Theatre Philadelphia expanded the pool of nominators this year from 60 to 70, “to ensure we had all the voices in the room — race, ethnicity, people not on the binary, the LGBTQ community. “We wanted our nominator pool,” he said, “to reflect what we want to see in our theater audiences.”
Category: theatre
Millions In Gov’t Funding For Emma Rice’s New Theatre Company ‘Makes A Mockery Of The Entire Arts Funding System’
“Wise Children, the company, didn’t exist until nine days before the deadline for registering a National Portfolio Organisation application [with Arts Council England]. … It may be that the company’s success provides a resounding and gratifying riposte to a ridiculous cock-up at Shakespeare’s Globe … But you have to ask: would other bold artists, who hadn’t been blessed with the oxygen of publicity, be successful with a similarly astronomical application?”
Anger At Black Actor Getting Booted From ‘Great Comet’ To Make Room For Mandy Patinkin
This week it was announced that Patinkin would make a now-rare appearance on Broadway, starring for three weeks in Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812. To accommodate Patinkin’s schedule, the producers cut short the contract of the actor currently playing Pierre, Hamilton alumnus Okieriete Onaodowan (“Oak”). Some fellow minority actors are denouncing the cast change on social media.
Are Working Class Actors Returning To The Theatre? Jim Cartwright Says Yes
“The working class thing is an attitude. It’s a burning, it’s a feeling inside,” Cartwright says. “That’s what came in the ’50s. It wasn’t just that they were from a particular area or a particular economic strata. They carried with them a certain fire. That’s what we’re building in the classes. We’re not just classes – we’re a bit of a movement really and we’re a quiet revolution. And we’re coming. If you won’t let us through the doors, we’re coming over the walls and through the stalls. We’re coming in. It’s time. And anyone out there who feels the same as I do, join us, because it’s time for change in theatre. It really is time for change.”
What The Hell Does Michael Moore Want Now? To Go On Broadway And Change People’s Minds
“Now Mr. Moore, this willfully disheveled, 63-year-old hybrid of Noam Chomsky and P. T. Barnum, expects theatergoers to pay Broadway ticket prices to watch him in a one-man show, The Terms of My Surrender. After his previous documentaries, books and television shows, does he have anything left to say, and does he really believe it will make a difference?” Dave Itzkoff goes to a rehearsal to find out.
Mandy Patinkin To Star In Broadway Musical For First Time In 17 Years
Patinkin will spend three weeks at the end of the summer as Pierre in Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812. “This marks Patinkin’s first role in a Broadway musical since 2000’s The Wild Party, and his first time on Broadway since his 2011-12 season concert An Evening With Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin.”
The Most-Popular Playwright In America Is An Unexpected Name
Lauren Gunderson recently topped the annual list of American Theatre magazine’s ranking of the country’s most-produced playwrights. (She was second only to August Wilson, who is deceased. Shakespeare receives so many productions every year he is no longer included on the list). Her placement there was remarkable for a number of reasons. She’s one of only a handful of women to make the list, and at 35, she is relatively young to appear there. But Gunderson took the theater world by surprise primarily because she has never had a major production in New York.
Let Great Stage Actors Be Great *On Stage* (Not Screen)
Isaac Butler and Dan Kois: ” Call it the Rylance Rule: Great stage actors can be great on film as well, but their film careers are always less interesting than their stage careers.” And Mark Rylance himself is their Exhibit B; Exhibit A is Nathan Lane: “So why on earth would we want to push one of the four or five best living stage actors onto film? Is Nathan Lane’s road to an Oscar worth the dozen great performances on stage that he’d sacrifice to get there?”
Tom Stoppard, Now In His Eighties, Dazzled By The Wealth Of Topics For His Next Play
The playwright politely ducked the question about what might come next, saying that he was eternally on the hunt for material—in magazines, newspapers, science journals, monographs—but hadn’t yet located something that felt like a script. Brexit fascinated him, he added, as did the rise of Trump. He’d also considered writing a drama about cloning, and another on the Leveson inquiry. So far, though, nothing has quite stuck. “I like to think that something is marinating. I read out of a combination of normal interest and the hope that there will be a play in there, or the half-notion of a play.”
Stephen Sondheim Is Fine With A Female Bobby In ‘Company’
“If you’ve got somebody as distinguished and inventive and good as [director] Marianne Elliott, and she says, ‘I would love to do Company with a female central character.’ … What is there to lose? It can only make the play either interesting or, if you dislike it … dislikable … but still. I’m fumfering here, but the point is: That’s what keeps the theaters alive. So I’m always open.”