A day after news media picked up on social media criticism that only five of 15 cast members for a first concert reading of the work-in-progress, a stage adaptation of the hit 1998 animated film about Moses, were nonwhite, Dreamworks and the producing theater called off the event with no explanation.
Category: theatre
TKTS Half-Price Booth Sets Up At Lincoln Center (Where There Are Real New Yorkers)
“Beginning on Tuesday and continuing for three months, TKTS will sell tickets to Broadway and Off-Broadway productions from a box office inside [Lincoln Center’s] David Rubenstein Atrium … The Lincoln Center venture is an effort by TKTS, which sells predominantly to tourists, to see if it can increase the number of tickets sold to New Yorkers” (who tend to avoid the flagship TKTS location in Times Square).
Diversity-In-Casting Arguments Crop Up Again, This Time Over A Concert Performance
The project in question is the in-progress stage adaptation of the 1998 Dreamworks animated feature The Prince of Egypt, about the life of Moses. The script and score will get their first public reading in a free outdoor performance next month on Long Island, and a social media fracas broke out over the false impression that the cast for the reading is all-white. (In fact, five out of the 15 Equity performers currently engaged are nonwhite.)
Composer For Blue Man Group’s Early Shows Sues For $150M In Royalties
“[Ian] Pai, who helped compose many of the show’s wordless songs and served as the musical director for shows in several cities, … [is] asserting that he only recently learned that he’s been underpaid for decades for contributions integral to Blue Man’s success.”
New York’s Big Apple Circus To Fold Its Tent After Fundraising Falls Short
“Despite its reputation and position in the city’s cultural firmament, many New Yorkers never realized that … the Big Apple is a nonprofit institution. Begun … in the 1970s, the circus was founded with a Robin Hood spirit that some families would pay full price; those lacking the means would pay nothing.”
There’s A Fabulous Old Victorian Theatre Sitting Derelict In North London, And Now There’s A Plan To Reopen It
“The existence of the ‘frozen in time’ theatre is not widely known but it is considered one of the most architecturally significant and historic parts of the [Alexandra Palace] entertainment complex in north London, built in the 1870s as ‘the People’s Palace’.”
‘A Musical Whose Time Has Gone’: Three D.C. Critics Have At ‘Phantom Of The Opera’
Anne Midgette: “With its emphasis on spectacle and size, Phantom certainly reflects a particular era of musical theater: the stage equivalent of 1980s-style big hair.”
Philip Kennicott: “Phantom looks better today than it did when it was new … [it] seemed to me then as it does now a testament to the degradation of theatrical taste.”
Nelson Pressley: “Now I sort of like the kitsch.”
What Will The Internet Of Things Mean For Theatre?
“Performers, audiences, and spaces can influence and manipulate each other, and the input-output system. In the classic theatre—the technician over there is sitting in the dark and is not supposed to be seen. But they’re there and they’re everywhere. The interesting thing is the whole theatre space is rigged in a very hierarchical way. But the Internet of Things is modular, so the idea is that everybody in the room can potentially become the operator or performer of a given system.”
The Struggle Is Real: Theatre Artists With Disabilities Want To Find More Of A Place Onstage
“I think my community has been really excited. The response has been like, ‘It’s time!’ It’s 2016 and it’s time for us to be represented onstage and to be given these kinds of opportunities. I’ve received a lot of messages and letters from younger people with disabilities and they’re saying, ‘I never thought that Broadway is possible, but now it is.’ And that’s really exciting.”
If We Normalize Queer Theatre, What Happens To Its Meaning?
“I don’t understand how a battle for equal rights under law devolved into an unintentional shift toward behavioral sameness in our artistic representations and daily lives.”