Category: theatre

“I envy Gary Taylor his confidence. I am increasingly coming to think that the most useful new discoveries about Shakespeare are the negative ones.” Jonathan Bate, who edited the complete First Folio for the RSC, has his doubts about Gary Taylor’s theory. (James I’s Danish queen, for one, might not have found Hamlet very flattering. And there’s documentary evidence Taylor’s overlooking.)

“The couple bought the historic movie house at 110 N. Main St. in 1995 with the idea of transforming it into a live-performance space. The next year, the couple encouraged their friends Rusty Wilson and Denise Simone to move their theater company from Richmond, Virginia, to Idaho to perform on the Liberty’s thrust stage. It was a successful arrangement for both parties based on an informal agreement about the building’s use.”

“Portraits of gay life in mainstream culture are no longer rare; they have been proliferating for decades. As a result, no one play (or movie) bears the burden of either seeming to affirm, or attempting to negate, stereotype. You might argue that it’s a sign of progress that these writers felt no compunction in writing about troubled, lonely gay characters. Nobody seeing any of these plays today would come away assuming it represented the sum total of gay men’s experience.”

“What happens during REM sleep if your daily routine involves assuming a new identity in front of hundreds of strangers for several hours? Even in small doses, does that repeated performance generate emotional muscle memory?” The answer is yes – Sandra Oh, Judith Light, Simon McBurney, and other actors share their examples.

It wasn’t only all-Hamilton-all-the-time, though that certainly leads the list. Among the other big news was the debut of BroadwayCon, the hit show stopped in its tracks by what should have been surprising good news, and the rise of Broadway’s next dynamic duo.

The Adams family (specifically, Abigail and John Quincy), like many of their day, saw the play as a tale of the dangers of race-mixing; white 19th-century Americans de-blacked the title role; Paul Robeson saw it as an indictment of white racism (and claimed the role for black actors ever afterward). “For more than 200 years, Americans have fought over Othello’s race as a way of fighting over the meanings of race itself.”

“Portraits of gay life in mainstream culture are no longer rare; they have been proliferating for decades. As a result, no one play (or movie) bears the burden of either seeming to affirm, or attempting to negate, stereotype.” Charles Isherwood looks at five shows presented in New York this year.

The autobiographical “Wishful Drinking,” which later went to Berkeley Rep, Broadway and HBO, got its start at the Geffen. That theatre’s artistic direector: ‘We found with ‘Wishful Drinking’ her appeal absolutely crossed all boundaries … men just love her, women absolutely love her, from young to old. She was just universally admired and loved and had such a unique brand of humor.’

“A stage is a dangerous and threatening environment, one in which chaos and calamity are never more than a protruding nail or a malfunctioning revolver away.” Actor Michael Simkins shares some of his favorite (if that’s the word) calamities.