"Steppenwolf Theatre Company, one of Chicago's most storied arts institutions and long a crucial part of the city's identity, said Thursday that it was laying off 12% of its staff, effective immediately." - MSN (Chicago Tribune)
Zachary Noah Piser, a Chinese-American actor, was to play the lead in Tiananmen: A New Musical when it debuts in Phoenix in October. The cast announcement was made last Thursday, when Piser happened to be performing in Shanghai; on Friday he made a brief statement announcing his withdrawal. - CNN
"Her scripts call for comfortable pauses, uncomfortable pauses, weird pauses, confused pauses, horrible pauses. … It's worth contemplating what's going on between the lines in her low and slow theater. For starters, why do some audience members find silence so off-putting?" - The New York Times
As the downsides to our increasingly mediated world become more apparent, working with AI no longer seems quite as defensible as it once did. And I’ve become more and more concerned about the role artists are playing in popularizing these technologies. - American Theatre
"Subscribers were long the lifeblood of many performing arts organizations — a reliable income stream, and a guarantee that many seats would be filled. The pandemic hastened their disappearance for a number of reasons." - The New York Times
As entertainment centres like Toronto become increasingly diverse, theatres that continue to program works with only their ever-shrinking base of traditional patrons in mind may fade into irrelevancy among the pool of potential audiences they need to attract, she added. - Toronto Star
It was a big surprise when word came down that not only had Sondheim finished his long-rumored adaptation of two Luís Buñuel films, he had authorized a production. Here's an extended conversation between Rich, playwright Davd Ives, and director Joe Mantello about how Here We Are came together. - New York Magazine
"Footage posted online shows eight police officers and staff from the Dominion Theatre lining the stairway in the balcony as audience members chant 'out, out, out!'." - The Guardian
"This is 'one great big Edinburgh experiment', says Coco Sarel, possibly as a caveat in case things go wrong. Sarel (900,000 followers) is one of four TikTok comedians who, she says, want to find out if they're any good at stand-up. 'Which is better than four LinkedIn comedians.'" - BBC
And it's not called Fear and Loathing, either. In fact, its title is The Untitled, Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical, it's premiering next week at the La Jolla Playhouse with a Tony winner in the title role, and the intent is to bring it to Broadway. - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
She wrote The Shadow of a Doubt in 1901 and came close to seeing it staged briefly on Broadway, only for the project to fall apart for still-unclear reasons. The script lay undiscovered until 2016, and it's now onstage at the Shaw Festival in Ontario. - The New York Times
The blood’s memory really coursed through August. You also have to remember that the man read everything ever written—he was an autodidact. But he didn’t specifically research and say, “Okay, I’m writing a play about this era…” - American Theatre
"For a long time critics couldn't stop talking about the 'next Fleabag' in a way that may have been constraining for other women writing frank, funny solo pieces about their messy lives." Natasha Tripney talks with three of those women at this year's festival. - The Guardian
