I suspect that, for many working in the arts, the weekday matinee is no man’s land. I’m not suggesting that we don’t operate them, or deal with them, but I do wonder the last time any of you have had occasion to attend one as a member of the audience....
They come, with startling regularity, on Monday and Tuesday each week. “The Grosses.” The Broadway League aggregates and releases the gross sales and attendance for every Broadway show on Monday afternoons (Tuesdays when there’s been a holiday), and a wide range of outlets dutifully report on the biggest hits, the...
“Everyone,” I wrote in a tweet to promote my previous blog post, “enjoys a good blurbing now and again.” Although I didn’t mind if someone read some perverse double entendre into “blurbing,” it was neither euphemism nor metaphor. I was referring to the time-honored and oft-criticized practice of skillfully extracting...
Previously in this column: The members of Bright Alchemy Theatre, a very young devised theatre company based in Washington, DC, have spent the last nine months working on its new project which began with the question: Why do we as a species feel the need to tell stories about our...
I promise, this is not another premature eulogy for Steve Jobs. I saw this on Google+ this morning. This is an old video of Steve Jobs responding to a critic at the World Wide Developers Conference in 1997, shortly after Jobs returned to Apple. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE[/youtube] One thing immediately jumped out...
It’s been a month since the first Dramatists Guild National Conference. In that month, three things have stayed with me: Mame Hunt’s declaration to playwrights to stop writing realism, Julia Jordan’s keynote speech on gender parity, and Marsha Norman’s comment that we need to hear everyone’s stories at the gender...
or, How Meta-Conversations are Taking Over Our Theatres Photo illustration featuring members of American Theater Company. (William DeShazer/Tribune / July 2, 2011) My friend Briana, a brilliant arts educator and visual artist, alerted me (via a tag on Facebook) to an article about the rising phenomenon of texting in the...
In case you’ve been in a coma for the last year, there’s this Broadway musical, it’s called Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, and it’s made some headlines. There were accidents and script problems and fights with critics and the official opening kept being pushed further back and back and back...
“THE CRITICS AGREE!” Urban legend or not, this was the marquee tagline someone told me about years ago, something a theater company posted after their show received unanimously bad reviews. I like the integrity of it: not including the negative assessments on the marquee or poster, but still wanting to...