Category: theatre

Eric Grode considers the many famous actresses and comediennes – and even male performers (Benny never actually played Dolly, but he did seriously consider it) to put their own stamps on the title role in Hello, Dolly! since Channing created it in 1964.

“They are two of the nation’s pre-eminent playwrights. Each has won nearly every award their field has to offer, including the Pulitzer Prize. Each has written works that are staged around the world and have become required reading in college classes. And each has earned an admired position in the academy, teaching aspiring dramatists at Ivy League institutions. One milestone, however, has long eluded Paula Vogel and Lynn Nottage: Broadway.” Why is this?

Deepa Fernandes visits with performers who are loosening up and becoming more visible, in clubs and in spontaneous street shows.

“For nearly 42 years the show chugged along at the 153-seat Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village, finally closing in 2002 after 17,162 performances – a victim both of a destroyed downtown after 9/11 and a new edgy mood. It opened four years later at The Theater Center, an off-Broadway complex in the heart of Times Square, where it will end after a run of 4,390 shows.”

“Part of me wonders whether musical theater featuring a call-to-action eliminates nuance — generally scarce in musicals as it is. Indeed, don’t theater makers fear our work being reduced to a message? Perhaps so, but I also don’t think that attempting to convince audiences that we should raise the age of criminal responsibility simplifies the audience’s journey. It’s the opposite — the audience experiences something like what our composers experienced: listening to a story, confronting and bypassing their own judgments about it, walking around with it, letting it spur them to make something from it. For our composers, that ‘something’ is a song. For the audience, collectively, it could be change.”

“Right now, students at hundreds of MFA and BFA acting programs across the country are rushing from scene class, to voice, movement, and an array of “specialties”: Lecoq, Laban, Suzuki, Grotowski, commedia, kinetics, Fitzmaurice, Alexander, clown, mask, musical comedy, the list goes on. Later tonight they may be performing on stage, putting all that learning into practice in front of an audience. One performance experience most acting students are doing very little of is acting in front of a camera. Professional training programs aren’t training actors; they are training actors for a career in the theatre. This is a problem.”

Four Broadway people got together and decided it was time: “A group leaving a rehearsal room together is a team and the connection they share has nothing to do with being employed or compensated. It stems from trust, from a shared experience, and from watching each other work. That ‘cast’ feeling is what we want to create at Broadway Weekends.”

As part of an endowment for the IAMA Theatre Company in Los Angeles, Rhimes is starting a competition for playwrights. She said, “I think it’s hard for any playwright to find opportunities. … If people aren’t being included, then I’m going to find a way to make sure they’re included. I’m going to find a way to make sure they have opportunities.”

That doesn’t mean all is forgotten and forgiven, but some of the changes reflect how the industry has, at least sometimes, changed. Tony-winning actor BD Wong says that at the time, when “Miss Saigon” was in London’s West End, “We said, surely the show will come to the United States, but the yellowface will never happen here, because that’s the kind of thing that only happens in England now.”