Category: theatre

Shutdown theatre cool idea number 458: “A postcard slips through the letterbox and lands lightly. While rural touring can’t take place, Nottingham-based company New Perspectives have created Love from Cleethorpes, a six-part postcard drama delivered to audiences’ homes.” – The Guardian (UK)

Assuming that it ever ends – with a vaccine or some kind of terribly expensive, in human life terms, herd immunity – Covid-19 may leave a theatrical legacy that’s hard to shake, at least for a while. And there are some small advantages. “One benefit of staging productions on Zoom, Ridgely says, is the ability to reach a much larger audience than is generally possible with live theater.” – St. Louis Post-Dispatch

And then there are the outdoor performances, with masks: “When a performer speaks a lot onstage, … masks become damp and stick to the skin, so each cast member goes through four or five of them over a two-hour performance.” – The New York Times

“It’s this process that we have spent decades, centuries developing in theatre of how much time it takes to make the thing. In my experience, the process will expand to fill as much time as you give it. So we’ve put ourselves in a place where we say, it’s going to take this many weeks to rehearse and this many hours to tech, and we take that as gospel now.” – American Theatre

One of the key facets of Jonas Barish’s argument is that, throughout history and across cultures, theatrical activity has almost always been met by vociferous opposition. From ancient Greece, when Plato wrote that acting and the theatre would be excluded from his ideal state, to the Soviet era in Russia, when strict governmental regulation dictated what type of work theatre artists were permitted to create, theatre has been subject to both philosophical criticism and material censorship. – Howlround

“It was not immediately clear how many shows would be eligible for consideration. Twenty plays and musicals opened during the abbreviated 2019-20 season, but a few might be deemed ineligible because they were open for such a short period of time that not enough Tony nominators or voters got a chance to see them.” – The New York Times

On the day in March when the Bay Area got lockdown orders, Berkeley Repertory Theatre called the cast of Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play, which was still in rehearsal, to come in on their day off. When the actors arrived, they were told to get into costume and perform the play for video cameras before the company closed for the duration; Berkeley Rep then sold tickets to stream that video in lieu of the cancelled performances. Now two members of the School Girls cast argue that that day constituted a series of contract violations, and they’re pursuing action against both Berkeley Rep for doing what it did and Actors’ Equity for permitting it. – San Francisco Chronicle

“The theaters are mostly small, and it remains unclear how calls for change in the industry will (or won’t) affect life at larger institutions, many of which have been programmatically and financially hobbled by the coronavirus pandemic.” But this year’s calls for equity are starting to have an effect. Says William Carden, outgoing artistic director of New York’s Ensemble Studio Theater, “The key to antiracism is sharing power. It takes a lot of work and a lot of humility, and it requires that white people step aside.” – The New York Times

Theatre union: “The entire industry has been shocked by Cameron Mackintosh’s unwillingness to use the coronavirus job retention scheme in full or deploy resources beyond the furlough months to support his backstage and front of house staff. Other West End employers have done their utmost to find creative ways to safeguard the livelihoods of their staff and pursue the bigger mission of saving the world class skills and talents critical to the success of theatres up and down the country.