Theater punditry explodes between Tony nominations and Tony broadcast, sometimes in startlingly unconventional ways — not just a historical/statistical approach (More Tony Talk: The Record Holders) or a personal take (Take a beat, Broadway and To Be Nominated: An honor? Really?)  by  Matt Rodin, the star of “Beau the Musical,” but also Sara Farrington on the shoddy treatment of playwrights by American theaters, naming names, and suggesting what can be done about it – a post that has nothing to do with awards season; she just happened to write it this week.

These recent posts are in three theater newsletters – Ron Fassler, Fourth Wall, and Theater is Hard – that are among the MORE THAN SIXTY online outlets covering theater that Brian Eugene Herrera lists in his latest #TheatreClique newsletter: Haphazard INDEX of Theatre (& Theatre-Adjacent) Newsletters+

What’s most bracing about Brian’s cornucopia of theater and “theater adjacent” writers is that the list doesn’t even include many of the outlets I routinely feature in my occasional theater blog roundups, such as the one you’re currently reading. I’m still calling them theater blog roundups, even though there are not that many outlets left that call themselves blogs. Some do; the oldest and most consistent – among them Jan Simpson’s Broadway and Me,David Sheward’s The David Desk 2 and Samuel Leiter’s Theatre’s Leiter Side — are primarily focused on reviews of specific new plays and musicals. (Brian’s list does mention my blog,  NewYorkTheater.me, grouping it with the New York Times’s TheaterUpdate and three others as “’traditional’ theatre/performance blogs, websites, or news outlets.” I guess after 14 years, I’ll have to accept “traditional.”)

The posts (or whatever you call them) to which I link below are about Artificial Intelligence, Sondheim’s first drafts, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s latest musical,  bad audience behavior, and bills, bills, bills.

Photos above, theater writers formerly known as bloggers, left to right.
Top: Brian Eugene Herrera (#TheatreClique), Jan Simpson (Broadway & Me) Philip Boroff (Broadway Journal)
Middle: Chris Petersen (OnStage Blog), Matt Rodin (Fourth Wall), Sara Farrington (Theater is Hard)
Bottom: Ron Fassler (Ron Fassler), Ken Davenport (Ken Davenport), Elizabeth Vincentelli and Peter Marks (Marks and Vincentelli)

Farrington is certainly not alone in believing that, for individual artists, “theater is hard.” Sometimes the facts speak for themselves. In the latest “Bills,Bills, Bills,” part of the Nothing for the Group newsletter, two anonymous New York theater workers, one a freelance designer, the other a managing director and fundraiser, offer their financial diaries

At Broadway Journal, Philip Boroff assesses the season just passed in Broadway’s Missing Mojo: “Nonprofit companies scored this season; investors, not so much.” A couple of other recent posts offer juicy scoops:

The Warriors to open on Broadway: Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis’ adaptation of the 1979 movie and 1965 novel  is scheduled to open on Broadway in March 2027, contingent on theater availability
Titanique’s Tangled Scandal:  …Before it was on Broadway, the off-Broadway production secured a $4.3 million civil judgment against the general manager, Carl Flanigan

Ken Davenport writes about 5 Ways to Ethically Use AI in Theater (Without Selling Your Soul)
“If you use AI, it should never be to replace the art or the artist.  It should be used to find more efficient ways to get that art into the world.” The ways to use it include for research, first drafts for business documents, and accessibility tools, such as AI-powered captioning.

 In OnStage Blog, Chris Peterson writes disapprovingly about the Fountain Hills Theater in Arizona’s use of AI-generated instrumental orchestrations in its musical “Shrew.”  (which goes beyond Davenport’s five ways) “Theatres should stop acting shocked when people object to technology being slipped into the same spaces where human artists are already being asked to do too much for too little,” Peterson writes. “The endgame of AI should be to free up time to create more art, not less. “

In another post, Peterson asks Why Has Audience Behavior Gotten So Bad?, cites several examples (At Just in Time, Isa Briones criticized audience members for shouting references to The Pitt while she was onstage. At Beaches, Jessica Vosk described a “super fan” getting backstage and into the dressing-room area. In London, Cynthia Erivo stopped a performance of Dracula after reportedly spotting someone filming.”) and offers several reasons, chief among them phones, and the changing nature of fandom.

In the Library of Congress blog, British composer Ed Zanders reflects on “The Stephen Sondheim Collection, which the Library of Congress acquired last year.  “It became quickly clear that Sondheim crafts his lyrics through a process of constant refinement and purification. He said art itself was “an attempt to make order out of chaos,” and his songs too go through several cycles of chaos to order before reaching the shiny final product….As a writer it was also, frankly, encouraging to see how inelegant some of his initial attempts were! “

Marks and Vincentelli talk to The Balusters playwright David Lindsay-Abaire and cast member Richard Thomas. On Tap podcast offers an interview with critic Helen Shaw

Diving into the spirit of the theater award season, JKTheatre Scene presented its own quirky Reader’s Choice Awards. A sample:
Musical gone too soon: Boop
Outstanding Replacements: Isa Briones in Just in Time and Jack Wolf in Hadestown
Outstanding Villain: Ali Louis Bourzgui, of The Lost Boys (a show that won 12 of Reader’s Choice categories.)