AmericanTheaterWeb Top News

MIDDAY ADDITIONS

New York Times ArtsBeat

Whoriskey to Succeed Sher at Intiman Theater
Kate Whoriskey will become the theater's artistic director in 2011, following a 2010 season in which she and Bartlett Sher will work together on programming

Variety

Whoriskey to take helm at Intiman
Director to introduce fest of international work -- Kate Whoriskey will succeed Bartlett Sher as artistic director of Seattle's Intiman Theater beginning in 2011.

Hartford Courant Behind the Curtain Blog

Free Reading for Quiera Hudes' New Play in Hartford
There will be a reading of Pulitzer Prize-finalist Quiara Hudes' new play -- "Water by the Spoonful" -- at Hartford Stage's rehearsal studios, 942 Main St. at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, June 24.

TheaterMania

* Hair to Celebrate New Broadway Cast Recording Release with Onstage Be-In
* National Asian American Theater Festival Set for NYC in October
* Broadway's Norman Conquests Adds Final Trilogy Performance

Playbill

* Solo Play About Zero Mostel to Launch Theater J Season in DC; Simon, Ives, Moses, Gold Follow
*LuPone Will Bring Her Gypsy Act to Vegas, Atlantic City, North Carolina, Florida and More
* "Theater Talk" to Celebrate Boys in the Band June 26
* Hammond, Ligon, Ortiz and Ward Set for Reading of New Musical El Diva Del Voodoo
* Show Girl Recording, with Carol Channing, to Arrive on CD in July (18 Jun 2009)

About Last Night

TT: Big break
I've been writing with steadily growing enthusiasm about Kate Whoriskey ever since 2005, when Washington's Shakespeare Theatre invited her to stage The Tempest:

lies like truth

Great Study. But What's It For?
Arts organizations are forever commissioning research papers to test the validity of their various endeavors. Quite often though, the time, money and effort that goes into producing a study fails to be put to good use.

The Playgoer

New NEA Report
The NEA just released a new study of US arts audiences, and the news is pretty much the usual "audiences getting grayer"/"income going down" variety. But I find many of the theatre-related findings surprisingly positive--only in that they show things not getting that much worse yet than they've been the last two decades.

The Guardian

West End girl: Attack of the sets Carrie Dunn
Bret Michaels was rocked by a bit of scenery at the Tonys, and theatregoers in Malvern saw X Factor's Scott Bruton hit the floor after an accident. Beware the backdrops ...

The Stage UK

Inquest into de Menezes killing to be adapted for stage on London fringe
London fringe venue the Landor Theatre is to stage a new play about the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.

Culture minister Follett joins calls for backstage improvements
Minister for culture Barbara Follett has added momentum to Equity's bid for "better and healthier" working conditions for West End actors, branding backstage facilities in historic theatres "shameful".

Whatsonstage.com

Interview: Ed Stoppard On ... Entering Father Tom's Arcadia
In Arcadia, my character Valentine is a scion of the Coverly family as we find them in the present day, as opposed o the same family in the early 19th century. He has a good understanding of chaos mathematics and he spots the genius of Th...

Browse all of the day's clippings

---

THE DAY'S FIRST TOP STORIES

Seattle Times

N.Y. director to replace Bartlett Sher at Intiman
Kate Whoriskey, a New York-based stage director, has been named to succeed the Tony-winning Bartlett Sher at Intiman Theatre.

New York Times

City Opera Tries to Hold Off the Ultimate Finale
If nonprofit cultural organizations were run like corporations, the chairwoman of New York City Opera might well be out of a job.

amNY New York City Theater

* T.R. Knight and Ashton Kutcher Rumors Pop Up on Broadway

New York Journal-News

Summer Shakespeare's eternal question: To picnic or not to picnic?
From Suffern to New Canaan, Garrison to Central Park, summer means Shakespeare out of doors

Time Out New York Upstaged Blog

Feldman vs. Feldshuh this Friday
The star of Irena's Vow faces a critic of the show

Connecticut Post

'Bares' a racy one-night stand with Broadway's best
'Bares' a racy one-night stand with the best of BroadwayWho says burlesque is dead? More than 200 Broadway dancers and actors will be spending their night off Sunday taking it off -- for strictly charitable purposes -- at the 19th annual "Broadway

"Tick, tick...BOOM!" coming to Westport Country Playhouse
Before he wrote "Rent," Jonathan Larson created an autobiographical piece called "tick, tick...BOOM!" about his own career dreams and life anxieties as he approached his 30th birthday.

Albany Times-Union

Arts education is waning
Kids were taking fewer field trips to art museums even before the recession began to gouge school budgets, according to a nationwide survey released Monday.

Variety

LaBute and MCC deny reports of split
Scheduling conflict to blame for Off B'way delay

TheaterMania

Stew Makes a Sound Decision
The Tony Award-winning musician talks about composing songs for A Midsummer Night's Dream, his new projects, and the film version of Passing Strange.

* Mara Davi, Joey Slotnik, Tony Yazbeck, et al. Set for Goodman's Animal Crackers
* Dancing With the Stars' Maksim Chmerkovskiy and Karina Smirnoff to Guest Star in Broadway's Burn the Floor
* August: Osage County Announces June 28 Broadway Closing
* Penny Arcade's Old Queen to Be Centerpiece of Dixon Place's HOT! Festival
* Lorin Latarro to Direct June 29 Installment of Erotic Broadway

Playbill

* Schwartz, MacDermot, Rado and Ragni Inducted into Songwriters Hall of Fame June 18
* Hofstra Entertainment to Present World Premiere of I'm The Greatest Star
* Next to Normal Hits #1 on Billboard Cast Album Chart

Broadway.tv

In The Wake Of The Tony Awards
As uplifting as the optimistic and positive nature surrounding the Tony Awards is, not every Broadway show gets a boost from the ...

