Category: theatre

“Winer’s beef, it should be clear, is not with her employers, about whom she had nothing but kind words in a brief interview today. She’s instead stepping down in protest over (or surrender to) the apparent collective indifference of readers to arts criticism, as a chill wind of click metrics has blown through the profession and shriveled word counts even for the most venerable of critical voices. After nearly 50 years on the aisle, Winer made clear, groveling for clicks is not how she wants to spend the rest of her life.”

“Next season, Best Sound Design of a Musical and Best Sound Design of a Play will be reinstated to the list of competitive Tony Award categories with a new voting process. In addition, it was determined that for similar reasons, the category of Best Orchestrations will adhere to this same new voting process. The Tony Nominators will nominate for these categories as in the past. However, voting on the winners of the three categories will now be the responsibility of a subset of the overall voter pool based on their professional affiliation.”

The project by the American Shakespeare Center, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, “invites writers to submit plays inspired by each of Shakespeare’s, on a schedule coordinated with the theater’s season. Two winners will be chosen each year, and will be performed in repertory along with the Shakespeare play that inspired them, starting in 2019. (Each winning playwright will receive $25,000.)”

“Opening arguments began on Monday in a civil trial about a Broadway musical that never came to be, a real-life drama that, even by showbiz standards, stretched the suspension of disbelief.”

“Carrying a banner reading ‘Satan, leave our city,’ about a dozen right-wing supporters Monday chanted extremist slogans and sang nationalist songs inside the theater in the coastal town of Split before police pushed them out.” The local Catholic archdoicese had called for the play, Oliver Frljić’s Our Violence and Your Violence, to be banned due to some extreme imagery.

Michelle Hensley founded Ten Thousand Things, which “pioneered an operating style — paying good wages to top-notch actors while cutting costs by keeping designs minimal — now practiced by at least eight companies nationwide.” Now she’s stepping down.

Director Dominic Dromgoole: “The British desire not to do things, not to make things, can be very wearying. But Wanamaker, an extraordinary blend of charmer, irritant, huckster, dreamer and impresario, plowed on.”

Edward Hogg isn’t thrilled about the dismissal of Rice: “It’s very sad, really. Especially at a time like this, you really need your true artists, people like Emma, at the forefront of big theatres like the Globe. I’m such a big Emma Rice fan, so with this we want to do our best not only for ourselves and for our show but for Emma as well.”

And the BBC put both Pinter’s “Betrayal” and Joan Bakewell’s “Keeping in Touch” on the air. “You were conscious, as the events unfolded in reverse chronological order, of the way betrayal spreads like a virus through a whole network of human relationships.”

Theatre artist Daniel Park wondered, so he asked: “As a queer person of color and member of Philadelphia’s theater community, I’m invested in and directly affected by your participation in the Ghostlight Project. The movement called itself a chance for organizations to ‘make, or renew, a pledge to stand for and protect the values of inclusion, participation, and compassion for everyone.’ On the movement’s website, it listed a large number of potential, actionable, ongoing actions for participants to take after the event on 1/19. I’m writing to find out what movements and plans your organization has begun since 1/19/17 to put this commitment into effect, outside of producing art.”