Introducing … Bobby Bermea, who serves as the artistic director of BaseRoots Theatre, a newish theatre company in Portland, Oregon. BaseRoots was founded on Juneteenth, 2009, and its mission statement says that it’s “a group of professional theater artists organized to build bridges between communities by presenting classical and contemporary...
This is an extension of last year’s post, What’s in Your Lobby? Whether your theater company is itinerant or in a permanent space, and whether you are an arts administrator, an artistic director, or a fan, ask yourself: what is your lobby? Is it a living room? Is it a...
Talk all you want about supply and demand, at least we have a National Endowment for the Arts. For now. If you haven’t read this post by Frank Rizzo at the Hartford Courant about tomorrow’s proposal for cutting the NEA budget, go check it out. I suppose the good news...
I had the distinct pleasure of traveling to Arena Stage two weeks ago to be part of one of the most important national new play convenings in recent history. In 2011, the very act of discussing new work means you’ve got to be rabidly thorough about inviting in as many...
On the Life-cycle of the Theatre Lover Your patrons are all very old. They’re all going to die. What on earth will you do? Oh, dear. You’d better invest all your time and money into getting young people to come to the theatre, or in a few years, you’ll be...
“We cut and carve the body of a play to its peril.” – Harley Granville Barker In my philosophical approach to staging (and cutting) Shakespeare, I am very much a child of Harley Granville Barker. HGB, if you haven’t yet met him, was a director, an actor, a scholar and...
Currently the South Florida Theatre League is participating in a program called Capacity Building Miami. My board president, myself, and the board presidents, artistic directors and managing directors of about fifty Miami based arts organizations have signed on for a two year mentorship program with the Kennedy Center. I’ve been gushing...
Prepping a Shakespeare text for performance requires careful negotiation from the outset. As a director and voice and text consultant on productions, I work wearing a couple of dramaturgical hats. I’m mindful, firstly, of the practical aspects surrounding the task: proposed running time, budgetary constraints, cast size and casting choices...
So apparently the following is too “abusive” or “off topic” for the NY TIMES to post on its Arts Beat page. One thing you can’t do in posts, I guess, is criticize the critics. But because this conversation means a lot to me, and because I’ve been in it for...
The main thrust that came out of the #NewPlay Los Angeles (#LAThtr) watch party was that the issues we were hearing during part one of the action steps portion were not the same issues expressed from the Los Angeles theater practitioners in the room. Photo taken by Cindy Marie Jenkins...