Category: theatre

“A bright spot in the report indicates that the U.S. professional not-for-profit theatre field attracted an estimate of 38 million audience members to 180,000 performances of 21,000 productions in 2019, and more than one million Americans subscribed to a theatre season that year.” – American Theatre

“Madre Goose tells the story of an LGBTQ+ community of activists rallying against gentrification and materialism. All the wacky costumes, silly characters and daft jokes are as you’d expect from panto, but it has punk songs, psychedelic green-screen backgrounds and embraces inclusivity.” – The Guardian

In the letter, Dramatists Play Service says that the move was partly inspired by the challenges facing the theater business posed by coronavirus. It’s a public health crisis that has brought Broadway and other centers of the live events industry to their knees, dramatically reducing the fees that can be garnered for licensing plays and musicals to theater companies around the world. – Variety

Basically, because of all the plagues everyone had been through, says Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director Greg Doran. “There is a big change in tone in his later work. Academics have speculated that this was to do with political unrest and change, the wake of the gunpowder plot, but experiencing the pandemic this year has made it clearer to me what lies behind it. Shakespeare just could no longer write straightforward comedies, or give a happy ending to Lear.” – The Observer (UK)

“We launched in October, 2019 with 15 podcasts. And here we are, a little over a year later, with almost 100 podcasts. Since the beginning it was very much the plan to have podcasts and record plays, musicals, audio dramas, and soap operas. It was never to replace theater and we certainly never anticipated the pandemic. When you see a show, you want to know more. What is happening behind the curtain?” – Forbes

August Wilson’s prize-winning play includes heavy use of the N-word by its Black characters, and when Faith Fox found out that her 14-year-old’s class would be studying Fences, she protested to the school repeatedly. (“It wasn’t something that I thought was appropriate for a roomful of elite, affluent white children.”) She says her son was expelled in retaliation for her standing up for what’s right; the school says it was a “termination of enrollment” due to “bullying, harassment and … slanderous accusations towards the school itself” by Ms. Fox. – The New York Times

Everything is locked down in Paris, except for Mass. “The ritualistic nature of the event, the dramatic buildup from scene to scene — even the slightly labored monologues — are all part and parcel of regular theater attendance.” – The New York Times

The movie, which premiered on streaming December 11, is an ode to the power of Broadway. Its journey from stage to screen, though, “underscores the inequities underneath the surface of Hollywood’s shiny stage musical adaptations, which often leave the original cast members hanging — and render invisible the work they’ve done to make the production what it is in the process.”- Los Angeles Times