Category: theatre

“The urgent need for a new, purpose-built theater space became clear when MIT Theater’s home in the 19th-century Rinaldi tile factory had to be demolished as the Kendall Square redevelopment began in 2016. … Other functions of the theater program were scattered around campus – in Kresge Auditorium, the Walker Memorial, and Buildings 4 and 10. W97 [as the new building is called] both replaces the Rinaldi facilities and consolidates all the other theater activities under one roof.”

The founder/artistic director of the Pop-Up Globe was inspired when he read to his daughter about the original Globe and she asked if they could go there. It’s not an exact replica of the second Globe (1614) – it uses modern materials and electricity – but the shape and dimensions are similar and it can be erected and taken down in a matter of a few weeks; it’s already done two seasons in New Zealand and is just starting one in Melbourne.

“The decision to appoint [Chris] Dercon, the former director of Tate Modern in London, to run the institution has spurred an angry debate, one that has
often conflated the issues surrounding his appointment with the larger challenges confronting Berlin, like gentrification, globalization and immigration. It has not always been a dignified debate. Along with the usual petition-signing, there have been ugly protests – some might call them a hazing – that even an avant-garde theater may find over the top.”

The theatre has recruited actors from unlikely sources for “a roughly 100-performer production of Homer’s “Odyssey” with free tickets and only four union actors. Everyone else onstage has arrived via a yearslong conversation between Seattle Rep and nonprofits; homeless shelters; and social groups, from the Purple Lemonade dance collective to scruffy members of the Dead Baby bike-race club.”

“I have grave concerns, because over the last 20 years I’ve watched as artistic staffs have become siloed  in theatres, operating as if they are the only keepers of the artistic flame and increasingly relegating all contact with artists to members of the artistic staff. Functions that were handled in the past by general managers, company managers, managing directors, and production managers are now often handled by artistic administrators, line producers, and a wealth of other people with creative titles.”

“Many of us who arrived in New York in the last decades of the last century, looking to the theater for news about what it meant to be gay, found ourselves serially disheartened. … Yet, over the past 20 years, gay rights did expand, well beyond anyone’s imagining. This recently led me to wonder what a young gay man arriving in New York would find if he looked in the mirror of the mainstream theater today. Pretty much the same thing I did.”

“Although Monticchiello’s productions were originally lavish costume dramas, the town’s Teatro Pobre (‘poor theater’) – also known as the spettacolo (‘spectacle’) – has become another example of personal struggles fueling art.”