Category: theatre

There’s greater insecurity to immersive work than its conventional counterpart. Often the producers have to beg landlords for use of the spaces that suits the work, such as disused flats and office buildings ripe for development.

“Apart from stray quibbles over which plays should and shouldn’t have made the list …, there has so far been extraordinarily little chatter, let alone pushback, about this audacious stab at canon-making. Ten years ago there would have been blog posts galore, perhaps a piss take in Time Out New York …, a snarky side-eye from Michael Riedel.” Rob Weinert-Kendt has a none-too-cheerful answer to the question.

E. Alex Jung surveys “a larger seismic shift that has occurred in the past few years: Instead of gay people trying to fit into traditionally heterosexual and male comedy spaces, they’re creating a gay paradigm. … What distinguishes it today is a queer sensibility. It’s queer comedy: stranger and more off-kilter than ever before, with a distinctly camp flavor.”

As an eyewitness tweeted after the incident at a performance of Polly Stenham’s modern adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, “As if there wasn’t enough onstage drama … as the play ended tonight, a fight broke out in the circle between a couple of middle-aged blokes, held back by their respective crews.”

Once you hit 25, or maybe 30, forget all of that “emerging artist support,” theatre folks. “I felt a pressure, perhaps even an expectation, to hit some sort of invisible jackpot. Did I only have a few short years to prove my worth and work ethic, to demonstrate some outstanding talent that would surpass my age so that I would be remembered before I would fall dramatically short of opportunities and professional support?”

“When we’re looking at hard numbers, it’s clear that people just aren’t reading this stuff, and theatres are spending most of their advertising, like everyone else, in the digital realm. It used to be that we had seven or eight pages in a weekly magazine to fill with theatre reviews because that was based on advertising from theatres wanting to advertise next to our reviews. That relationship has changed. I think absolutely, if you wanna be taken seriously as an arbiter of culture in this city, you have to have some kind of knowledgeable coverage of theatre. But I guess the question becomes, is it profitable to be a cultural arbiter? I’m not sure that it is.”

“Interestingly, I’m finding that more and more of my friends and colleagues from the theatre are operating their careers in reverse.  Instead of starting in the regions and building up a resume to take to New York, they began in the city and are taking their talent and experience back out into the world.”

“Are ‘Best Actor’ and ‘Best Actress’ awards an insidious example of gender apartheid, or is it just a convenient excuse to give out more awards? You can decide after reading our latest Point-Counterpoint.” TheaterMania critics Zachary Stewart and Hayley Levitt debate.

Blackface, once popular in racist U.S. minstrel shows, is still performed in Spanish-language entertainment. Afro-Latinos in South Florida say the practice, and this latest incident in Miami, is a small window into the racism that persists in Latin American communities stateside and abroad.