If this year’s Dublin Fringe Festival felt bigger, it may have been because it was more complicated to navigate. The event covered more ground than before, including venues spread so widely through the city that the map in the festival brochure seemed to give up. But the shows themselves made it harder to get your bearings.
Category: theatre
A Harrowing Play That Gets New Life Thanks To The Administration’s Anti-Immigrant Policies
Sure, Alex Alpharoah’s play about coming to the U.S. as a baby in his then-15-year-old mother’s arms was powerful, and sure, it sold fine during its six-week run at Ensemble Studio Theatre. But its name – Wet: A DACAmented Journey indicates what had everyone from politicians like Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) to the ACLU and the Human Rights Watch showing up, and what has the theatre planning for another run: It’s about DACA, the “Dreamers” program that the president kept saying he would end.
To Be Part Of Broadway’s ‘Clockwork Orange,’ It Helps To Be Ultrafit
The director says, “Alex makes a point in the book of saying as a young man, you should be the best version of yourself that you can be. And certainly Jonno’s translation of that is: ‘Don’t let your body go to waste when it’s in its prime.’”
Actors Have Been Occupying This Iconic Berlin Theatre All Weekend
On Friday afternoon, at Berlin’s Volksbühne theatre, “a group of left-wing activists moved into the building and proclaimed they were occupying the institution with the aim of turning it into a collectively run theater.” The actors left a newly built stage at the disused Templehof theatre for their ostensible director, Chris Dercon.
A Backroom Deal With Weinstein Productions About ‘Finding Neverland’ Raises Questions For A High-Profile AIDS Fundraiser
Well: “Mr. Weinstein said that when arranging the charitable contributions that flowed to the theater he told some donors that the funds were to support the ‘Finding Neverland’ production. But, he said, it wasn’t his responsibility to further disclose that the money would be used to reimburse him and the other investors or otherwise cover their business obligations. If people wanted to learn more, he said, they could have done internet research.”
The Predicament Of Arabs And Muslims In The American Theatre
Playwright Yussef El Guindi: “Americans are so averse to politics in their entertainment that the simple act of including Arab or Muslim characters in a play exposes it to the charge of being overly political or didactic. And if the play is written by an Arab or a Muslim? The writer must surely then be peddling some political agenda. Even if, for example, the play revolves around an Arab or Muslim family preparing a Thanksgiving dinner … The very act of rendering a group of people usually depicted negatively in a three-dimensional way is deemed a political act.”
The Ten Most-Produced Plays Of 2017-18: Shakespeare Leads The List, Even Though His Plays Don’t Count
As it does every year, American Theatre magazine omits the Bard’s plays and A Christmas Carol adaptations (because they’d lead year in, year out). Yet the most-produced play of the coming season is … Shakespeare in Love. (Most of the rest of the list is higher-brow.)
The 20 Most-Produced Playwrights Of 2017-18 (Excepting Shakespeare)
Editor Diep Tran: “This year, when I finished calculating the … list for 2017-18, and saw who was at the top, I let out a laugh. ‘Of course!’ I exclaimed. I was not surprised by the name at the top; she had been on it last year, at No. 2, just under August Wilson. It was almost poetic.”
Why The New York Times Will Recommend A Play With A Dirty Word In The Title But Won’t Print That Title
When Ben Brantley reviewed a revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Fucking A (a take on The Scarlet Letter), he wrote, “since I am not a character in this work but an employee of The New York Times, I shall be referring to this play only as ‘A.’ (The full title places an Anglo-Saxon adjective before the ‘A,’ one commonly used on cable television but not considered fit for print here.)” Commenters were not impressed: “Given the rather grisly subject matter, I’m wondering if the people who might attend the play would get the vapors if they were to see the name in print.” So the standards editor for the Times explains why the paper won’t print “Fucking A.” (The commenters remain unimpressed.)
The Incredible New Theater At Chicago’s Navy Pier
“The public won’t get in to Chicago Shakespeare’s $35 million, 33,000-square-foot one-of-a-kind new space until Sept. 19, when James Thierree’s The Toad Knew opens. But you don’t have to wait to see the Yard – a theater where the seats can literally float in midair and the stage can morph into just about any shape imaginable. Crain’s has obtained exclusive images of the Yard’s interior, designed by Chicago’s Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture and the UK’s Charcoalblue.”