Theatre

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 days before covid-19. I wore my mask throughout the shows, a feat that a year ago I had convinced myself would be too uncomfortable to tolerate. – Washington Post

“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 imperative.” – American Theatre

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, and were surprised that it got so much attention) and goes on to look at how the controversy unfolded inside Southern California’s Asian-American theater community. – American Theatre

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 expectant, kettled huddle. – The Daily Beast

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 have systems and canons that are built on ideals that are hundreds of thousands of years old, whether we’re talking about ballet or opera. We’re ultimately upholding that ideal but haven’t taken the moment to question how relevant that aesthetic is now to the culture that is being created by the world around us.” – Howlround

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 TV creator out there? There are so many!” – Wired

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 joke. A few people sipped beers, but everyone wore face coverings, making reactions to jokes harder to decipher. Still, the comics said they could tell from crinkled eyes and body language.” – The New York Times

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 what is sure to be a slow and bumpy road to eventual reopening.” – The New York Times

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 next day, East West revoked its membership in the Ovation Awards presenter, LA Stage Alliance, and urged other local companies to do the same. More than two dozen did, including the Center Theatre Group, the Geffen Playhouse, Deaf West Theatre and the Pasadena Playhouse.” – LAist

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

“It was supposed to be a murder mystery: two couples, four motives, one gun. What it became was a different kind of mystery entirely: a musical that got prominent pans, alienated much of its audience and lost most of its investment — yet survived. Not only is Follies, which opened on Broadway on April 4, 1971, still here 50 years later, trailing a string of revivals, revisals and gala concerts, but it is also now recognized as the high-water mark of the serious ‘concept’ musical.” Jesse Green offers seven reasons (and one caveat) why Follies still matters. – The New York Times

“I can’t pretend I’m 20. No one’s going to believe it. But I can feel that I’m 20. … One advantage is, when I was starting out as a young actor, I often played old men. Well, I didn’t know what it was like to be old, but being old, I do remember what it’s like to be young.” – BBC

Shakespeare’s Globe has announced a mid-May reopening, albeit with a capacity of up to only 500 in a popular auditorium that can hold as many as 1,700. The coveted standing places that allow the so-called Globe groundlings to jostle one another, and on occasion the actors, will be replaced by seats; a lack of intermissions will further limit unwanted contact. The idea is to return to normal practice, assuming restrictions ease as the summer season continues. – The New York Times

George R.R. Martin, who wrote the Song of Ice and Fire novels on which the megahit HBO series was based, is working with playwright Duncan MacMillan and director Dominic Cooke on a big, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child-type play that producers plan to open in New York, London, and Sydney and/or Melbourne. The draw is that the play will depict a major event in Westeros history that took place 16 years before the novels and Game of Thrones start. – The Hollywood Reporter

“A project, called Play On! Shakespeare, launched in 2015 by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, … commissioned 36 playwrights from diverse backgrounds … [to adapt] all 39 of the Bard’s plays from their original Elizabethan English into a more modern diction.” The first three titles in the print series (now re-punctuated as Play on Shakespeare) will be Migdalia Cruz’s Macbeth (May), David Ivers’s As You Like It (June), and Kenneth Cavander’s The Tempest (July). – Publishers Weekly

Many burlesque entertainers pull together a living in New York through a variety of performance gigs, while others use it as a release from more conventional day jobs. The city had been a hub for burlesque for more than a decade; before the pandemic, you could find a show on almost any given night in both Manhattan and Brooklyn. – The New York Times

What has to change: “Disabled people may be artists, musicians, singers, or actors, [but] our experiences and stories rarely find their way to the stage. When we do appear in scripts or on stages, almost invariably those stories focus on the non-disabled people around us and cast us as villains, punchlines, or charity projects for the protagonists. Ableism runs deep in theatre and other performing arts communities. It shows up not only in the stories we tell but also in the ways in which we tell those stories—and it shows up in the spaces where we learn, rehearse, and perform.” – American Theatre

While the interior is idle (or getting a revamp, in some cases), the windows to the street have a thing or two to say about art, poetry, and the power of words – and, in some cases, even dance. The Brooklyn Ballet performed 20-minute “jewel-box dances” from The Nutcracker in its street-level windows in December, using barriers to prevent crowds. “It was a way to bring some people back to something they love that they enjoyed that they might be forgetting about. … It did feel like a real performance.” – The New York Times