Category: theatre

“Of the plays we’ve singled out as the best 25 of the last 25 years — dated by their first reviews in [the newspaper] — only nine have ever appeared on Broadway, and none originated there. No matter their size, most began on, and many never left, the smaller stages of Off and Off Off Broadway, or were developed at regional theaters. If they have reached fewer people as a consequence, they have told more stories: the kind often ignored during the decades when theater was still a dominant but homogeneous cultural force.”

“We started with 75. … This was encouraging; it meant we found much to love. And many of the same plays were on more than one list. That was good to recognize, too. To get to 25, we eventually realized that we could only include one play by any given playwright, or risk being overrun by a medley of Annie Bakers or Suzan-Lori Parkses. Conversely, we decided that we could not include veteran playwrights just because they wrote great plays before 1993.”

“Andrew Garfield, a Tony Award nominee for playing the defiant Prior Walter in the Broadway revival of Angels in America, was 9 years old in 1993, when Stephen Spinella won the first of his two Tonys in the role. As it happens, Mr. Spinella is again tackling the furious, fantastical poetry of Tony Kushner’s two-part, seven-hour play, this time as the bilious lawyer Roy Cohn at Berkeley Repertory Theater. The New York Times asked the actors, who have never met, to correspond by email during a week’s worth of shows. … Below are edited excerpts from their exchange, which included insights on how to understand the character of Prior, a man with AIDS who accompanies an angel to heaven, and how to maintain the stamina to play him.”

“In March, Audible Inc. moved from the aural space into the physical New York theater world when it sponsored a run of Harry Clarke at the Minetta Lane Theater. Now, the audiobook company is formalizing its relationship with the theater: It struck a deal to produce plays, comedic shows, panel discussions and more there, starting with a solo show from Carey Mulligan in June.”

“Just half an hour before the sold-out opening night performance of The Tempest was set to begin, police officers asked the hundreds of well-dressed patrons to immediately evacuate the theatre, telling them to go as far from the building as the Avon River and Water Street.”

The play “3 Viudas en un Crucero” (Three Widows on a Cruise), which has been showing since January, featured light-skinned actress Marta Velasco smeared with dark makeup, exaggerated red lips, thick, drawn-in eyebrows and an Afro wig. A trailer of the play posted on YouTube shows Velasco pounding her chest, with her legs wide open while saying “Bailar, tomar y gozar como tres gorilas” (to dance, drink and have fun like three gorillas).

“Does the brain of a comedy improv actor or freestyle rapper work in a particular way? Is it measurably different? Is it processing language (or sound) faster than a regular, lower-improvising brain? … We asked our pal Ari Daniel from our partner program NOVA to look into this. As it happens, he found a group of researchers and a group of professional improvisers working together on some of these questions.”

“It was fun for me to find out how many things you could express in the waltz form,” says composer Kander (Cabaret, Chicago) of their adaptation, with librettist David Thompson, of James’s The Beast in the Jungle. “The first thing I said was, ‘How much do I have to pay to do this?'”