Whether offering a Spring Review, or praising a Broadway run, or welcoming the news that the Washington Post will indeed be hiring a new theater critic after all, the theater bloggers below mix hope with worry, as if not quite trusting the light emerging after the darkness.
Jan Simpson offers her first Spring Preview since the pandemic, in which she catalogues specific shows she’s hopeful about — such as the three directed by Michael Greif and four “taking on big state-of-the-world subjects” that have her “really jazzed” (although one she’s since seen, which disappointed her.) But she also captures the hopeful mood of many theater lovers — not just theater bloggers — after such a long uncertain time
Philip Boroff’s blog posts tend to be scoops, which are then reported elsewhere, so consider these links recognition of his enterprise rather than information you don’t already know:
BROADWAY LEAGUE CHIEF ABRUPTLY EXITS
‘TITANIQUE’ & ATLANTIC WORKERS VOTE ON UNIONIZING
‘FORBIDDEN BROADWAY’ IS BROADWAY BOUND
Ken Davenport write about the 3 theater things I learned from the Super Bowl: Ticking clocks are exciting; things change fast; the impossible is sometimes possible (this is because people used to say that the Super Bowl would never be in Las Vegas, and this year it was.) Also: Usher should be back on Broadway.
I have another one: Could Broadway do the theatrical equivalent of Instant Replay? –Maybe at the curtain call, do a few of the best lines from the show we just saw? (I suppose they do that already in musicals when they replay the catchiest song)
In “Even shows that are so good so good so good must say goodbye,” Davenport is obviously not delighted that the show he produced “A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical” is closing in June, 18 months after it opened, but he puts a good face on the news (though his perspective is sobering): “We are one of the highest grossing and longest running new musicals to open in Broadway’s new (and challenging) post-pandemic world.” (“so good” etc. is a Diamond lyric.)
Howard Sherman recounts yet another incident of school officials shutting down a play, this time a teacher in Montclair High School stopping a scene from the Luna Stage world premiere production of “Rift, or White Lies,” a semi-autobiographical play by Gabriel Jason Dean about two half-brothers, one a college English professor, the other a convicted criminal and a white supremacist. The professional actors had traveled to the school to perform the play, with plans to lead a discussion afterwards.
Playwright Sophie McIntosh, who usually feels like “an apprehensive trespasser” when attending Shakespeare, describes why she fell in love with new non-hierarchical theater company Double Feature’s back-to-back productions of “Macbeth” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” inside, “(and, indeed, throughout)” a Brooklyn brownstone. “As I watched Macbeth and his banquet guests dissect putrid globs of orange Jell-O and dodged a popsicle lobbed from the balcony by a rowdy Athenian youth, I found myself not only having fun at a Shakespeare performance for one of the first times in my life, but actually connecting with Shakespeare’s work on a joyful, visceral level….And as I watched, I had a dazzling realization: I didn’t know that this was allowed to be for me.“
The Washington Post IS hiring a new theater critic. There was a fear that Peter Marks, who took a buyout after 21 years, would not be replaced. Several theater bloggers linked to (or reposted) the help wanted ad, and then offered their own implicit criticism of, as Chris Peterson in On Stage Blog puts it, “what theatre criticism has been for the past 100 years.” – offering “My Hopes for the Next Theatre Critic for the Washington Post”
Peterson also wrote a post, What should the criteria be for Broadway dimming their lights? – in response to the embarrassing back and forth over whether all 41 Broadway marquees should dim for Hinton Battle, the three-time Tony winner who died in January at age 67. He suggests three objective criteria:
Tony winners and nominees
Life span
Donation or philanthropy
Samuel Leiter has taken to reviewing theater-related books on his blog.
He calls Sir Patrick Stewart’s Making It So: A Memoir “about as smoothly digestible a personal account of a premiere actor’s life as one could wish. “
James F. Wilson’s Failure, Fascism, and Teachers in American Theatre: Pedagogy of the Oppressors , he callsa tidy, timely, and trenchant study about how teachers have been treated in 20th century drama
His review of Stephen J. Bottoms’s Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement doubles as a reminiscence of his own:
It’s taken me 18 years to get around to Stephen Bottoms’s jampacked critical history of Off-Off Broadway (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006, 401 pp), but I’m glad I finally got the chance, especially as I was at least a molecule in the remarkable moment it chronicles in modern American theatre. I was an undergraduate theatre student at Brooklyn College when the movement quietly began, graduating in 1962, and then leaving New York for two years to get my MFA in Hawaii. So I wasn’t able to participate at the beginning, which, had it been otherwise, might have radically changed my life’s direction.
An interview with Robert Softley Gale, the artistic director of Birds of Paradise, Scotland’s pre-eminent disabled-led theatre company, celebrating its 30th anniversary. “We are told over and over again that there aren’t any parts for disabled actors, and then when there are, they get played by non-disabled people.”
