AmericanTheaterWeb NewsClips

The Artful Manager

Considering the Creative Ecology
I had a great visit to Austin, Texas, last week to talk with artists, arts managers, creatives, and other community members. Building on their cultural planning of the past years, they are working to forge a ''creative alliance'' to advance the creative life (not just cultural) of the region.

Fory Days to Forty Plays

DAY 26: J JULIAN CHRISTOPHER
J. Julian Christopher holds an MFA from New School University. Plays include Beast: A Parable, Metro Psalm, Nico was a Fashion Model & Leap Year Skin. Julian is a 2009 Public Theater Emerging Writers fellow. http://www.jjulianchristopher.com/

The Hub Review

Fisking Emily Glassberg Sands
I finished reading the much-discussed Emily Glassberg Sands study on sexism in the theatre this weekend (and even had a phone conversation with Sands afterward). I must report, however, that the conversation grew "contentious" (as Sands herself put it) as I pressed her on issues regarding the final section of her paper - the part devoted to Broadway productions.

Huffington Post

Jonathan Tisch: A Helping Hand For Those Who Work In The Arts
Hollywood star Annette Bening came to town last week. She wasn't shooting a film, accepting an award or even performing on the Great White Way. She was in New York City to kick off a campaign to support the arts--more importantly, the people who work in the arts. ...

NYC Performing Arts Spaces Blog

Fundraising made easier? Additional info sessions added!
Recently we wrote about the upcoming orientation sessions for the New York State Cultural Data Project, a powerful online management tool designed to strengthen arts and cultural organizations.

Off-Off Blogway

tweets + reviews = tweeviews
So.....lately Ludlow Lad has been spending more time blogging about upcoming shows, news and awards and less time "reviewing" shows on Off-Off Blogway. Ludlow has decided that all "reviews" of shows will be done as "tweets" from the Off-Off Blogway Twitter account and will appear on Twitter as well as in the margin of this site ...

Parabasis

On The Dearth Of Female Critics...
Tom Laughlin, in the comments to an earlier post, writes:

Theatre as Case Study?
If you're someone who is interested in workplace discrimination, equal employment opportunity, bias and affirmative action issues (as I happen to be right now) theatre makes for an interesting counter-factual case study. Why? Because there aren't class-action lawsuits against theaters fort discrimination

The Producer's Perspective

An article about Social Media.
In case you didn't get my tweet last week, here's a link to an article I was asked to write for Mashable about Broadway and social media.

Scrappy Jack's World-Wide Theatricals and Dime Museum

some good news
The National Endowment for the Arts as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities received a $170 million budget from the U.S. House of Representatives for 2010, nearly a 10 percent increase from their current $155 million budget.

Superfluities Redux

My Dinner with André
Louis Malle's classic 1981 My Dinner wtih André, written and performed by director André Gregory and dramatist Wallace Shawn, makes its appearance in the Criterion Collection this month. Notorious for its seemingly simple situation (two men having dinner together) and its wide-ranging conversation, the

 

About Last Night

TT: Up in the air (I)
In the summer I hit the drama-festival circuit, and I try to get from one town to the next in as uncomplicated and unhurried a way as I can contrive. Not only has experience taught me to travel light and never fly on show days--to do otherwise is asking for trouble--but I also have to give myself sufficient time to write, file, and edit my Wall Street Journal drama columns from the ...

MUSICAL
A Minister's Wife (Writers' Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe, Ill., closes Aug. 2). Josh Schmidt, Austin Pendleton, and Jan Tranen have teamed up to create a musical version of George Bernard Shaw's Candida that's better than the original. The score is exquisite, the book crisp and pointed, the lyrics plain-spoken yet poignant.

TT: Almanac
"Critics are like brushers of noblemen's clothes." George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum

TT: Another little taste
I recently posted a photo of the scale model of Hildegard Bechtler's set for the first and second scenes of The Letter, which take place in the living room of the home of Leslie Crosbie, who shoots her faithless lover dead as the opera begins. Here's the set for the third and sixth scenes, which take place in the Singapore office of Howard Joyce, Leslie's lawyer and her husband's best friend: ...

