Lance Gardner, who'd given "rock-star performances" in a huge variety of roles, gave up acting in 2019 to become live events producer for public radio/tv outlet KQED. Now he's the new artistic director at the Marin Theatre Company. - MSN (San Francisco Chronicle)
Drama school leaders are at the sharp end: the issues experienced by the wider theatre sector often land first in drama schools, in raw, unfiltered and unrehearsed and powerful form. - The Stage
"(Stereophonic) unfolds in a recording studio, where a rock band’s protracted work on an album straddles a year from 1976-77. 'It really is like the process and the play are blurring because these people are in a studio forever (and so have we)." - The New York Times
“An average audience-goer saw 40 or 50 shows or other cultural arts experiences over the course of a year, prior to 2020, going weekly to a play or museum or dance production each week. We sensed that change fundamentally." - Chicago Sun-Times
"On the one hand, there’s never been more of it — more specials, podcasts, comedy-generated discussions and debate and cultural flare-ups. … On the other hand, comedy, like everything else, is in bits. Online, it has shattered into memes and trolls and culture warlords and goats singing Bon Jovi." - MSN (The Atlantic)
A financial review shows that the festival gets up to 80 percent of its budget from ticket sales - a high number that puts the 88-year-old repertory company at risk. - Oregon Business
"Approximately eight times a week, 40 weeks a year, Broadway-sized crowds watch (the musical) Queen Esther in a town of 12,000 people in the Ozark Mountains." Theater/dance historian Joanna Dee Das writes that this success isn't about dumbing down — there are key factors here that big-city theaters are neglecting. - The Conversation
“We’re all trying to figure out what it is that makes people get off their couch, come through the rain and show up at an event together, right? It feels like there needs to be some real magnetic attraction, something that they will truly miss if they don’t see it. - Seattle Times
"I ask myself whether, as so many theater companies grapple with ongoing pandemic-related challenges, I should reconceive my role. What ought arts criticism look like when the art can feel like it’s barely hanging on?" - San Francisco Chronicle
Intentionally or not, the stage version of the polymorphously perverse cult classic, produced by North Texas's flagship theater company, has become a standard-bearer of opposition to the state law S.B. 12, which regulates any performance that "appeals to the prurient interest in sex." - MSN (The Washington Post)
Thomas Schumacher, who is 65 and currently holds the titles of president and producer of Disney Theatrical Group, told his staff on Thursday morning that he will take on a new role as the division’s chief creative officer. - The New York Times
Activists with the British group Just Stop Oil, which started the climate-protesting art-vandalism trend, disrupted a West End performance of Les Misérables during (of course) the anthem "Do You Hear The People Sing?" Then they padlocked themselves to the scenery and the performance was ended. - BBC
On Monday, the Latino Theater Company announced $9 million in grants to 52 Latino theaters in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Santa Fe, N.M., Denver, Providence, R.I., and St. Paul, Minn. - Los Angeles Times
