Category: theatre

These two guys met as undergrads and wrote the now infamous song “Edges” (the one musical theatre majors sing for every audition). Now they have a potential big hit on Broadway, the festival-awards-sweeping movie “La La Land” (starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, no big), and are – aside from a certain guy known as Lin-Manuel Miranda – “the future of the musical, on stage or screen.”

“Why Noh? Why now?  No (Noh) why. Noh is indirect drama, better suited for posing questions than, like Ibsen or Arthur Miller, positing answers. If we did know why, we wouldn’t need Noh, and clearly, we do.”

“Actors who have done the part report it to be one of the hardest (if not zaniest) challenges of their career. Here’s a look at several of them, plus insight from puppet designers on what inspired their own Tyrones. Simple answer: It wasn’t all Elmo.”

“As a technology university that has never had a drama or dance department, the University of Bradford seems like a weird old place to host one of the country’s first professional practice venues. But when the university was formed, the incoming senior management appointed fellowships in theatre and music, believing that engaging with art and culture was an intrinsic part of any education, technical or otherwise.” (Those were the days, eh?)

“A playwright in his mid-30s wants to pen an epic tale of ambition, authority, and power. He turns to his nation’s history, to characters familiar to his audience from school and legend. He performs a kind of magic trick.” Hamilton or Henry IV, Part One? Both, of course – and they have more than that in common.

Kristen Anderson-Lopez on In Transit: “When we started this a lot of people didn’t know what a cappella was. For advertising in the Off-Broadway version, we called it ‘vocal orchestration,’ because a cappella was this weird Latin term that the marketing team was afraid would alienate people. Now our tagline is ‘Broadway’s first a cappella musical.’ The culture’s awareness and understanding of a cappella, and all the things a cappella can do, has changed. It’s not just a bunch of old guys singing ‘Blue skies smilin’ at me!'”

“It is unlikely that the country will turn to the performing arts to guide its gun policy, but it could do a lot worse. The stage and screen are the places where the balance of freedom of expression and scrupulous attention to safety have been achieved. If only this were true on our streets and college campuses.”

It’s a 240-seat venue and it’s dismantleable. “It’s going to cost somebody a bit to move it but it’s a very good opportunity for a new company or a school, or somebody like that, provided they’ve got a suitable space to put it in,”

“I don’t know what ‘being faithful to a text’ means. There’s not one truth. As a director or actor, you have to give an interpretation of a line. I get 10 different people to say ‘I love you’ – three words, an objective truth – and yet each time it is spoken it is different. I’m known for my preparation. For actors, this is not a threat, it is freedom.”

“Cash-strapped Mad Cow Theatre must pay actors and others owed money by Dec. 1 if it wants to receive a $75,000 grant from Orange County. … The council’s recommendation also requires the downtown Orlando theater to explain how it plans to deal with its long-term debt.”