Performance Art, Part 1
[A number of years ago, I started making some notes on performance art, but I never did anything with them. A few weeks ago, I went back to the notes and brought them up to the current time, and below...
View ArticlePerformance Art, Part 2
[Picking up the history and development of performance art with the advent of the 1980s, Part 2 of my article will take that discussion into the 21st century and make a little prediction about its...
View ArticlePenny Arcade: Two Performances
[Earlier this month, I posted a two-part article on the history and development of performance art. Among the artists I named as examples or illustrations of the art form was Penny Arcade, a former...
View ArticleDispatches From Israel 3
by Helen Kaye[My friend Helen in Tel Aviv, who, ROT readers will recall, reviews for the Jerusalem Post, has sent me three recent notices from October. Two are classic plays, Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good...
View ArticleMaking Broadway Babies
[Over the past few years I’ve collected several articles, all from Allegro, that report on programs for children interested in musical theater. (Allegro is the member magazine of Local 802 of the...
View ArticleKids on the Broadway Boards
“GROWING UP BROADWAY”Meet Kid Actors From Cat, Annie, Matilda, Drood,and NewsiesBy Michael GioiaWith nearly half of Broadway shows currently on the boards populated with children under the age of 18,...
View Article'And Away We Go'
A few weeks ago, while my theater companion Diana and I were working out the schedule for some performances coming up this season, she raised the issue of an announced new play by Terrence McNally at...
View ArticleAmerican Exceptionalism
On Tuesday, 10 September, President Barack Obama delivered a short address from the White House on the subject of the potential use of military force by the U.S. against the regime of Bashar al-Assad...
View Article'That Hopey Changey Thing'
At the beginning of December, I made another visit to my mother in Bethesda, Maryland, after we spent Thanksgiving together with family in New Jersey. Mom and a friend have a subscription to the...
View Article'Chéri'
I’ve only seen one of Martha Clarke’s movement plays up to now, a revival of Vienna: Lusthaus at the New York Theatre Workshop in the East Village in July 2002. Though I could recognize Clarke’s...
View Article'The Last Two People On Earth'
In a crowded month of theater for me, as well as a somewhat varied one (one straight play—plus another one at the end of November—one monodrama, one dance-theater piece), comes now a self-described...
View Article'How I Learned What I Learned'
In June 2005, when the Signature Theatre first announced its 15th Anniversary Season, a two-year celebration ending with productions of August Wilson plays, I was excited for two reasons. The Wilson...
View ArticleThe Father of Actor Training: François Delsarte
Four years ago, I posted an article on ROT called “Psychological Gesture & Leading Center,” devoted to two acting techniques I learned in a class called How to Do Homework taught by Aaron Frankel...
View ArticleNobody Wants to See a Tired Bat on Stage
by Oona Haaranen[Oona Haaranen, a Finnish-born dancer and choreographer who came to this country 30 years ago, was a graduate student in a dance program whom I tutored in writing in 2007. I then began...
View ArticleStage Hands
[In recent months, the stage actors’ union has run articles about some of the work its members do in production other than playing characters on stage. Equity Newspublished a profile of the...
View ArticleReligious Drama
by Kirk Woodward[Once again my friend Kirk Woodward has submitted a fascinating piece of theater writing, a discussion of the work of French dramatist Paul Claudel and specifically his 1910 play, The...
View ArticleDueling Brechts, Part 1
[On 10 January, the Classic Stage Company began previews for its new staging of Bertolt Brecht’s A Man’s a Man (Mann ist Mann, sometimes translated as Man Is Man, as we’ll see, or even Man Equals Man)....
View ArticleDueling Brechts, Part 2
[“Dueling Brechts, Part 2” begins where Part 1, published at the end of last week, stopped, after detailing the history of Bertolt Brecht’sMann ist Mann and the rivalry between the two New York City...
View ArticleWords on Words
“DRAFT: Those Irritating Verbs-as-Nouns”by Henry Hitchings[As readers of ROT will know by now, one of my overriding interests in good writing, I’m a recovering writing teacher, having attempted to...
View ArticleCulture War
[When Hilton Kramer, New York Times art critic from 1965 to 1982, died on 27 March 2012 at 84, he was nearly universally lionized as a perceptive and knowledgeable commentator on the art of the 20th...
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