Category: theatre

“No other piece of stage business has burned itself so deeply into the collective consciousness. All the greats have been there, from Richard Burbage to Thomas Betterton, Sarah Bernhardt to Laurence Olivier. Even Bart Simpson has got in on the act. Given all this, it’s worth reflecting on the fact that, for Hamlet‘s earliest audiences, seeing real human remains on stage would have been a shock.”

When Kahn announced that he’d be stepping down after two more seasons, he said that he would leave his successor a financially healthy company. Artistically? That may be a different matter, worries Peter Marks.

So that’s where “enemy of the people” comes from. The enemy was unpopular, and undoubtedly an “elitist”; but he trafficked in fact, and he was right. Trump obviously had no grasp of this

Steppenwolf artistic director Anna D. Shapiro: “The state of the world was really crushing me, and then Tracy got the script into my mailbox. I called him and said that we are lucky you write plays for us.” (And you know that a play by the writer of Killer Joe and August: Osage County is going to be furious.)

Diep Tran tells the story of #FairWageOnstage.

Milia Ayache writes about adapting, staging and performing Derek Walcott and Biljana Srbljanović in Arabic with her Masrah Ensemble.

The circus, for many, represents nostalgia for a “simpler” past — although that past can be tricky to reconcile with the injustices embedded in history. Still, there’s something inherently entertaining about a circus. So the new circuses aim to define what that is…

“It’s no longer controversial to give other authors a share in Shakespeare’s plays—not because he was a front for an aristocrat, as conspiracy theorists since the Victorian era have proposed, but because scholars have come to recognize that writing a play in the sixteenth century was a bit like writing a screenplay today, with many hands revising a company’s product. The New Oxford Shakespeare claims that its algorithms can tease out the work of individual hands—a possibility, although there are reasons to challenge its computational methods.”

How Qui Nguyen started Vampire Cowboys, realized he would never be “mature,” wrote the play Vietgone, and found director May Adrales for a partnership made in theatre paradise.

Can “Amélie” and “Come From Away” make it where West Coast transplants have failed before? The L.A. Times’ Charles McNulty says, “Musicals en route to New York receive an enormous amount of tinkering, polishing and sharpening. Rarely, however, does all this primping smooth over structural cracks in the book or holes in the score.”