Category: theatre

“The production, from the Tooting Arts Club, originated in 2014 at Harrington’s Pie and Mash Shop in London, where audience members sat at tables … and [later] transferred to a cocktail lounge in the West End.” In New York, they’ll be using an actual Off-Broadway theater, though they’ll reproduce a pie shop inside.

“Hidden behind a gender- and race-neutral job description is an expectation, grounded in a stereotype, of what a theatre leader needs to look like: white and male, because white and male leaders have been the long-standing majority of those in top positions.”

“There is an artist of color who is not Latino being cast in a part of someone who is Latino, which I feel can be just as dangerous because to me, as a Latino, that’s saying ‘brown is brown.’ There’s white, and then there’s ‘the ethnics.'”

But the play he lied about sounds potentially amazing: “Mr. Scahill, the documents say, falsely claimed to have obtained the rights to the life story of the opera singer Kathleen Battle, aiming to produce a one-woman show, starring Ms. Nyong’o, about the day in 1994 when Ms. Battle was fired by the Metropolitan Opera.”

“Called Fringe Whistleblower, the site states it has become ‘dismayed at the state of the Edinburgh Fringe’ and claims many artists do not get paid. It adds that many venue staff ‘work in very difficult working, and sometimes unlawful, conditions’. It is now calling on people performing and working at the event to share their ‘stories of abuse’, which can be published anonymously on the site.”

“The nicest thing you can say to Hochi Asiatico is that his work looks like hell. That’s because Mr. Asiatico is one of a small number of Broadway distressors, artisans who make costumes look beautifully bad. … Here, in four relatively easy steps, is Mr. Asiatico’s guide to D.I.Y. distressing.”

Shona McCarthy, on whether she’s daunted by the pace of the Fringe’s growth: “I’m not intimidated, and continuous growth is not our primary objective. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe should be whatever size it needs to be to accommodate the artists from all continents who want to have a voice here, and the venues who want to host them.”

“Plays ask us to come together to engage with people and relationships presented just a few feet away — farther, if you have a balcony seat — while still allowing us the privacy that darkness confers. It offers community and anonymity at once. Additionally, a script or a streaming site won’t provide theater’s ephemerality, the sensation that each performance will never recur in exactly the same way.”

Brian Logan: “‘This is an American-style hour,’ says Ari Shaffir at the top of his Edinburgh festival show. ‘So there’s no theme and no crying.’ So is that the American style of comedy? … I’ve seen a handful of US acts this first week on the [Edinburgh] fringe, and it’s interesting to note the features that, to some degree, make them distinctive.”

“The secondary ticket market is an industry-wide plague, and one which we as producers take very seriously,” Friedman and Callender said in a statement. “Our priority is to protect all our customers and we are doing all we can to combat this issue.”