Philadelphia Inquirer

A welcome spark for small theaters
A small Philadelphia theater company called Hotel Obligado folded in December - which ended up, oddly, being good news. After producing offbeat and new work for eight years, Hotel Obligado closed with a surplus of about $5,000 - which has become its legacy, funding the city's newest theater prize, the Hotel Obligado Audience Choice Award for New Work. A $1,000 chunk of it

Baltimore Sun

Baltimore Playwrights Festival opens tonight
'Bloodlines' at Fells Point Corner Theater is first of 10 original productions

Orlando Sentinel Attention Must Be Paid Blog

* PlayFest looking for submissions for 2010
* Theatre Downtown extends 'Sordid Lives'

St. Petersburg Times

Timothy Douglas to direct August Wilson's 'Fences' at American Stage

Miami Herald

Controversial play 'Rachel Corrie' opens here at last
Rachel Corrie was a passionate American activist, a young woman who had cared about the larger world since she was a child. As a fifth-grader in Olympia, Wash., she said this in a speech about world hunger: ``We have got to understand that people in Third World countries think and care and smile and cry just like us. We have got to understand that they dream our dreams, and we dream theirs. We have to understand that they are us. We are them.''

Essential Theatre

Essential Playwright Vynnie Meli's PLAGUED at NYMF
Congratulations are out to JIM CROW playwright Vynnie Meli. Her musical, PLAGUED will be part of this year's prestigious New York Music Theatre Festival. Well done Vynnie. You can see her play JIM CROW AND THE RHYTHM DARLINGS as part of this year's Essential Theatre Festival.

Chicago Sun-Times

Stage is the thing at Auditorium
The stage of the Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Congress, will be turned into a black-box theater shared by actors and audience this summer as Highland Park's Apple Tree Theatre reprises its well-received production of "Mistress Cycle."

Time Out Chicago

Matt Hawkins
The actor-director-fight-choreographer gets down with 500 Clown.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Skylight sparks controversy with artistic director's dismissal
Shock and dismay have erupted in Milwaukee's music and theater communities over the firing of William Theisen as artistic director of the Skylight Opera Theatre.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Acting Out Blog

Two reasons to drive to Chicago

Dallas Morning News

Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization aids Lyric Stage's 'The King and I'

Orange County Register

Suleman takes a dim view of 'Octomom'
Octuplets' mom threatens lawsuit over new musical.

Orange County Register The Arts Blog

New play announced for SCR’s 2009-10 season
South Coast Repertory has added “Doctor Cerberus,” a new play by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, to its 2009-10 line-up.

L.A. Weekly

Stage Raw: Angels in Poland
Madonna and child in Wroclaw, Poland, where L.A.'s theater directors are making a strong showing as "core participants" and "guests" for the Wroclaw segment (June 14-30) of the Grotowski International Theaer Festival, June 14-30. The effort to bring ...

Contra Costa Times

Curtain Calls: D'Emidio shines as 'Dolly' at Lesher Center
Word is that Diablo Theatre Company's production of "Hello, Dolly!" has people practically dancing in the aisles with its uplifting musical about the outrageous Dolly Levi.

The Guardian

Edinburgh festival 2009: our critics pick the best
Don't listen to the doom-mongers – the Edinburgh festival is adapting in style to changing times. Lyn Gardner introduces this year's lineup, and our critics pick out the highlights

Reasons to be pretty cheerful about Neil LaBute and MCC theatre David Cote
The playwright's relationship with the nonprofit company seems to have stalled. Maybe it's just as well – too many writers get their work greenlit with alarming ease

What to see at the Edinburgh festival Lyn Gardner
Faust in a box, Waiting for Godot in a loo and Don Quixote with a blindfolded audience. If you're still wading through the programme, here's a handful of my highlights

The Stage UK

Mark Shenton: The error of my ways…
I like to be proved wrong sometimes. Only the other day I was admitting that I didn’t expect the Edinburgh Fringe to keep growing as it does: as I wrote here , “every year I expect the bubble to...

Everybody Loves a Winner - Sally Lindsay & Neil Bartlett: The Stage Podcast #31
In this week’s Stage Podcast, former Coronation Street actress Sally Lindsay and writer-director Neil Bartlett talk to Nick Smurthwaite about Everybody Loves a Winner , which runs at the Manchester Royal Exchange from July 3-18 as part of the...

Whatsonstage.com

Michael Coveney: Being Alive in Company
I was inconversation with one of the Showstoppers improvisers, Adam Meggido, the other day, and he said something interesting about Stephen Sondheim, which in itself is quite unusual.
London Theatre Guide

The Big Interview: Lara Foot Newton
It seems an odd accusation to throw around, but Lara Foot Newton’s multi award-winning show, Karoo Moose, which opens the Tricycle theatre’s South African season, has drawn the occasional complaint of being “too hopeful”, writes Matthew Amer.

Artsy Schmartsy

The Skylight Board issues a statement
This was posted on The Skylight's website late in the day. Read. Think. I'll discuss later:

Dog Days

Are You Talking About Today or Tomorrow?
Monday was a big day for arts policy and data wonks. We got two major arts focused reports from the federal government and substantial media coverage for both. The NEA released its 2008 Arts Participation survey findings and the Department of Education released the NAEP Arts Report Card.

The Playgoer

David Hare: Man of the Moment
Well whatever one might have thought about Stuff Happens or his occasional first-person "monologues" (like the recent--and unreviewed!--Berlin/Wall, which I missed), you gotta give David Hare credit for staying current.

Browse all of the day's clippings