Playwright Sarah Ruhl: "To ask 'How are you?' no longer felt like small talk. We relied on our eyes above our masks to make connections. … If actors have always been avatars for what we cannot express, they seemed even more so now." - The New York Times
The hip, fannish crowd is almost the same as it was at shutdown, with a large fillip of relief joining the giddy thrills. "The color pours down your eye holes right into your serotonin receptors — all that warmth without heat triggers something deep in your lizard brain." - Vulture
"After only one show, Aladdin was paused again because COVID-19 cases were detected within the company." Testing allowed the show to resume for one more performance before multiple new positive tests led to a two-week shutdown. - CBS
Says Tiago Rodrigues, who's coming to Avignon from Portugal's Teatro Nacional, "I really love to see what happens to a play when you did it in one language, and then you do it in another. … I've visited a lot of embassies in Portugal." - The New York Times
Emerging from its forced hibernation for live performance, theater appears to be in trouble, so our compassionate reviewers/publicists/reporters feel duty bound to come to the rescue. The rah-rah is uninhibited: troupes must be supported... - Arts Fuse
"The broadened Directors Project will offer fellowships for early-stage directors, programs to help mid-career theater directors transition into film and television, and assistantships for young BIPOC creatives to shadow established BIPOC directors." - Variety
"I always say the pandemic was the universe telling everyone to go to their room and think about what they’ve done. And while we’ve been in this season, it’s gifted—at least for me, it’s gifted me the opportunity to truly reflect on the why I wanted to do this in the first place." -NonProfit Quarterly
"Even before COVID-19, many ambitious productions had been taking place … in elaborately engineered glass cubes that evoke high Modernism. … There wouldn't seem to be a more flagrant violation of dramatic immediacy. And yet the design is, as of late, ubiquitous." - T — The New York Times Style Magazine
Helen Shaw: "Looking back while looking forward was the impossible job of this year's (ceremony). Instead of razzle-dazzling us, the host Audra McDonald (and, in the second half, Leslie Odom Jr.) had the job of surveying the pandemic wreckage, all of it still piling up." - Vulture
What you had all night was a temporal mash-up: Broadway’s past jockeying for space with Broadway’s future — a future that at the moment looks frightfully uncertain. - Washington Post
Playwright Jeremy Harris tweeted that the play had a massive impact anyway. He added, "I told my mom this was gonna happen this morning bc we knew who these folx were when we put the play on stage in nyc." - The Hollywood Reporter
The producers apologized and said they had "hired a new dramaturgical team (which includes nonbinary, transgender and BIPOC representation), to revisit and deepen the script" before the musical reopens on Broadway. - The New York Times
