It's not easy for a woman in comedy, and that's doubly true for a Black woman. Ask Ziwe (who now has a series on Netflix). "You really have to create for yourself and create in that vacuum because you’re not going to get the instant gratification and validation." - Variety
I can report that once the rest of us were inside — 25 or so socially distanced in a black box theater that normally seats up to 99 — the evening unfolded exuberantly. It was the first of three live theatrical events I attended over the weekend, the first time in a year my schedule resembled something like the...
"Just as Asian shows are seen as exotic oddities rather than universal, Asian American theatres aren’t considered national theatres by funders, even though it is companies like Ma-Yi, Theater Mu, and East West Players that have historically nurtured Asian American artists when white theatres would not work with them, and told Asian American stories before there was a financial...
Los Angeles sound designer and playwright Howard Ho — the boyfriend of actress Jully Lee, who was the subject of the dumb mistake at LASA's Ovation Awards — writes that the last thing he and Lee expected was for the organization to shut itself down (they initially laughed off the mistake, which wasn't even the only error that night,...
The line of people he came to greet waiting to see the first performance of Blindness at the Daryl Roth Theatre off Union Square was collectively, properly masked, but still a line, still packed closely together, reminding this critic that whatever measures being taken inside theaters, the line outside a theater right now remains just as it always was—an...
That's how one scholar summarizes the theory that the plays of William Shakespeare were written, yes, by the glover's son from Stratford-upon-Avon — but adapted from scripts and prose works by the courtier and Latin translator Sir Thomas North. Here's a look at the evidence. - Smithsonian Magazine
"The Kimmel Center is instituting a mandatory $1,000 donation for access to the best seats in its Broadway series. That's $1,000 up front, before the cost of the tickets themselves. The new policy goes into effect now for new subscribers and in the 2022-23 season for existing ones." - The Philadelphia Inquirer
"The American theatre is a very slow-moving ship, especially when I think about how quickly culture moves, and particularly now that we are in what’s called the digital age. It’s not just in the way we consume work, but also what the work is. And I think that’s a major, major issue. It’s part of the reason why we...
Last week, more than 25 Los Angeles area theater companies, including the Geffen Playhouse, the Pasadena Playhouse and the Deaf West Theatre, revoked their memberships in the Alliance after the nonprofit organization misidentified and mispronounced the name of Asian actress Jully Lee at an awards show earlier this week. - Deadline
OK, we'll be honest, not a musical. A play. Or two? Seven? Hm. However, why Game of Thrones? "It was an epic, at times beautiful, show and all these attempts to reanimate its corpse can feel like a cheapening of the original experience. But there’s something else: Why not host a stage production from literally any other author or...
Just ask these stand-up comedians, who have been doing sets on trains for months. There are tickets, but then there are also random subway riders. And is it official? Hm. "The show had the chaotic air of something that could get shut down at any moment by a strict police officer who was not in the mood for a...
The pop-up event, where Nathan Lane and Savion Glover performed (one at a time) "before a masked audience of 150 scattered across an auditorium with 1,700 seats, was the first such experiment since the coronavirus pandemic caused all 41 Broadway houses to close on March 12, 2020, and industry leaders are hoping it will be a promising step on...
The list of things that went wrong at the Ovation Awards is too long to list - though the venerable East West Players did on social media - but the result of mispronouncing an Asian American actor's name, posting the picture of a different Asian American actor to identify the first actor, and much, much more, is clear. "The...
Sort of. "Still, how these works fare on practical levels — such as WiFi reliability and technical mastery of a visual medium — reveals the Internet as bumpy terrain for a field that breathes more naturally in shared public air." - Washington Post
"More than 25 Los Angeles area theater companies, including the Geffen Playhouse, the Pasadena Playhouse and the Deaf West Theatre, have revoked their memberships in the L.A. Stage Alliance after the nonprofit organization misidentified and mispronounced the name of Asian actress Jully Lee at an awards show earlier this week." - Deadline
