“Children’s museums have led the way in the museum field regarding play and its positive effects on brain development – and now all types of museums are using play and touch to engage children and adults in interactive learning.” – Christian Science Monitor
Tag: 01.15.19
Community Youth Theater Ordered To Pay $450K For Copyright Infringement
A U.S. federal court in Virginia ordered Theaterpalooza Community Theater Productions, Inc. to pay damages and and attorney fees to Music Theatre International, the major licensor for musicals, after Theaterpalooza staged at least 16 musicals (including Matilda, Seussical, and Little Shop of Horrors) without licensing and the company’s owner ignored repeated cease-and-desist letters. — Playbill
How To Create A “Viral” Play (What Is That?)
Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour: “Marketing-wise at the time I didn’t have anyone helping me, so I put my email address in the show. I urged people to write to me. I asked a random audience member to keep the script after the show; it’s my way of spreading the word. It was a strategy and it worked.” – American Theatre
Using Virtual Reality To Design New Musical Instruments For The Disabled
The leader and a researcher from the Performance Without Barriers project write about how, always working with disabled performers themselves, they’ve adapted VR technology to augment the instrument of a blind clarinetist and create an entirely new instrument for a musician with cerebral palsy. — The Conversation
What Does It Mean To Be A “National” Theatre?
Put the word “national” in your name and you become a receptacle for a country’s values. In what you do, the nation will seek to see the very definition of itself; a definition perhaps vaguely articulated, but intensely felt. Change your priorities, by being too regal or not regal enough, and you upset the nation’s sense of its own identity. – Irish Times
Portland For Dance (No, Really)
In the past few years numerous choreographers and dancers have moved to the city. There’s space and audiences. And now there’s an interesting dance scene. – Oregon Arts Watch
Are Some Ideas Too Extreme To Be Expressed?
Which beliefs exactly should be judged as “out of bounds”—and who gets to be the referee? How wide is the circle of ideas that are not even worthy of discussion? Such questions are themselves open to debate, and the judgments we make about them in particular cases will tend to be provisional. Still, this is preferable to the alternative. For there is a growing cost to pretending we’ve arrived at a settled consensus about their answers, or to denying that they are even real questions. – The Point
Playwright Ishmael Reed’s Problems With “Hamilton”
It’s a global phenomenon, and people ask me, “Why take on a global phenomenon?” You know what else is a global phenomenon? Gone With the Wind. I think Hamilton is probably the biggest consumer fraud since The Blair Witch Project. – The Observer (UK)
Generational Change: Regional Theatre Pioneer Emily Mann Leaves McCarter
Mann didn’t just lead Princeton’s $23 million theatre from a respected regional outpost to a Tony-winning incubator of new work and new talent. While there she also built on an already ground-breaking career as a documentary-play creator and feminist director to create signature American works as Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years. Her stamp is on not only generations of theatre artists but creative administrators as well. – American Theatre
New Film Shows Us An Actual Soviet Show Trial
In The Trial, Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa and his team use only rare, recently-discovered film (with sound) of a full 1930 show trial in Moscow. Masha Gessen explains just how fitting the term show trial is: “the judges, the prosecutor, the court clerks, and the defendants are all members of the cast. They are performing their assigned roles. The rest of the people in the hall — men and women of different ages, some dressed in military uniforms and some in civilian suits, but all wearing their best — are the audience, and their job is to believe everything they see.” — The New Yorker