Theatre

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 reshaped her plans, she is on her way to fulfilling that dream, with a staged and costumed reading of Tartuffe.” – The New York Times

“Three of the 25 competitive awards — best musical, best play and best play revival — will be presented live during a [Sept. 26] 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 ceremony that will be shown only on Paramount+, the ViacomCBS subscription streaming service.” – The New York Times

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 an unstoppable force: the coronavirus pandemic. – The Stage

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 accuser was consensual. – Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)

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 New Republic

“The Fonseca Theater, located in a working-class neighborhood on [Indianapolis’s] 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 Too August Wilson), a metafictional meditation on Blackness that was recently selected as the winner of the 2021 Yale Drama Series Prize.” – The New York Times

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. – NPR

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 drafts to and fro, getting them to work and then polish them up line by line. We had to be good clerks to each other.'” – The Guardian (UK)

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 slaveholding past is to figure in every tour and talk.” – Washington Post

“This project takes formal cues from lensed images. It’s styled as an episode of Real Housewives run amok, and the team cites French surrealist film, the photography of Man Ray, and the melodramas of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Douglas Sirk as major inspirations.” – The New York Times

“[The] quirky 104-year-old Manhattan specialty store that has long been a haven for aspiring artists as well as a purveyor of scripts, will reopen next month with a new location, a new look, and a new team of starry owners — the Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, as well as the show’s director, Thomas Kail, lead producer, Jeffrey Seller, and the theater owner James L. Nederlander,” who bought the store in 2019 after it lost its lease and closed. – The New York Times

“For [Melanie] Andrews, Shakespeare represents a foundation for success, particularly for students of color attending under-resourced schools. If they can master Shakespearean wordplay, ‘they can master anything,’ she says. But it’s not all Shakespeare. The theater ensemble has evolved into a support system and expanding network for the estimated 1,000 young people who have been involved since its founding.” – Los Angeles Times

“This sounds corny, but that’s what I love about art, especially comedy. It’s not evergreen. It changes so much every time you return to it, and as the world changes and as hopefully you change. That’s how art can teach us, whether it’s good stuff or bad stuff, problematic or inspirational, it’s all the same.” – The New York Times

Brian Cheslik, theatre teacher at the Texas School for the Deaf: “Please know that I am writing this from a place of love and support, in hopes of giving guidance for theatre educators and producers nationwide. While I wrote this to focus on theatre education in schools, these tips do apply to the entertainment industry in general, so you can substitute the word student for person, actor, or artist.” – American Theatre

“The show is produced by Garth H. Drabinsky, the Tony-winning producer behind Kiss of the Spider Woman, who was sentenced to seven years in a Canadian prison in 2009 for fraud and forgery. That sentence was reduced on appeal to five years. Drabinsky served 17 months before being released on parole in 2013. Subsequent US charges were dismissed in 2018, clearing the way for Drabinsky to resume work as a theatrical producer south of the border.” – Theatre Mania

There were two attempts in the second half of 2020 to start British theatres up after the pandemic lockdown, and both were quickly ended as COVID cases rose. “Monday’s comeback felt like it was actually permanent, 15 audience members said in interviews, many highlighting Britain’s speedy vaccination campaign as the reason for their optimism. (Over 55 percent of the British population has received at least one dose, a higher proportion than in the United States.)” – The New York Times

“There has been a fear that the large-scale redundancies during the pandemic – an estimated 40% of theatre workers lost their jobs – could be followed by a reopening packed with ‘safe’ work. Instead, ‘bold’ is the adjective being used to describe much of what is to come. … The National Theatre’s deputy artistic director … says the public want challenging art rather than ‘comforting’ work.” – The Guardian

You can imagine my astonishment when, early one morning, my calculations revealed that within Les Miserables, the principal characters of Fantine, Eponine, Gavrosche and Valjean all died on or very close to a golden ratio point. Further analysis revealed that major changes in the story line (matching to within less than 1%) coincided with all 16 golden ratio points. – The Conversation

An errant sentence in a New York Times article (since reworded) led to a lot of participation from actors via social media. They’re fed up with the sizeism and lack of body diversity on Broadway – and everywhere else in theatre. “The infamous ideology of a ‘Broadway body’ — a term that assumes a stage performer’s castability is specifically related to their size — has come to reinforce ‘the imposed ideals we place on women to be waif-like, or men to be Adonis-figured,’ tweeted Kinky Boots alum Sean Patrick Doyle.” – Los Angeles Times

Jose Solís: “Theater in my hometown? ‘A lot has changed since you’ve been gone,’ said Inma López, a producer and ensemble member at Casa del Teatro Memorias. … Theater in Tegucigalpa went from the didacticism of political plays that toured colleges and high schools in the 1980s, to becoming an essential part of city life.” – The New York Times

“‘The whole process here is to recreate the experience for the audience,’ said [Goodman artistic director Robert] Falls. ‘The audience chooses which performance they want to see, they buy their ticket, they’re instructed to get there early to make sure that the technology is working and at 7:30 in the evening, we’re all set to go live.'” – Yahoo! (Chicago Tribune)

Charles McNulty: “I prefer to experience plays the way I experience films at the movie theater — uninterrupted. At night when I awake momentarily from dreaming, I can rarely, if ever, restart the same dream when I fall back to sleep. The spell is broken. … Playwrights do the dreamwork for us, but our absorption is required. And unless a complicated set change demands an extended time out, I’d prefer not to have to return to the workaday world until the play is over.” – Los Angeles Times