongeBob Square Pants, The Band’s Visit and Frozen – with The Band’s Visit the closest to reflecting past developments and achievements in the art form.
Investigative Journalism Nonprofit Moves Into Theatre
“The Bureau of Investigative Journalism is moving into theatre producing with a touring show about cuts to domestic violence funding. Refuge Women is a collaboration between journalists and performers, and is inspired by real stories uncovered through investigations into the state of government-funded services for women fleeing domestic violence.”
It Looks Like London Is Getting More Theatres. But Can The City Support Them?
If we are to create more theatres in London, what business models are they going to operate on if no public money is available? There is an intrinsic problem. Property developers want to give over as little space as possible for cultural provision, but to make a theatre work commercially, you need a certain number of seats and – preferably – a food and drink operation to bring in a secondary income.
Dramatists Guild Scolds Tonys, CBS, For Excluding Writers
Every year, the Academy Awards faithfully includes screenwriters in not one but two categories. And it’s not just the Oscars; the Grammys, Emmys, and Golden Globes all award the writers in their respective industries on the air. And yet it’s the theater that most esteems writers; we are generally recognized as the principal artistic force behind new work, and we even retain ownership and control over the material we create. Yet on the very awards show intended to celebrate our craft, we are effectively negated.
Shakespeare Asks: Which Is The More Legitimate King — The One Chosen By God Or The One Chosen By The People?
“Richard II is God’s anointed representative on earth, but by the end of the play that bears his name, he’s dead and his cousin sits on his throne. This is the story of how Shakespeare used English history to ask still-relevant questions about legitimacy, and about how a performance of Richard II played a role in the last aristocratic rebellion against the English crown.” (podcast)