Category: theatre

A virtual reality piece released last October seemed like a wild, enjoyable experiment at the time. But now, the piece (which, not incidentally, is keeping at least 18 actors employed) “shows one potential way forward, a future where the worlds of home technology and theater coalesce to build not just fresh experiences but carve out new business models.” – Los Angeles Times

Please immediately click on this link. Just do. – The Hollywood Reporter

Yes, 50 is a lot, but we’re already in week *checks notes* a zillion of this lockdown and no live theatre, so might as well get started, right? – The Stage (UK)

“It’s a mad idea.” Indeed: 50 writers and 50 actors have a virtual mandate. “For Abbey dramaturg Louise Stephens, who works with writers on developing scripts for stage, 100 artists was ‘such an enormous number of people as to be almost impossible. But that’s also what’s great about it.'” – Irish Times

Basically, the National Theatre has better camerawork than most theatres trying to do broadcasts – and that creates intimacy, the kind of intimacy you might otherwise find only at a life performance. “Partly it’s that the productions are terrific, and wildly varied in style. And partly it’s that the intimate camerawork makes you feel like a collaborator in distinctly theatrical effects. When a callous aunt took the bundle of rags that stood for baby Jane Eyre and violently shook it out, revealing the dress that the actor playing Jane donned to assume her role, I gasped.” – The Atlantic

Though the troupe has cut back on performances, it’s still going (Japan has encouraged people to stay home, but hasn’t shut down places like theatres – at the time of writing this post): “Gekidan Miyama has been entertaining audiences for over a century, persisting, as Nakamura says, through earthquakes and typhoons, but also managing to come back after a world war.” Can it, will it, survive Covid-19? – Japan Times

“I’m not going to say this new online platform replaces theatre, I just think that temporarily it is a really interesting form of storytelling.” – American Theatre

Turns out not even the people involved agree on the answer to that. Absolutely not, says Ryan Rilette, artistic director of metro DC’s Round House (the theater behind the project): “You can’t actually capture the quality of being with a group of people, breathing the same air, listening to a story together.” But playwright Alexandra Petri (yes, the Washington Post columnist), who wrote the first episode, says that “[it’s] fundamentally a 10-minute play, but it happens to be set inside your computer.” – The New York Times

“With no clear indication when the theater might be deemed safe to reopen, [managing director Amy] Wratchford and her remaining team (all on half or quarter salary) have written contingency operating plans, only to have to crumple them up and formulate new ones. … [The company is] converting its ticket-buying lists into class lists and turning some of what’s executed on its modern-day Renaissance stage into teachable moments online.” – The Washington Post