Createquity.

Creative Providence
On Friday, I attended the unveiling of Creative Providence, a cultural planning effort conducted primarily by Dreeszen & Associates over the past two years. A nice-sized crowd came out for the catered event at the Hotel Providence to see the Mayor of Providence, David Cicilline, ...

Culturebot

Lincoln Center Festival Opens July 7
Two top theater companies – France’s Le Théâtre du Soleil and Hungary’s Katona József Theatre – share opening night honors at Lincoln Center Festival 09, which runs from July 7 through July 26, 2009 and offers 56 performances by artists and ensembles from ...

Curatorial Masterclass at EYEBEAM
An initiative of Eyebeam’s Summer School program, the Curatorial Masterclass will be led by Eyebeam research partner Sarah Cook from CRUMB, the online resource for curators working with media art. The series will be an opportunity for emerging and established curators of art ...

the nytheatre i

Gallery Players Launches Summer Shakespeare
The Gallery Players, a theatrical institution for more than 40 years in Park Slope, Brooklyn, has recently announced an exciting addition to their schedule--a summer Shakespeare production. Here's the full announcement, courtesy of publicist Paul Siebold:

Off-Off Blogway

Big Art Group's Cinema Fury: The Imitation (HOT! Festival)
Cinema Fury, an ongoing series of experimental video art and musical collaborations; a spontaneous, open framework continually in production and evolution, resulting in special performance events.

off-stage right

The New York Times continues the discussion on parity for Women in Theater
Today’s New York Times takes a look at shows directed by women in New York in Who’s in Charge of This Show? She Is by Patricia Cohen. Links at the end of the post for more of the discussion on Women in Theater. But interesting points to be made from the New York Times article: ...

Parabasis

I Want To Make Something Really Clear
As a follow up on everything we've talking about here...
I don't hate institutions. i don't want them to go away. I don't want to blow them up. I want them...

Stunning
I just saw Stunning at LCT3 last night and I really really dug it. Not that it's perfect or anything, but you really should go see it if you get the chance. It just extended for two weeks, so there should be tickets on sale. ....

A Good Post From David Dower
Can be found here, in which he talks amongst other things about the positive value of institutions. I hope I've been clear here over the past couple of weeks that even when discussing what so frustrates me about institutions, I recognize the positive value that they can have. I just think it's worth understanding them and their (perhaps inherent) drawbacks as well. ...

Performance Monkey

'Pick up the gun and shoot the bastard!'
I was much tickled this afternoon to read the performance artist and lecturer Lois Weaver recalling a visit to David Hare's play The Secret Rapture. Her colleague Peggy Phelan, a reluctant co-attendee at the matinee performance ('this sea of the well-behaved'), became exercised during the scene in which the heroine's dangerously obsessive ex bursts in on her with a gun.

a poor player

Rock and a Hard Place 3: What Actors Want
I suppose it’s disingenuous of me to write about “what actors want.” Perhaps this will more accurately be a reflection of what I want to see for actors in this country, based upon the reasons I became an actor and the reasons I chose to leave the profession as a full-time ...

The Rob Kozlowski Chicago Theater and Vintage Film Medicine Show

500 Clown and The Elephant Deal
I admit it. I was disappointed, and it breaks my heart because Molly Brennan and John Fournier are phenomenal talents, but ultimately the whole thing came down to two words: too much. Loosely based on Brecht's Man Is Man, a play with which I confess I am completely unfamiliar, the 90-something-minute evening isn't so much a play as it is a cabaret show that explodes into a nihilistic clown show, something that is tremendously entertaining for about the first 45 minutes until the whole thing collapses like a house of cards, or like a bunch of clowns standing on each other in the middle of a tornado.