Oklahoma!, South Pacific, The King and I, Carousel, The Sound of Music — they can seem corny today. Yet they deal with loaded issues — persecution of outsiders, racism, exploitation and oppression of women, and escape from fascism — and a new generation of directors is bringing those themes out. - BBC
Fat Ham, which transmutes Hamlet from a tragedy in Denmark into a comedy at a Southern Black family's cookout, was produced for streaming last year by Philadelphia's Wilma Theater, where playwright James Ijames is one of several artistic co-directors. (Live performances start this week in New York.) - The New York Times
The nominators spread out their admiration quite widely: Of the 34 shows eligible for nominations, 29 got at least one nod, including the critically scorned “Diana.” But five new plays were completely overlooked. - The New York Times
For best play, The Lehman Trilogy has the most nominations, and Company is in the mix for best musical revival. The ceremony was delayed until June 12. - The New York Times
Marjan Neshat, a 45-year-old Iranian American actor, is having a real one, with three critically acclaimed performances in one season. Says playwright Sanaz Toossi, "She’s a very Chekhovian actor. ... She’s so interested in the tiny ways we can destroy each other." - The New York Times
Director Awoye Timpo and dramaturg Arminda Thomas: "We were thinking about this notion of what what does it mean to expand the canon? .. Now what we think of is exploding the castle of classical canon." (Note: The transcript of this podcast is here.) - Slate
Masks are still required, mostly, but "while some patrons welcomed the change, others said they felt uneasy about going into crowded theaters without the assurance that their seatmates were vaccinated." - The New York Times
Two theatres have converted their stages for people to sleep and for storage of food and medicine. It echoes a narrative happening across Ukraine cultural spaces, which have been transformed to meet people’s current needs. - The Stage
The union has ended or expanded (depending on how you look at it) its proceeding against a nonunion tour of Waitress to petition the Broadway League (the association for theater owners and producers) to end the arrangement where a show may have union and nonunion tours simultaneously. - The Hollywood Reporter
My agent didn’t know anything about it either, until he checked his email and saw he’d received a message less than half an hour before – just after 6pm on the Sunday of a bank holiday weekend – to say the show was closing and I no longer had a contract. - The Guardian
Testimony of nearly two dozen survivors and examination of the now-destroyed theater's plans indicate that at least 600 of the people who had taken shelter in the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater during days of aerial bombing were killed — twice the number previously reported. - AP
“Our team is largely made up of lots of actors, stage managers, company managers, all of whom work in the theater. Nobody has cared about bringing Broadway back like they have.” - The Hollywood Reporter
When The Lark's board announced the company's closure last October, they said there was no way to keep the company financially sustainable. Former staffers say the problem was really the departure of some unusually dynamic executives and a well-intentioned experiment in shared management that didn't work out. - American Theatre
Arifa Akbar: "If a critic changes their mind, do they discredit themselves? No, because theatre reviewing is by its nature only ever an overnight response. ... It is a very different proposition to book reviewing, for instance, where critics are given days, if not weeks, to formulate their views." - The Guardian
You bet. The relationship an audience has to a Broadway star is all the more intense for being in-person. Knowing a body in space, the parabolas of certain gestures, the side angles of expressions, the timbre of a wisecrack, the mood of a certain strut lend an illusion of kinship. - Los Angeles Times
