A game show that asks audiences whether or not to award someone U.S. citizenship sounds like a twisted kind of dystopia. But for the co-creators of American Dreams, an interactive production staging live online performances through Nov. 15, that unsettling premise is closer than it may seem to the truth. “Every time you vote, you’re choosing how this country operates,” said Tamilla Woodard, director and co-creator of American Dreams, which was originally conceived as an in-person performance and mounted at Cleveland Public Theatre in 2018. Woodard and American Dreams writer and co-creator Leila Buck adapted the show for a virtual run […]
Theater
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Pennsylvania State Representative Wendy Ullman and Governor Tom Wolf were caught joking off camera about taking their masks off just before they spoke at a press conference touting the need to defend Obamacare during Covid-19. Just as Ullman was preparing to speak behind the podium on Tuesday at a press conference north of Philadelphia, Wolf can be heard off camera to her left, saying: “So Wendy, I’m gonna take, I’m gonna take my mask off when I speak.”Ullman walks toward Wolf, off camera, and says: “I will as well, just, I’m waiting so that we can do a little political theater.” […]
It is, allegedly, the last time we will see Richard Nelson’s Apple family during the pandemic. How are the liberal, white, arty, upstate-dwelling American upper-middle classes feeling as lockdown eases and the election approaches? The last of a trio of plays, Incidental Moments of the Day suggests the answer is, as confined and confused as the rest of us. Here again, discussing, needling, laughing, and consoling are siblings Barbara (Maryann Plunkett), Richard (Jay O. Saunders), and Jane (Sally Murphy), with Marian (Laila Robins) mostly absent out on a date, and Jane’s partner Tim (Stephen Kunken), an actor turned restaurant manager, away […]
Theatre for One: Here We Are boils drama down to essentials: one viewer, one actor, and a visceral live-wire connection that manages to transcend physical space. Presented by Arts Brookfield and billed as a digital theatrical experience, the eight micro-plays burn fast and bright, pairing one performer with one audience member for a live two-way video call. Written, performed, and directed by Black, indigenous, and other racial minority women artists, Theatre for One connects viewers screen-to-screen with characters whose stories are reflected among ongoing global calls for racial justice. Viewers are first instructed to enter a 10-digit code on the website’s […]
We Gawk At Nonsense Political Theater While The Real Enemies Go Unnoticed By Lee Camp, Consortium News. August 27, 2020 We Gawk At Nonsense Political Theater While The Real Enemies Go Unnoticed2020-08-272020-08-27https://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/12/popres-shorter.pngPopularResistance.Orghttps://popularresistance-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/08/woman-face-thoughts-media-head-question-mark-circle-tree-structure-e1598549191470.jpg200px200px Looking beyond the distractions, one can see what really matters, like detecting cancer. Donald Trump speeches. Celebrity tweets. Corporate news repetition. Chaos. Vapidity. Manufactured dissent. Graphic fighting sports. This is what fills our field of vision. It consumes our thoughts, overflows our brains with anti-intellectual mud. Yet most of these things are the bug splatter across the windshield. They are not the actual highway, the path forward, actually deserving […]
More than once in our conversation, the Broadway producer Brian Moreland qualifies an optimistic thought with, “I know that sounds very Pollyanna of me.” Moreland, one of the few Black producers working on Broadway, is hopeful for not just the healthy, post-pandemic return of Broadway, but also for a renewed kind of commercial theater which looks, sounds, and feels more diverse. “I feel there’s change in the air,” he told The Daily Beast. The lead producer of upcoming productions of Charles Randolph-Wright’s play Blue (which had been set to open at the Apollo Theater in May) and Keenan Scott II’s Thoughts of […]
A Portland theater has cancelled a planned showing of the 1990 comedy Kindergarten Cop because some social justice warriors complained on Twitter that it glorifies policing. The film was scheduled to be played during the Northwest Film Center’s summer drive-in series “for its importance in Oregon filmmaking history” because it was shot in Astoria. The theater daring to show a classic funny movie about a cop prompted a clearly bored activist named Lois Leveen to rant and rave on Twitter about how glorifying police in schools is racist. “National reckoning on overpolicing is a weird time to revive Kindergarten Cop. IRL, we are trying […]
Earlier this week, a New York Times article read: “Hands are out as Congress is set to begin negotiating a new round of pandemic stimulus. Airlines, hotels, restaurants. Military contractors and banks. Even Broadway actors.” That “even” hit many of us working theater artists hard. Let me tell you why. The arts in New York City is a major economic engine. According to a study commissioned last year by the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Entertainment, theater is responsible for $1.3 billion in annual economic output, 8,409 jobs, and $513 million in salaries. The Broadway closedown, effective from March 12, has […]
https://cdn1.img.sputniknews.com/img/107975/13/1079751335_0:231:3007:1923_1200x675_80_0_0_d888af644869b0cc153f8f759dec225e.jpg Sputnik International https://cdn2.img.sputniknews.com/i/logo.png Sputnik https://cdn2.img.sputniknews.com/i/logo.png https://sputniknews.com/europe/202006291079751371-at-least-1-person-injured-in-explosion-at-helsinki-city-theater–reports/ MOSCOW (Sputnik) – At least one person was injured on Monday in an explosion that hit Helsinki City Theater located in the Finnish capital city, media reported, citing the local police. According to the Yle News outlet, there is no indication that the blast was deliberate. The local police and rescue services arrived at the site, while journalists have been denied access to the building. The theater’s technical director, Atti Rehtijarvi, told the news outlet that there were about 100 people in the building at the time of explosion, as regular maintenance was being […]
