A video of this building, with a lot of show notes after the video. If you love Broadway, you’ll probably want to watch it a few times. Like, a lot of times, just to enjoy the building: “More than 800 Broadway musicals and plays have begun here. The building, run by a nonprofit established in 1990 to redevelop 42nd Street, has 14 rehearsal studios that are rented on a sliding scale — commercial producers pay more, and nonprofits pay less.”
Category: theatre
‘The Parrotheads Were After Me’ – New York Times’ Jesse Green On Writing Negative Theater Reviews
“I don’t take writing pans lightly. For one thing, I’m as thin-skinned as anyone else, and don’t enjoy being excoriated on Twitter or mocked as a theater snob or told on Facebook to just ‘relax’ – as if my being uptight were what made the show bad. … So when I get home from the theater with my notebook bristling with scribbles like ‘what is happening?’ and ‘kill me now,’ I ask myself a few questions. Was there anything at all I admired? Can I imagine why someone else might like it? Are there people I would send to the show despite my own distaste for it?”
How Director Marianne Elliott Wrestled With ‘Angels In America’ (And Tony Kushner)
As the UK National Theatre’s revival of the epic opens on Broadway, Michael Schulman talks to its director – known to US audiences for War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time about the challenges and joys of staging the play and bringing to the States (and, yes, of dealing with its notoriously difficult famously engaged playwright).
The Marionettes Bringing Health Education To Burmese Villages
“In the play, a puppet starts to offer a cigarette to a friend but his cough gets the better of him, which makes his voice a bit funny-sounding – eliciting peals of laughter from a roomful of a hundred schoolchildren.” Didem Tali reports on puppeteers who have adapted the traditional Burmese puppet theater yoke thay to improve public health in modern Myammar.
Why Don’t American Playwrights Today Ever Write About Labor Unions?
“Why are unions off-limits? For the same reason corporate boardrooms and the 1% who haunt them are usually left out of the dramatic picture. A fear of looking at the ‘invisible’ levers of power in the real world, a reluctance to invite charges of being didactic, and anxiety about alienating audience members and the moneyed classes (bankers, corporate leaders, lawyers, etc) who fund or support performance events.” Bill Marx focuses on the issue – and on one new play that deals with it (partly).
Comedian Howie Mandel Buys World’s Largest Comedy Festival
“Montreal’s Just For Laughs Group has been acquired by a group of investors led by ICM Partners and Howie Mandel. The acquisition covers the annual comedy festival held in July in Montreal and its offshoot events in Toronto, Vancouver and Sydney. The deal is said to be valued in the mid eight-figure range.”
A Boom In Indigenous Theatre
“We’re experiencing a Native arts revival right now,” said Alaska Native playwright Vera Starbard, whose autobiographical advocacy play Our Voices Will be Heard was performed in Juneau, Anchorage, Hoonah, and Fairbanks. “There was one in the ’70s, and we’re right in the middle of a pretty exciting one now.”
London’s West End Theatres Threatened By Noise Complaints With New Construction
Industry leaders and MPs are now calling for more robust measures to protect theatres from the threat of residents in new nearby developments complaining about noise. They fear this could lead to restrictions on the venues that would severely damage their ability to operate.
This Production Of ‘Julius Caesar’ Needs Stage Managers Versed In Crowd Control – For The Audience
Nicholas Hytner’s staging for the Bridge Theatre in London (starring Ben Whishaw and David Morrissey) takes place on a series of platforms right in the middle of the audience, and the ticket-holders standing in the pit at the center of it all play the mob. Fergus Morgan talks to the stage managers about how they wrangle a new crowd for every performance.
Five Veteran Theater Critics Form Their Own Review Website
“Launching March 20, just in time to catch the spring wave of big Broadway openings that began last week with Escape to Margaritaville and continues this week with Frozen and Angels in America, New York Stage Review comes online with some 20 pieces of criticism about recent spring openings. … For most productions, New York Stage Review will have more than one critic weigh in. That’s taken from the playbook of The New York Times” – way back when, in the days of Walter Kerr.