Category: theatre

Yes, that Disney spectacle was indeed The Lion King, and A Strange Loop‘s Michael R. Jackson spent years working as an usher for the runaway hit. He says, “Being an usher was pretty brutal, for me at least. You’re seeing Broadway patrons up close and personal eight shows a week. Anything can happen. There’s lots of vomit involved, and accidents, and spills, soda, and trash.” But hey, it inspired a musical that “has been thrilling New York audiences with its audacious update of the form.” – Slate

Tristan Baker and Oliver Royds first became business partners in 2015, when they designed and built the pop-up theatre in London that housed Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female Shakespeare trilogy and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights. “Out of that experience came Troubadour Theatres, their new company … [which has] developed a reusable, modular construction kit that can turn an empty site into a huge temporary auditorium in 12 weeks.” – The Stage

In George Brant’s solo play Tender Age, actor Carlo Albán (whose parents brought him from Ecuador to the U.S. as a child) plays a Latino Texan who takes a job as a guard in a Brownsville Walmart-turned-detention center for children who’ve fled Central America. Peter Marks travels to the O’Neill Theater Center to see the play in development. – The Washington Post

“[The 77-year-old ex-Beatle] will write music and lyrics for the project. Lee Hall, author of Billy Elliot and screenwriter for the recent Elton John biopic Rocketman, is also writing lyrics and the show’s book.” – The Guardian

“Why would anybody want to go? It’s inarguably among the most prestigious collections of stage actors in the world and yet membership comes with no formal minimum participation requirement. … However, two sources close to Steppenwolf said that there was no love lost between the actress and the current artistic administration, although Plimpton had wanted to keep her action as private as possible.” – Chicago Tribune

“In a comedy club, you can go nuts and go off and be funny, but you can’t really get emotional, you know? The crowd is there to get in a rhythm of set-ups-and-jokes with you. They don’t really care about stories — stories that last a whole show, I mean. In a theater, though, jokes are not enough. You better have a story, you better have a point. I loved the energy and immediacy of comedy clubs. You can see why it’s so addictive. But you get to a theater, people don’t let you slide.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer

“[The worrisome development is] the recent decision of leading Scottish newspapers and magazines to slash their coverage of the festival in half. Coupled with the dwindling size of the annual contingent of London critics, the threat to the ecology of the festival is real.” – The Observer (UK)

Performers from multiple Broadway shows gave impromptu renditions to crowds along the streets outside the theaters when the power went out in Manhattan Friday night just before shows were about to start. – Washington Post

When a team decided to adapt Sue Monk Kidd’s 2002 book The Secret Life of Bees into a 2019 musical, and the only African American person on the production team was playwright Lynn Nottage, well, they knew they had some discussions ahead of them. Nottage says, “What makes this very different from those other stories [like The Help or Green Book], is that this white girl enters into a black space, and she has to negotiate a space that’s alien to her, rather than the black body entering the white space.” – NPR