Summer is normally a time for R&R – which for theater lovers can mean reading theater books and attending regional theater festivals. But the mood is more complicated these days, more tense (due in part to the news out of Washington), or at least more split. This is reflected in the posts and podcasts summarized and linked to below, from such regulars as (to go alphabetically) Philip Boroff, Ken Davenport, Don Shewey and Jan Simpson, returnees like Howard Sherman, and newcomers to this roundup like Michael Riedel.

In Another Eye Opens, Don Shewey reprints two articles he wrote long ago. The first, The Actor as Object of Desire, from the October 1990 issue of American Theatre Magazine “may be my single favorite thing I ever wrote. It’s my love letter to actors” (It is an engaging read.) The second is about director Mark Brokaw, which Shewey prefaces: “Kind, modest, talented theater director Mark Brokaw had a gift both for shepherding new plays into life onstage and guiding actors through the process of creating indelible performances. He died of cancer this week at the age of 67. I had the pleasure of interviewing him for the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times in 1997, when he was just emerging into the top echelon of stage directors in the US.”
In the piece, Paula Vogel talks about how Brokaw directed her Pulitzer winning play “How I Learned to Drive” using only chairs: He “embraced what the actual magic of theater is, which isn’t based on spectacle. You can create a far greater spectacle from actors and words alone.” The director says: ”I’m distrustful when everything’s already there

In “There’s Only Us” (the title a lyric from Rent), the Bad Boy of Musical Theatre’s Scott Miller looks to musicals as a way out of what he calls the “angry, dark, cultural and political cloud musicals hovering over us.” He writes: can musicals help us understand Trump and MAGA? Yes. They can. I think.”His post doesn’t explain how exactly, but rather makes a general argument for live theater. “All of this selfishness and apathy I witness is why live theatre is both awesome and necessary. It’s hard to disconnect when you’re in the same room with the storytellers and an audience… there’s a four-way connection in a live performance – among the actors onstage, among the characters inside the story, between the actors and audience, and among the audience.

In Broadway & Me, Jan Simpson offers her annual Theater Books for Summer Reading. “There are 16 of them this year, two for each of the official summer weeks. And as has become my custom, many of them are novels because I love stories set in the world of the theater.” One she mentions I’ve read, reviewed and recommend: Theater Kid: A Broadway Memoir by Jeffrey Seller.

Ken Davenport, who is lately full of “Joy” (that’s the title of the new musical he’s producing), analyzes why Broadway just had its best year ever – by which he means, it grossed more money. Bottom line: It’s all because of three shows, Othello, Goodnight and Good Luck, and Glengarry Glen Ross, or more precisely, the draw by the stars of those shows, Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal; George Clooney; and Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, and Bill Burr “Broadway owes a huge debt of gratitude to those stars for spending these weeks with us and getting a whole bunch of people to sit in our theaters.”

In Broadway Journal, Philip Boroff points out that the last two of those massive money-makers are getting millions of dollars in subsidies from New York State, and asks: Boondoggle Or Sound Policy? Clarifying The Broadway Tax Credit. The New York City Musical and Theatrical Production Tax Credit, he explains,  for a was Introduced in 2021 and has been extended for a second time, “is effectively a grant, subsidizes 25 percent of most production costs and is worth up to $3 million per Broadway show and $350,000 off-Broadway — regardless of need.”

A post-Tony piece in Broadway Journal makes clear that Maybe Happy Ending had two happy endings – it won the Tony award for best musical; it also engineers a turnaround in its finances, going from less than $300,000 weekly box office gross (way below its weekly expenses) to more than a million dollars a week.

In the Muse blog of the Library of Congress, which recently announced the acquisition of The Stephen Sondheim Papers, reposts Sondheim: An Appreciation by Mark Eden Horowitz. 

In OnStage Blog, Scott Rudin’s Return to Broadway: A Reckoning Revisited recounts the controversies and reports of abuse that pushed the producer to “step away” from in 2021, now that he is back with a new Broadway production, Samuel D. Hunter’s Little Bear Ridge Road. “Rudin’s presence feels like a step backward…No public apology tour. No engagement with the people he harmed. ..While some collaborators are already working with him again, others are left wondering if anything has really changed.”

OnStage Blog’s Chris Peterson asks: Why Don’t Sequels to Musical Work? citing as examples Annie Warbucks, Love Never Dies, Bring Back Birdie, and concluding. “Maybe the magic of a Broadway show is that it ends. And maybe we should just let it.

Howard Sherman looks at the embattled National Endowment for the Arts, and suggests: “maybe it’s time for the establishment of a true arts endowment – a foundation dedicated solely to the support of US arts and culture, independent of the government and established in such a fashion that future generations could not turn its attention to other needs. 

Among the latest theater podcasts:

The Drama Book Shop’s podcast, the Drama Book Show, features discussion of the anthology Beyond the Binary: Eight Non-Binary Plays.

Michael Riedel’s Singular Sensation offers three episodes on the making of the musical Chicago, including an interview with composer John Kander

Marks & Vincentelli talk to Jeremy McCarter about his six-part audio adaptation of “Hamlet” and to actor Jeff Hiller of Somebody, Somewhere on his recent memoir.  (My review of Actress of a Certain Age 

Brian Eugenio Herrera’s Substack #TheatreClique is itself a roundup of theater pieces, although he casts a wider net (including newspapers and magazines), and has lately started to add his personal take on shows he’s seen recently.. His latest #TheatreClique, “links out to pieces that consider what makes a play a political play; the techniques and histories of gender crossing performance; and unexpectedly enduring legacies.