But these aren’t just any TikTokkers. “Thousands of TikTok users, including many with Broadway credits, have paid homage to the 2007 Disney Pixar film, about a rat who dreams of becoming a French chef, by creating their own songs, dances, makeup looks, set designs, puppets and Playbill programs.” And Disney is apparently paying attention as well, according to its Tweets and its own TikTok contributions. – The New York Times
Category: theatre
When ‘The Last Gasp’ Isn’t The Final Breath For A 40-Year-Old Theatre Company
The 76- and 71-year-old women who founded and run Split Britches were in London when COVID-19 hit New York hard, so they didn’t come back for a while – but where to stay, and how to make the new work they were supposedly putting up at La MaMa in April and the Barbican in June? And where to stay in London? Enter an empty house with running water, electricity and one chair. – The New York Times
Theatres Are Saving A Christmas Carol
Did … did it need saving? Well, perhaps the theatres do; it’s been such a large money maker for theatres in the U.S. for, well, many years. Now, as the holiday season kicks into high gear, theatres “are using every contagion-reduction strategy they have honed during the coronavirus pandemic: outdoor stagings, drive-in productions, street theater, streaming video, radio plays and even a do-it-yourself kit sent by mail.” – The New York Times
More Details Emerge About Why Mosaic Theatre Company Kicked Out Its Founding Artistic Director
Ari Roth was fired from Theatre J after 18 years as an AD, and so he quickly founded his own company – Mosaic. Recently, he resigned under pressure from Mosaic. Why? A liaison with Equity says he is living with an older definition of an AD as someone who can treat staff and others badly, as long as his vision is great: “His defense is that the role of the artistic director has changed. … But everything changes. Everything evolves. We just happen to be living in a time where this imaginary rule that an artistic director’s actions will be tolerated by the people below — that rule no longer exists.” – The New York Times
Theatres Are Becoming Media Companies
As the theater’s biggest commercial motor, Broadway, has languished, resourceful artists and producers are making work that incorporates video, gaming and interactivity into hybridized digital-theater forms that, rather than serving as mere stopgaps, stand poised to endure even after the return of theater as we knew it. – Variety
How Theatre Producers Cope With England’s Ever-Changing COVID Restrictions
“This month, theatre reopenings in England were abruptly brought to a halt by the second lockdown. As the future of live performance remains uncertain, producers and those running venues explain their strategies for programming with maximum flexibility.” – The Stage
‘The Inheritance’ Playwright To Pen Major Biopic Of Tennessee Williams
Matthew López has been engaged by Searchlight Pictures to write a screen adaptation of Leading Men, the Christopher Castellani novel about Williams and his longtime lover Frank Merlo. López’s The Inheritance won four Olivier Awards in London in 2019 and garnered eleven Tony nominations this year. – Variety
Christmas Panto In The Pandemic
It seems you can’t keep England’s antic, anarchic holiday tradition down, even as disease stalks the land. Chris Wiegand talks to producers who are putting their pantos on film and in car parks. – The Guardian
Black Theatre Needs More Than Just Different Playwrights
The form must also meet the content, say critics and scholars. They discuss “an under-theorized element of the discussion on Black theatre: its form. Oftentimes, Black theatre is relegated to conversations that focus solely on its content, obscuring the ways that Black artists have revolutionized the way theatre is written, devised and performed.” Artists like Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Tarell Alvin McCraney show the possibilities and the joy. – HowlRound
Creating A Campus Play When That Play Is ‘Spring Awakening’ And There’s A Pandemic On
Says a former theatre student of Baldwin Wallace University’s Victoria Bussert, “Theatres have shut down everywhere, and this woman is just like, ‘Fuck that! We’re doing a play, we’re doing theatre. Give me hoops—I will jump through them, but I will make it work.'” – American Theatre