Vulture joined five of the cast for dinner at Sardi’s as “they discussed how the show changes every night, the quiet importance of director Thomas Kail, how they landed on their takes on these American icons, and when they think they will be ready to leave their parts.”
Category: theatre
Will It Make A Difference If I Submit Scripts Under A Man’s Name?
“What if I was a Jordan or a Morgan? Or what if I was an unfamiliar foreign name, like Sizwe or Hideyoshi? Would I have been more successful if my gender was uncertain? Or better yet—would I have been more successful if people straight-up thought I was a dude?”
When You Want To Be Transgressive But You Also Want People To Like You
“If you look at American pop culture, the only well-loved book where a married mom commits infidelity is ‘The Bridges of Madison County’ — and it begins when she’s several decades dead, conveniently dead, and she did it for four days and then went back to her marriage. The guy wrote her these letters, and she just returned them. Why? Leave the farm! No one cares! The kids are up and out, your husband is into weighing heifers. Go to Spain, order off the tapas menu!”
A Military Curfew Killed Theatre In Ghana In The 1980s, But It’s Coming Back (At Last)
“After the curfew was lifted, ‘nightclubs came back, discos came back, but theater did not come back, because we had lost most of the human resource to the new emerging video production market. So we didn’t have the theater anymore. Commercial theater was missing.'”
Why Do Theatre? Ask These People
“‘I’m trying to share this story,’ she says. ‘I’m trying to leave something in the minds and hearts of people who will carry it. And it’s something I can only do through art.'”
Does Theatre Need To Have Some Clarity, Or Is Hanging Out, Confused But Together, Cool?
“We were ushered into the New Ohio Theatre, where the seats had been replaced by red felt mats, and we lay down for an hour, while the sun (or moon) before us turned from red to orange to silver to white and back again, and the sound track offered the sound of crickets, and waves, and the occasional folk song, and perhaps the distant yelps of a dingo. It was a lovely rest period, more pleasant and certainly longer than any I spent in kindergarten.”
Immersive Interactive Theatre Is Taking Over. What’s A Passive Person To Do?
“So I am not the natural ticket buyer for the immersive and participatory theater that is taking hold in the city as art forms bleed together, companies experiment with different storytelling approaches, and people clamor for more active artistic experiences. Is the passive audience dead (in more ways than one), you begin to wonder?”
The Mystic, The Monk And The Play Brought To You By Powerball
“It sounds like the setup for some kind of droll joke: A lottery winner and a rhinoceros arrive at the birthday party for a dead mystic. Art, and a blowout brawl, ensues. An unusual stew of ingredients, some onstage and some off, has resulted in this strange spectacle’s move from Kentucky to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.”
Pasadena Playhouse Artistic Director To Step Down
Sheldon Epps, who departs at the end of next season, “helped Pasadena Playhouse to become one of the most prominent regional theaters while making strides toward diversifying the shows it mounted and the people who came to see them.”
Off-Broadway Powerhouse Signature Theatre Hires New Artistic Director From Lincoln Center
“Signature Theatre has settled on a successor to founding artistic director James Houghton, who will step down in June after 25 years. Effective July 1, Paige Evans will take on the new role … after guiding Lincoln Center Theater’s emerging artists program, LCT3, since its inception in 2008.”