Herbert Sigüenza, a founding member of the Chicano sketch company Culture Clash and playwright-in-residence at San Diego Rep (which premiered his latest script, Bad Hombres/Good Wives) talks to dramaturg Matthew McMahan about “the unique dynamics of bicultural comedy. He frames the comic writer as a type of diplomat whose plays yoke together divergent ideas, jokes, characters, and languages, while managing to get a diverse group of people to laugh at it all the same.” – HowlRound
Category: theatre
Woolly Mammoth Theatre’s New Leader Pushes To Be Artistic Leader In Fighting For Social Justice
To survive long-term, companies such as Woolly need to convince social-justice-minded, cash-challenged millennials to buy tickets. The crucial challenge: Can they do this without alienating a crowd who, liberal as they may be, might also be slower to get with the times? Or do you have to, in effect, fire one audience to lure the other? – Washingtonian
Closed Caption Glasses Extend The Audience Experience
The glasses are aimed at D/deaf audiences and offer personal captioning, flashing the production’s dialogue in front of the wearer’s eyes as the actors say it. They were developed by the NT and introduced in 2018, but will now be used at the London Short Film Festival for screenings of works by emerging directors, including Maxine Peake and Lena Headey. They will be used across four screens at the BFI Southbank. – The Stage
How Relaxed Performances Are Changing… Performance
Relaxed performance — an approach to performance that challenges what have developed as strict expectations and codes for audience and performer engagement and behaviour — is making theatre and other types of live performance like fashion shows and musical events more accessible. – The Conversation
The Problems With Translating Shakespeare Into Modern English, And How The Playwrights Who Did It Dealt With Them
Writer and dramaturg Loren Noveck was skeptical of the Play On Shakespeare project, and not because she’s a purist: “The Bard,” perhaps the paradigmatic Dead White Male, takes up so much space on stages, in season schedules, and in the minds of theatre folk that there’s not nearly enough room for newer voices dealing with contemporary issues. (Not to mention the now-abhorrent 17th-century attitudes in some of the plays.) But the playwrights tell Noveck that they were well aware of these questions, and they talk to her about their answers. – HowlRound
How Do You Translate A Standup Comedy Act From Another Language Into English? Ten Comedians Who Do It Explain
“Some grew up functionally bilingual, while others had to learn English from scratch. All overcame linguistic, cultural, and a variety of other hurdles to translate their acts for an English-speaking audience, which can potentially take their act from quiet clubs to packed theaters. They addressed a variety of topics, including the beauty of foreign accents, how American and British audiences are simultaneously more and less approachable, and why Germans aren’t exactly known for their sense of humor.” – Vulture
The Times Of London Appoints New Chief Theatre Critic
“[Clive] Davis has more than thirty years of journalism experience, and was a regular freelance writer for The Times and The Sunday Times covering music, radio, theatre, comedy, and contributing op-ed columns. His other work has appeared in The Independent, Daily Express, New Statesman and Weekly Standard.” – News UK
This Actor Finally Landed The Role He’d Been Waiting His Career For — But It Was In A Language He Didn’t Speak
What’s more, he triumphed, and in a production that ran for at least a year longer than anyone expected. The actor is Steven Skybell, who talks with Laura Collins-Hughes about playing Tevye in Joel Grey’s Yiddish staging of Fiddler on the Roof. – The New York Times
Was “Cats” Really So Bad? Guardian Critics Take A Second Look
“One tweet claimed Cats was so bad it must have been made by the dog lobby. As a lifelong cat lover, I don’t regard this film as an insult to cats. Yes, the production is over-CGI’d, but there is Rebel Wilson’s earthiness and James Corden’s comedy; both succeed in playing it for laughs.” – The Guardian
What The State Of London’s National Theatre Says About The UK
The questions facing the National Theatre reflect the broader themes of British politics right now: elitism, identity, diversity. In the half century since it was founded, the National has always commissioned plays that represent the “state of the nation,” tackling everything from the privatization of the railways to the Iraq War. “The National Theatre repertoire is a time capsule for the socioeconomic condition of Britain at any moment.” – The Atlantic