“Stephen C. Byrd and Alia Jones-Harvey are out to change the game on Broadway. The only black lead producers in that space, the pair runs a company, Front Row Productions, which has as its explicit goal to diversify the Great White Way. Among their credits: They brought Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed to Broadway last season and are currently working to bring both The Wiz and Black Orpheus to Broadway.”
Category: theatre
It Took 30 Years To Get ‘Dreamgirls’ To The West End, Says Producer
Sonia Friedman: “And so for years and years, many great producers have tried and been thwarted. I just kept persisting, and anyone who knows me knows I don’t give up. I just kept trying to get the rights. I tried so many times and failed.”
When I Started My Own Theater Company At Age Eight
Actor Finn Whitrock writes about the summers he spent with his parents at Shakespeare & Company in Massachusetts, and his he and his friends “would arrange five or six scenes from Shakespeare, rehearse them on our own time in the sun-drenched Berkshire afternoons and perform them for the adult company after one of their Mainstage shows.”
Meet The First Woman Head Carpenter Of New York’s Backstage Workers’ Union
Jennifer Diaz, 34, “has made history, becoming the first female head carpenter of Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. The local’s 3,351 members work in spaces from the Met to Carnegie Hall, at Radio City Music Hall and Madison Square Garden, and in every Broadway theater – including the Walter Kerr, which is where she was one morning in September, overseeing the load-in for the musical Falsettos.”
Cameron Mackintosh: Weakened Pound Sterling Is Boosting West End Theatre Ticket Sales
He highlighted how surprised he was to see so many people in the West End on a Monday night, and added: “It’s the best September I can remember across my theatres.”
Report: Streaming Theatre Performances Don’t Threaten Live Audience Attendance
“Of 243 companies surveyed, 38% said the advent of live-to-digital has had a positive impact, compared with only 13% who said it had had a negative impact. In fact, an audience preference for live shows over the recorded alternative was found to be the biggest barrier to attendance of theatre broadcasts at cinemas. Just over half of those surveyed said their preference for live theatre put them off event cinema.”
Putting Real Fire And Rain Onstage With Your Own Homemade Machine
Theatrical devices that can provide both a steady stream of rain and actual fire are expensive to rent, let alone buy. So the Wilma Theater’s crew designed and built one themselves.
Theatre Festival Bars Audience From Play; Audience Shows Up Anyway And Demands, Politely, To Be Let In
“Hours before the performance Sunday night, the MESS festival announced it would allow only the festival jury to see “Our Violence and Your Violence” by Croatian director Oliver Frljić, an award-winning director whose provocative plays often criticize nationalism and spark protests. The play, which has a fairly abstract plot, contains scenes of nudity and rape.” But the ticketholders weren’t having it.
Yale Rep Celebrates 50 Years – As Its Founder Worries
“Leave it to Robert Brustein, the outspoken founding director of Yale Repertory Theater, to raise tough questions at a celebration of the theater’s 50th anniversary this weekend. … At a celebratory banquet, he worried out loud about whether nonprofit theaters like Yale’s were straying from their original mission.”
London Doesn’t Need Any More Theatres, So Stop Building Them
Mark Shenton: “I saw it argued on Twitter that, with London’s ever-expanding population, there’s a need to expand theatrical provision to meet the possible demand; but we’re nowhere near reaching capacity on the venues we already have. And surely the more venues there are, the more it will dissipate the existing audience. … I suspect a lot of the new theatre ‘builds’ (conversions of pop-ups) are driven by something else.”