Category: theatre

“Under the agreement, which is tentatively scheduled to last until Dec. 31, 2021, the two unions agreed that Equity will cover work recorded for digital distribution that replaces, or supplements, a live audience.” But, by god, it had better be as close as possible to a live, in-person performance: SAG-AFTRA has put some very specific restrictions on what qualifies. – The New York Times

“Complaints by staff members and months of internal conflict have led to the ouster of Mosaic Theater Company Artistic Director Ari Roth. … The end to Roth’s tenure at the company he set up in the final days of 2014 is a bitter close to what had seemed a successful revitalization of his career as a theater leader in Washington. Just before creating Mosaic, in December 2014, Roth was fired as artistic director of Theater J, the company he ran for 18 years as part of the DC Jewish Community Center.” – The Washington Post

“I shouldn’t have been so surprised. Art has played a major role in bringing this once poor and isolated country into the international arena, and the government subsidizes culture in a big way. That’s why artists continue to be employed — and why, even though socially distanced performances will never cover their costs, companies in Finland are putting them on, secure in the knowledge they have a financial cushion.” – The New York Times

Reading Michael Riedel has long been mandatory for theater insiders. They may complain about his journalistic practices, his tendency to sensationalize and distort, his refusal to let a fair review of the facts get in the way of a good scoop, his speculative and often erroneous conclusions. But his copy is sinfully entertaining, full of dish and drama and delivered with the wicked wit Broadway pros can’t help but admire. – Los Angeles Times

The musical, which was to be one of the centerpieces of the Sydney Festival in January, was postponed and withdrawn from the festival by the producer after a trans non-binary actor launched a social media campaign saying the casting of Hugh Sheridan in the title role “is offensive and damaging to the trans community.” (John Cameron Mitchell, who created and co-wrote the show and originated the part, has said that Hedwig is not a trans character and can be played by anyone.) – The Guardian

Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me has become “the grandmother of [a] genre” that includes, just this fall, Kristina Wong for Public Office (about Wong’s run for a local commission in Los Angeles), Lessons in Survival (actors repeating, complete with pauses and tics, observations of prominent Black Americans about society), Denis O’Hare’s What the Hell Is a Republic, Anyway? (using the history of the Roman Republic to examine the American one), and Melissa Dunphy’s The Gonzales Cantata (an oratorio setting the 2007 testimony of George W. Bush’s Attorney General before the Senate Judiciary Committee). Jesse Green looks at these pieces and considers “what it means for performers to take public policy as their script at a time when policymakers seem to be taking public performance as theirs.” – The New York Times

This year, the number of work weeks has plummeted by 65 percent to about 92,000 — including nearly three months of normal work before the shutdown.  The lack of work weeks is pushing somewhere between 200 and 300 union members off their health insurance a month, Actors’ Equity told CNBC. – CNBC

It became evident to me that companies that had a strong relationship with their audience base before the pandemic had seen continued support. Theatres like Cape Fear Regional Theatre, which specializes in “edutainment” (a combination of performance and education), received an outpouring of verbal support from parents who were overjoyed that their child could go to a sanitized and physically distanced afterschool environment and have a sense of normalcy. – HowlRound