Category: theatre

“After years of making use of elaborate renderings on one New York soundstage, NBC is taking a cue from Fox’s recent production of “Grease: Live!” and, for the first time, is staging the production in Los Angeles including a live studio audience and will mount some of the production outside.”

Frustrated, like so many others, by lack of opportunity, the Asian American Performers Action Coalition decided to get the real stats on Broadway diversity. The results probably won’t surprise you.

What’s more, he’s the author of the play that became the Oscar contender Moonlight – Tarell Alvin McCraney, who himself graduated from Yale’s program just a decade ago.

“Since the Belgian ex-director of London’s Tate Modern, Chris Dercon, was announced as the successor of the Volksbühne’s veteran director Frank Castorf in spring 2015, staff have been in open revolt.” Part of the reason seems to be concern for the theater’s prop and scenery shop, which does some genuinely extraordinary work. But that concern may be based on a simple miscommunication.

“I would argue that the key to diversity should be addressed at the very top: commercial theatre. It has a responsibility to showcase BAME performers in leading roles in order to show the merits of, and then to offer, diverse casting in mainstream productions.”

The report covers theatre across the board. It says “musical theatre has challenged the monoculture”, with successful productions such as Motown the Musical, “but the success of these shows has bred another problem. The failure of drama schools to take in enough BAME talent has led to a shortage of actors suitable for the roles and, as a result, touring productions have been cancelled”.

Even though Strayed hasn’t written “Dear Sugar” for years, people still ask her questions – one in particular right now being focused on a certain president-elect. Strayed: “I don’t have a crystal ball. … I think sometimes people ask questions not because they even believe there’s an answer but because they want to be heard.”

Thomas Ostermeier has returned again and again to plays that strip the nationalist far right of its masks and pretenses, and he and his theatre have been sued and threatened for it. Why does he do it? “Because, he says, he’s ‘interested in truth.'”

Howard Sherman tracks down the actor playing “Mike Hot-Pence” – and raising money for Planned Parenthood – in Times Square: “I decided to have some fun with it and dress as ‘Sexy Mike Pence.’ Once I decided on jacket and tie for the top half and short shorts for the bottom half, the ‘Hot-Pence’ moniker popped into my head.”

“We tell stories. As directors, we stand beside speakers with narratives other than our own and ask them to tell us what they see so we can build a telling of that narrative with sufficient doors and windows for an audience of wild multiplicity to all walk inside a shared moment of human condition. Samuel Johnson said that the human mind, once expanded by a new idea, does not retract to its original size. Nor, I think, does the heart. And all I know to do right now is the work of expanding the heart.”