"Former pupils have raised allegations including how tutors have 'grabbed' female students' breasts, made sexual comments about their bodies and pressurised them to remove clothes during rehearsals or performances. … a female student complained that a visiting teacher had sexually assaulted her at home." - The Telegraph (UK)
With capacity restrictions, social distancing rules, other safety measures, and eager-but-nervous audiences and performers, venues from mighty Caroline's to tiny Stand Up NY have some difficult tricks to pull off. There are some good jokes, though. (Brian Scott McFadden: "I spoke with my agent and I can't get COVID because I have a deal with Ebola.") - Gothamist
The earliest decision-makers were not at all sure this was the direction to go. Ask then-newly installed interim director Shirley Serotsky at the Hangar Theatre in Ithaca - proposing something "completely new, hugely ambitious, and hardly cost-neutral" to the board was a challenge. "It took some convincing ... But I did believe that it was the only way we...
Celebration Theatre's longtime AD Michael Shepperd was accused of sexual misconduct over more than a decade - and the accusers say that the theatre mishandled those complaints until last week, when an internal investigation prompted the theatre to let him go. When there's a power differential, can a small theatre be a "safe, sex-positive" space? - Los Angeles Times
Not only are audience members (at a quarter of pre-COVID capacity) required to stay six feet from each other, so are all the actors and crew. That's presenting quite a traffic management puzzle for director Sean Homes as he restages his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream for the Elizabethan theatre's reopening. - The New York Times
"Sitting on a bench in Prospect Park recently as flocks of maskless Brooklynites passed by, Lucie Tiberghien reflected on the long, strange journey toward the first full production of Molière in the Park, the company she conceived to bring free theater with a diverse cast and crew to her home borough. This weekend, after months of delays that radically...
"Three of the 25 competitive awards — best musical, best play and best play revival — will be presented live during a television program, broadcast on CBS, that will primarily be a starry concert of theater songs. But the bulk of the awards, honoring performers, writers, directors, choreographers and designers, will be given out just beforehand, during a...
For 427 days, an old wooden board inside the foyer of St Martin’s Theatre in London was stuck on the number 28,199. It had ticked upwards every night for 67 years, logging the number of performances of the longest -running play in the world. But on March 16, 2020, The Mousetrap paused for breath. This seemingly immovable object met...
Michael A. Shepperd, artistic director of Celebration Theatre, has been terminated following an internal investigation of allegations that he groped and propositioned an actor backstage during the company's 2019 production of The Producers. Shepperd, describing Celebration Theatre as "a queer safe space" where flirting and physical affection were common, maintains that any and all contact between him and his...
The paths they each followed are telling. If you are even marginally involved in the theater, it is impossible not to envy the state support of the arts that benefited Stoppard in Britain or be angry at how, like most American directors, Nichols spent so much time chasing the dollar. Their biographers, too, take differing approaches to these lives....
"The Fonseca Theater, located in a working-class neighborhood on west side whose actors are more than 80 percent people of color, staged its first show on Friday night since its founder, Bryan Fonseca, died from complications from COVID-19 last September. And not just any show — the world premiere of Rachel Lynett's play Apologies to Lorraine Hansberry (You...
The great flowering of Yiddish-language drama in the late 19th and early 20th centuries reached its apogee in New York, but it was born in the Romanian city of Iași and grew up, very quickly, in Odessa — a place in which public performance in Yiddish was illegal except for five crucial years. - Tablet
Not only did Shuffle Along bring jazz to Broadway, it was the first African American show to be a smash hit. Its composer Eubie Blake recalled on WNYC in 1973: "When we put Shuffle Along on, on Broadway, we put negroes back to work again." But he added that some members of the Black community had problems with it....
But, of course, Hilary Mantel isn't really into easy. She and actor Ben Miles had to figure out their newest Thomas Cromwell adaptation: "You can only do so much on Zoom, Mantel said, 'because every line has to find its precise form for the next line to play off it. You have to have precision. We would pass our...
The truth is, enslaved people formed the majority of the town's population at the time depicted at the site. New interpreters and an urgency to depict something closer to the truth of the history pervades the actors and administrators now. And so: "The instruction has gone out lately to all of Colonial Williamsburg’s dozens of actor-interpreters that the city’s...
