Category: theatre

The designers didn’t want an audience probably well-steeped in the Harry Potter movies to be either disappointed or blasé. In the two-part play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, “the result is a spectacle that relies much more on human-powered magic than special effects trickery.” – NPR

Everyone from Harvey Fierstein to Chita Rivera has something to say about the man who deeply understood his craft. Betty Buckley, who played Dolly Levi in the 2018-19 national revival tour of Hello, Dolly!, said, “The lesson for me in doing the show — and I owe him a debt of appreciation — was that joy is a choice. It’s not something you wait to happen to you. You choose it, and you work really hard to sustain that commitment.” – The New York Times

Even as the topical revue heads toward its final performance on New Year’s Eve, it still gets tweaked to reflect current news. (Donald Trump’s angry tweet at Greta Thunberg — he said she needed to work on anger management — made it into the script in a matter of hours.) Jo Schuman Silver, widow of Babylon creator Steve Silver, has been producing the show on her own since his death in 1995, and she gets a profile here from reporter Tony Bravo. – San Francisco Chronicle

Humor is about connection—shared references, shared emotions, shared perspectives. The best comedians both surprise and unite the audience. They create a moment. But moments keep coming. Over time, attitudes change, and humor has to change with them. When older comedians complain that they can’t perform at colleges anymore because the audiences are too “politically correct,” they are missing the point. – The New Yorker

“At the top schools, administrators are fielding recruiting calls from television producers and managers, adding TV classes, and competing with high-paying shows for writers they can hire as adjuncts. While these programs say they don’t want their students to leave theater altogether, TV offers them a way to make a real living, the kind of financial stability that has ramifications not just for individual artists, but for the programs themselves.” – The New York Times

In all of academia, not only theatre, women who teach become support for students rather than only academic help – and it’s burning the women out. One recent Ph.D. discovered that she could solve some of that burnout with the help of … a giant stuffed Pokémon character. – HowlRound

Just like Young Adult literature, YA theatre – or Teen theatre, perhaps – had an initially rapturous welcome, and a rapid cooling-off. “Critical consensus about Young Adult Theatre took a sharp turn when the subgenre became solidified, popularized, and canonized with the viral teen hit Be More Chill. Joe Iconis’s musical, which made it to Broadway thanks to a huge, enthusiastic teenage fanbase online, received vitriol from many critics who called it loud, hollow, and vapid.” – American Theatre

Students responded not only to one incident, in which the lecturer for the class was removed, but many other experiences at the college: “Some of the quotes and scenarios on the board read: ‘White male faculty member to a black female student: ‘Act more sassy,’’ ‘Holding a meeting about microaggressions where a student of color was told to stop being mean to white people,’ ‘Male director explaining to a female student what happens emotionally to a woman when she is assaulted’ and ‘Female-identifying students told to lower the pitch of their natural voices in production to ‘sound stronger.’'” – The Ithacan

“Theater people resent “Cats” not just because it made Broadway uncool until “Hamilton” finally rescued it from the pop cultural stocks. What really infuriates buffs is that “Cats” ushered in an era of grandiose spectacle, the vacuous parade of shows from the 1980s and early ’90s that made it seem as if a musical had to have a helicopter or a crashing chandelier to be worth the rapidly rising ticket price.” – Los Angeles Times