I often feel alone. My life experiences and the demands of my day-to-day are so specific to my life producing and performing in small budget theatre that it often feels that outside of rehearsal I can go for days without running into (a non-wife) someone who truly understands what I’m...
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...
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...
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...
Actors are not alone in needing to manage nerves, but compared to most professions, yours is unique in terms of how frequently you are placed in nerve inducing situations in order to get the job. Think of the engineers, nurses, teachers, etc. you know, and then of the frequency they...
You don’t have to program it during the holidays to sell a bunch of easy tickets. That tactic works for lots of companies though, which made me wonder why. With anything as big as A Christmas Carol, there is more than one reason. Holidays are full of rituals, marking or...
I think I had Twitter open for all of ten seconds today when this story popped up: Chipotle cups will now feature stories by Jonathan Safran Foer, Toni Morrison, and other authors. I didn’t even have to click on the link, because I’ve been waiting for them to try this...
We’ve Named the Problem. Now what? Unless you’ve been living under a rock the last week (in which case, I hope it’s been warm!), if you’re in the theatermaking world, you are likely aware of the fallout from an event Twitter dubbed #thesummit. For the uninitiated, Brett Steven Abelman posted a...