Short Takes: Some Unique Performances
[Back on 17 June, I posted another “Short Takes,” the ROT shorthand for a collection of brief articles usually too short to post on their own. That collection, subtitled “Some Art Shows,” consisted of...
View ArticleStephen Schwartz
by Kirk Woodward[Soon after I got out of the army in 1974 and moved to New York City, I started trying to catch up on theater. After almost five years of active duty, including 2½ in West Berlin,...
View Article'The Originalist' Squared
[I posted a report on a television performance of The Originalist,John Strand’s 2015 play about Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, back last year. I’ve now seen the play live, still...
View ArticleVerbification
[One afternoon earlier this month, I was riding the New York City Subway to an appointment uptown and I noticed a series of ads in the car in which I was riding. The ad was for Scentbird.com and the...
View ArticleSpeaking Truth To Power:
SHALIKO’S MYSTERY HISTORY BOUFFE GOOFFollowing 1986’s The Yellow House (see my report on Rick On Theater on 9 February), avant-garde director Leonard Shapiro (1946-97) put together a contemporary...
View Article"The Unique Experience of a Professional Broadway Understudy"
by Steve Adubato[I like to post articles on Rick On Theaterthat define, describe, or explain the efforts of theater workers about whom most non-theater people (whom one of my teachers dubbed...
View Article"In rural Oregon, regional theater sparks a creative revival"
by Jeffrey Brown[The following transcript is from a segment of PBS NewsHour on the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that aired on 24 August 2018.]A remote area of the Pacific Northwest might not sound like...
View ArticleAgatha Christie: Dramatist
by Kirk Woodward[This is Kirk Woodward's third guest post since August, after "Stephen Schwartz" on 2 August and his half of "The Originalist Squared" (paired with my own report) on 7 August. My...
View Article'Days to Come'
I haven’t been a fan of the Mint Theater Company since I first saw one of their productions a good many years ago. (The earliest one for which I have a report was 2003’s Far and Wide by Arthur...
View ArticleCaffe Cino, Part 1
[Almost seven years ago, I posted a two-part article on Rick On Theater called “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s” (12 and 15 December 2011). It was principally about the genesis of...
View ArticleCaffe Cino, Part 2
[Welcome back to Rick On Theater for the second and final part of “Caffe Cino,” my brief history of the Ur-theater of Off-Off-Broadway and its founder. If you haven’t read Part 1, I recommend going...
View Article"Gained in Translation"
by Laura Collins-Hughes[The article below, from the “Arts” section of the New York Times of 12 September 2018, reports the preparation of Craig Lucas’s I Was Most Alive With You, a play inspired by...
View Article"Focusing on 'Mean Girls'"
by Sopan Deb[“Focusing on ‘Mean Girls’” describes the process actress Jennifer Simard went through when she took over the parts played in the new Broadway musical, based on the 2004 movie that opened...
View ArticleLeon Gleckman: The Al Capone of Saint Paul
In the 1920s and ’30s, Saint Paul, the capital city of Minnesota, was known as a “crooks’ haven”—a sanctuary where bootleggers, bank robbers, and gangsters of all kinds from all over the Midwest came...
View ArticleInterviews with Two Theater Pros
from American Theatre[In the past two months, American Theatre, the Theatre Communications Group’s journal of the non-profit theater which is represents, published interviews with two especially...
View Article'Bernhardt/Hamlet'
[Theresa Rebeck’s Bernhardt/Hamlet is one of those plays that provokes so much commentary that there just isn’t room for it all in one post. It also provokes a lot of critical response, some of which...
View ArticleGeorge Abbott
by Kirk Woodward[Kirk’s newest contribution to Rick On Theater is a profile of George Abbott, the prolific (and all-around) stage-and-film eminence who lived—and worked—until the age of 107. He was...
View Article'History Keeps Me Awake At Night'
I was first introduced to the artist David Wojnarowicz when I worked with Leonardo Shapiro on Collateral Damage: The Private Life of the New World Order (Meditations on the Wars), a 1991 anti-Iraq war...
View Article“Light The Lights: A Focus On Lighting Design,” Article 1
[The July/August 2018 issue of the Theatre Communications Group’s American Theatre (vol. 35, no. 6) contained three special articles spotlighting (if you will) lighting design in the theater. On AT’s...
View Article“Light The Lights: A Focus On Lighting Design,” Article 2
[The July/August 2018 issue of the Theatre Communications Group’s American Theatre (vol. 35, no. 6) contained three special articles spotlighting (if you will) lighting design in the theater. On AT’s...
View Article