Theatre

Hardline Hindu activists, empowered by the 2014 election of Narenda Modi as prime minister, have been doing things like this to plays they deem unpatriotic: “Hours before the show was due to start, the crew said they were forced to escape the venue as a mob had gathered. They said they ran down back alleys and had to take side roads to avoid being attacked on a main road. ‘It wasn’t that people didn’t like our play, expressed their dismay and left. No. We were being hunted across the city,’ said Ashwath Bhatt, an actor in the play.” – Reuters

“In recent years, the dam between uptown and downtown has started to spring a leak or two—and this season, the floodgates have opened. A rush of new productions written and directed by artists with a distinctly downtown sensibility are reshaping the Broadway landscape.” – Vogue

Journalist and playwright Farai Mabeza gives a survey of the sector and the ways its artists have been opening windows on the society’s social and political problems despite a severe lack of financial resources. – HowlRound

Sean Daniels passes on a Joe Haj list constituting a recipe for being a successful artistic director of a theatre. Some are common sense (don’t be an asshole). Others reflect a bit more psychology: “Everyone who works with you is firmly placed in the center of their own lives. You must collect their dreams and include them in a shared idea of the future, or pay the penalty of a disconnected and disaffected staff.” – The Awkward Stage

Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel has passed the $40 million mark at the box office, with advance sales lifting the total to $55 million. There are still three British imports ahead of it: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time ($68.3 million) and War Horse ($75 million), which Mockingbird will probably surpass, and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child ($118.7 million). – The Hollywood Reporter

The major capital project, which was to begin in October of this year, includes new production and rehearsal facilities and a library/archive; when it was announced in 2016, it was expected to cost £30 million. But projected construction costs have risen significantly since then, and Globe administrators decided to delay work for two years. – The Stage

That’s what worked for Katherine Chandler, “one of the most vital voices in Welsh theatre,” who took advantage of a Thatcher-era work for welfare opportunity, got placed at a theatre, fell for it, and eventually started writing plays. The award-winning playwright says Welsh theatre is “working class, strong, and in-yer-face. A lot of our work can be brutal and that’s because it reflects what’s happening in our country.” – The Stage (UK)

Lithgow: “Look, I read the script and I wanted to be in it, but my immediate anxiety was, ‘What were these two people going to think?’ Because I admire them, I know them, I care about them.” – The Washington Post

Composer Tom Kitt and lyricist Brian Yorkey (Next to Normal) and book writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (the chief creative officer for all Archie Comics properties) “have departed the production due to ‘creative differences’ … Director Trip Cullman and choreographer Camille A. Brown, who collaborated this season on the Tony-nominated Broadway production of Choir Boy, remain attached.” – The Hollywood Reporter

The co-founder and recently retired director of DC’s famed theatre company reports from this year’s Golden Mask Festival, where selected companies from all over the vast country meet to show their best work. – HowlRound

Trump on Show, which ran for four days last month at the city’s last commercial Cantonese opera theater, “tells a story of Mr. Trump’s long-lost twin, Chuan Pu, who was raised in China and works at a crematory. There he meets the undead corpse of Liu Shaoqi, the Chinese leader who died during the Cultural Revolution. The opera includes a Ping-Pong game between Mao and Nixon, who later gets stumbling drunk at a state banquet; a visit to the White House by a scheming Kim Jong-un; the ghost of Lincoln; Mr. Trump’s disappearance on an extraterrestrial spacecraft; and multiple singings of ‘Edelweiss.'” – The New York Times

Former National Theatre bosses Sir Nicholas Hytner and Nick Starr will run the venue, which is under construction and is set to open in winter 2021. It will be based on the Bridge Theatre, which the pair opened in October 2017. – BBC

In Chicago, where Bellow spent his life, playwright David Auburn (who won the Pulitzer for Proof) has reshaped the hefty novel into a single-evening play with 13 actors portraying 40 characters. But will today’s audiences relate to a story by an author who, as one of his biographers puts it, is “lucky he did not live to see the #MeToo movement”? – The New York Times

Way back in 1985-86, Anne Hamburger started up En Garde Arts in place of writing a master’s thesis at the Yale School of Drama. (“At the time, no one knew what that was; audiences identified theatre companies with the buildings they occupied.”) In this essay, Hamburger explains how she put together some of her early successes, why she closed En Garde Arts in 1999 and reopened it a decade later, and why that intervening decade completely changed how her company works. – HowlRound

The Storefront Theater is a retractable theatre disguised as a shop. It was built to re-invigorate the main street in the town of Lyons, Nebraska, and create a community space for its residents. – Dezeen

The Vent Haven Museum, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati in northern Kentucky, houses nearly 1,000 dummies, some 150 years old. Most of them, especially those that are or used to be famous, are off-limits to present-day ventriloquists, amateur or professional. – Smithsonian Magazine

Is it too soon after this year’s Tony nominations came out? So what? Bring ’em on: “When it comes to new musicals, looking beyond Broadway can reveal productions that may yet be players in the coming season. It’s also a reminder of the almost inextricable relationship that now exists between non-profit institutional theatres in the US and their commercial counterparts.” – The Stage (UK)

Amber Gray auditioned as well as she could for the Broadway-bound Hadestown: She “couldn’t read sheet music but had prepared for the tryout by diligently listening to the assigned song from the production’s buzzy concept album — which had since been tweaked.” Oops. – Los Angeles Times

Vulture somehow found time to photograph and interview a lot of people on the list: “The nominees spoke about their shows, their collaborators, their group texts, and their reactions to being nominated, before heading off to their Wednesday matinees.” – Vulture

David Bedella says he has to focus on LA instead of London. “TV offers celebrity and financial security and these things are important in an age where you don’t know where your next job is coming from. I want to be able to make the kind of money to support my family and not worry.” – The Stage (UK)

“Empowering the female lead may be a celebratory hook for selling a show, particularly given that women buy the bulk of Broadway tickets. But on closer inspection, it is rarely the women that require revision. … No, the real problem with these stories is the men. They are terrible, and yet they have the audacity to believe they can teach these women lessons, and to come out on the other side looking like plausible romantic leads. A modern production’s success rests on how it tames its man.” – The New York Times