Category: theatre

“The departure of McKeen, one of the city’s most prominent arts leaders, comes as something of a shock. He’d been OCT’s managing director since 2008. Before that he spent several years as a grant writer and fundraising consultant for several Portland arts organizations, served a year as the first manager of the Oregon Cultural Trust, and spent three years as general manager of Portland Center Stage.” – Oregon Arts Watch

Charles McNulty: “Even before the pandemic, the theater’s economic model was broken. Our resident theaters, the nonprofit companies that constitute the art form’s national foundation, arose in a cultural landscape drastically different from today’s.” – Los Angeles Times

Well, not in the theatre world, obviously – but in the wider world, Netflix carries some pretty solid cultural cachet. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is the first of Wilson’s plays to be adapted for the streaming behemoth. Its director says Wilson’s play is all too relevant in 2020. “It would be lovely one day if it was a lovely piece of nostalgia about the difficult complicated racial equation of 1927. But that’s not going to happen for a while.” – NPR

Sure, the U.S. is Christmas Carol‘d out – but the longtime American theatre Christmas standby is also serving its home country. In Bury St. Edmunds, the play is outside, in the center of town. Says the director, who is no doubt right about the ghosts of Christmas, “Certain effects really suit a winter evening.” – BBC

Theatre leaders met in May to hash out a response to the Black Lives Matter protests and the extrajudicial killings of George Floyd and other unarmed Black people. “They were beginning a process to overhaul the entire ecology of their field, at every level — casting, staffing, fundraising, boards, tech crews, audiences, everything — and inject anti-racism into its DNA. … If this broad coalition of theater makers effectively transforms one part of the arts world in one city, it might just set a standard that can be exported — not simply to other arts disciplines, but to other sectors in America that are struggling with the deep, pervasive and seemingly intractable problem of institutional racism.” – Seattle Times

The good: “Musicals — and, in a way, plays too — are now being filmed because of their music, not in spite of it.”
The less good: “They put us onstage with the story and give us no say.” – The New York Times

Director George C. Wolfe says of the final scene, “It’s a very slippery little slope: When does sharing become cultural appropriation become theft?” – Los Angeles Times

“We are all here because we believe in the power of theatre, right? We think it has the power to change minds, to catalyze conversations, to shift narratives. But we most often limit that to what’s on our stages, with the goal that our mostly wealthy, mostly white patrons might see our groundbreaking show and say, “Wow, I never knew that.” But if we approached theatremaking as cultural workers, we wouldn’t be measuring success only by the number of tickets sold, and our programming choices wouldn’t be driven primarily by the institution’s need to sustain itself.” – American Theatre

The author of The Man Without Qualities worked in the theaters of Vienna as both critic and playwright. Author Genese Grill looks at how Musil’s two completed plays fed his most famous novel. – Literary Hub

“Perth’s Fringe World, which opens on 15 January, attracted criticism and protests earlier this year over its longstanding sponsorship by fossil fuel giant Woodside. In a bid to head off disruption of next month’s event, the organisers – not-for-profit company Artrage – have included in the festival’s main contract the stipulation that ‘the presenter and the venue operator must use its best endeavours to not do any act or omit to do any act that would prejudice any of Fringe World’s sponsorship arrangements’. … [Performers] said the clause effectively amounted to a gag order, curtailing comment on anything from climate change to local politics.” – The Guardian