About six and a half years ago, we started the #2amt hashtag on Twitter. If you’re on this site, you know it’s a conversation about theatre–performance, production, promotional ideas, outreach, what have you. It’s been a wonderful conversation and community–and continuously active on the hashtag–from day one. This week, it’s...
The Chicago Reader published as careful and deliberate a piece of investigative journalism covering the arts as I can ever remember reading. In the piece Aimee Levitt and Chris Piatt laid out a history of mental and physical abuse and cultish insularity at Chicago’s Profiles Theatre that mirrors much of that...
Effort. Webster’s defines effort as “work done by the mind or body: energy used to do something.” I spend more time than you can imagine thinking about, analyzing, and trying to minimize effort required by a body to achieve anything – including the effort required to do nothing. My senses...
Although I was raised in the Catholic Church, I am not a practicing Catholic. The few times I have been in a house of worship in the past two decades involved either a wedding, a christening, or my mother’s funeral in 1995. Therefore, no one was more surprised than me...
This post may skate on the edge of self-promotion, because I am going to be drawing attention to a brief e-book I’ve co-authored; but I have a good story to tell about how this book is an example of the kind of unconventional theatre promotion we need more of. This...
I spent all day absorbing what people said about New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players’s now cancelled performance of The Mikado at NYU’s Skirball Center. I read blog posts, groaned at comment threads, and rolled my eyes when the Artistic Director of NYGASP posted that defensive statement on the organization’s...
A roundup of articles about the current and recent productions of The Mikado and the controversy surrounding them. Leah Nanako Winkler from Sept 2015: The Mikado in Yellowface is Coming to the Skirball Center of the Performing Arts and We Should Talk About It Howard Sherman from Sept 2015: Putting...
Why the Mikado is a No-No, and Other Painfully Obvious Realities About Race Representation in the Theatre Nearly 4 years ago, as a fresh face on New York’s scene, I attended the inaugural Asian American Performer’s Action Coalition (AAPAC) meeting held at Fordham University. A multicultural caucus of over five...
I have long had an interest in arts groups using transitioning commercial and retail spaces to alleviate space crunch. On hearing that Matt Cosper and his Charlotte-based ensemble XOXO are taking part in such a venture I asked him to write a little about the process and after it was...
We are not doing a great job of teaching our actors to care for their instruments properly. This is clear to me when I read (regularly) about an actor in a particularly difficult physical role answering questions with an attitude of “of course my back hurts every day,” “I have...