MOSCOW—When Russia’s leading contemporary theater and film director Kirill Serebrennikov and his three colleagues went on trial, virtually all of Russia’s cultural elite, nearly 4,000 actors, poets, writers, and directors demanded authorities stop the shameful proceedings. Even the most careful celebrities stopped being careful and made public comments condemning the prosecution. “We tried to sit quietly but they continued to open our wounds with this case.” — Chulpan Khamatova, actress What they realized as they watched this case taking shape was that in Russia today any famous personality can be charged with some sort of cooked-up crime, arrested, and convicted. Dozens […]
This year’s season of “Pride Plays,” produced by Rattlesticks Playwrights Theater in New York City, is showing online at Playbill.com. This is the first of two articles focusing on the Black queer playwrights with plays in the season. Rodney Hicks’ play, Just Press Save, is about the hopes, fears, and intrigues of a group of six high school seniors, including twins who are undocumented immigrants and a Black trans man. Hicks, 46, is also an actor who starred in the original productions of Rent and Come From Away. Just Press Save is directed by Michael Greif, who directed Hicks in the original production […]
The inaugural Antonyo Awards chose the evening of Juneteenth to honor the work of Black theater artists on and off Broadway with a virtual celebration. With the 2020 Tony Awards postponed indefinitely due to the coronavirus pandemic, and in the midst of a global uprising calling out the value of Black lives, the streaming event was a welcome moment to acknowledge the extraordinary achievements of Black theater artists in a season that was cut short and put to bed with little fanfare. “The Antonyo Awards seek to fill the gap between Black talent and public acknowledgement,” said Drew Shade, founder of […]
Thousands of theater professionals assembled this week for #BwayforBLM, a three-part online forum that was raw, emotionally charged, and bracingly frank about the systemic problems plaguing the medium’s white-dominated spaces and institutions. The forum took place amid a global uprising over the death of Black Americans at the hands of police, and a reckoning with anti-Black racism across a growing number of industries—including media, retail, and tech. The event closed out a week that also saw the circulation of an open letter, “We See You, White American Theater,” decrying racist structures and practices across the profession nationally, signed by more than […]
Retired St. Louis Police Captain David Dorn was murdered last week outside of Lee’s Pawn and Jewelry in North St. Louis City. Advertisement – story continues below The looters then broke in the store and looted it as dozens of cars drove by on Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive. David Dorn was 77-years-old when he was gunned down by looters. He lay outside the store bleeding as his death was captured on Facebook Live. TRENDING: “I Should Never Have Been There” – Gen Mark Milley Stands with the Mob – Apologizes for Walking to Torched St. John’s Church with President Trump […]
Tonight should have been the Tony Awards. But Broadway has been shut since March 12, and with it the postponement of those shows (and cancellation of a few others) that would have qualified for them. Indeed, this year the Awards feel a faraway shadow—and not just because there is no Broadway to fuel a ceremony right now. The death of George Floyd and subsequent protests and debates about racism and change have led Broadway and the wider world of theater—like many individuals and institutions—to necessarily question itself, not for the first time, about the need for urgent change. Yet again, theater […]
Larry Kramer, the late LGBTQ and AIDS activist, author and playwright, has been much praised and analyzed over the last 24 hours. But Larry Kramer was also both a friend and professional collaborator to many. Lost amid the tales of fire and brimstone are stories of a certain paisley pocket, an unexpected delivery of chicken soup, and the linking of arms late at night on a Broadway street. On Wednesday, in my obituary of Kramer, who died Wednesday at the age of 84, I mulled what people invariably mention most about Kramer: his anger. That anger, as I wrote, could be […]
Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, makes clear she does not “have a crystal ball.” But her personal belief is that Broadway will reopen in January 2021, she reveals in an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast. For St. Martin, Broadway’s post-pandemic reopening means safety protocols being in place to ensure audience members can sit next to each other as they did before, likely—at least in the first phase of reopening—wearing masks, with actors, singers, and dancers able to perform in the same numbers and proximity, and with the same energy, as before. “We know that we cannot […]
President Donald Trump is thirsting to hold campaign rallies again. And among his campaign and White House advisers, a possible solution has been discussed that could allow for such MAGA gatherings even in the midst of a global pandemic: the mostly defunct, rural tradition of the drive-in movie theater. According to three people familiar with the preliminary discussions, Trump aides and operatives have spent weeks exploring alternatives to the standard Trump 2020 rally that could allow for social distancing while still allowing for a modest number of attendees. Much of the focus has been on sprawling outdoor venues, such as large […]