Their unions, of course, but they often have to track down offenders themselves. “Production photos, fight choreography clips, even bootleg production videos are often just a Google search away. While it’s never been easier to copy someone else’s work, it’s also never been easier for directors and designers to find potential offenders.”
Category: theatre
Edinburgh Fringe Fest Relies On Unpaid Workers, Study Says
The study reveals that not only are nearly a third of the festival workers volunteers, but those who are paid are paid very little, and many work excessive hours.
It’s Time To End The Fat-Phobia In Theater
Maggie Rogers: “It is time to talk about the elephant in the room: me. I’m the elephant. I’m the fat girl playing the Nurse in Romeo & Juliet senior year of high school, because as a fat girl you only play grandmas or other ‘undesirable’ characters. I am the fat girl who sits behind the rehearsal table as an assistant director trying to keep her mouth shut while wondering why all the characters of lower status and even lower intelligence levels in the show are fat.”
The Problem With Theatre Outreach In Troubled Communities
Nathan Lucky Wood, on watching a play about homelessness performed for homeless youth: “A young man raises his hand. He wants to ask a question. Why have they come here to perform a play which is so depressing? Being homeless is already hard. He was excited to see a play because he thought he could forget about that. But now he had been reminded of it, and he felt awful. He wanted to know, what had been the point? The facilitator didn’t have an answer. Nor, having worked across theatre and homeless services for years now, do I.”
Should Different Theatres Have Distinct Artistic Identities?
Matt Trueman: “There have been times, over the last decade, where London’s major theatres have felt rather interchangeable. Plenty of shows could have been scooped up from one programme and set down in another without seeming at all out of place. … Artistic identity, like any identity, isn’t a concrete thing. It’s amorphous and indistinct; fluid, not fixed … a complex amalgamation of a number of things – history, aesthetics, even audience. It’s more easily intuited than definitely expressed. It can be changed and betrayed, diminished and lost.”
Decline Of The Working-Class Actor
“For British actors, ever-growing division is a fact of life. The erection of roadblocks for working-class actors now begins at state schools, where drama has been squeezed out by slashed teaching budgets and a narrowing curriculum. Then come rising fees at drama schools. Overcome those and you get to chase dwindling roles in soaps and bad gangster movies.”
The Problem With One-Person Plays
Michael Billington grants the genre its virtues – low cast, adaptability, the chance to spotlight an actor’s skill – but wonders about its limits of perspective.
Study: Broadway Is Becoming More Diverse
“The study, released Monday, examined the 2015-16 season and found it to be the most diverse the group has reviewed so far, with 35 percent of all roles going to minority actors, up from 30 percent the previous season and 24 percent the year before that. The coalition has now compiled 10 years of data on diversity on New York stages.”
Cirque Du Soleil Banned Critic Lyn Gardner – Here’s What Happened Next
“The critic Sanjoy Roy, who has never reviewed the company before, was approved for a press ticket for the show and The Guardian bought a ticket for me for £73, which offered a side view over the stage.” Here’s a review by both writers of Cirque’s show Ovo – as Gardner writes, “I love the acts. It would be foolish to pretend that Cirque doesn’t showcase some of circus’s most skilled performers.” But …
What Should Theatre Criticism Do About Its Problematic So-Called ‘Genius’ Men?
The root of the problem? “We have formed the very basis of theatre criticism on white male supremacy, teaching decades of students that white male-centered criticism is the backbone of the field and that anything else is a specialization, an extra. We teach this to the students who grow up to run our industry, and then we wonder why they hire so few women and people of color to positions of power, then we wonder why granting orgs give most of their money to theatres headed by white men, then we wonder why major publications hire mostly white male theatre writers and editors, then we wonder why universities hire more men than women and more white people than people of color for tenure-track positions.”