Reflections on Theater Etiquette
by Kirk Woodward[If it seems like I’m turning ROTover to my friend Kirk Woodward, you aren’t far from wrong. (Well, to be honest, starting the blog was his idea.) Kirk turned in “Religious Drama,”...
View Article'A Man’s a Man'
On 24 and 27 January, I published a two-part theater-history article on ROT called “Dueling Brechts” which related the saga of two nearly simultaneous Off-Broadway productions of Bertolt Brecht’s play...
View ArticleMore on Movicals
[In December 2013, two periodicals ran articles on stage musicals based on films. Readers of ROT will recall that on 20 September, I posted my own article, “Movicals,” which traced the history and...
View Article'Newsies'
My mother came to New York City for a visit at the beginning of February and I thought a Broadway show would make a nice treat. She hadn’t been for a long visit in quite a while and there never seemed...
View ArticleShaliko's 'Strangers,' Part 1
[I’ve written several times before on ROT about Leonardo Shapiro, the experimental theater director I knew in the 1980s and ’90s, and the downtown New York troupe he founded and directed, The Shaliko...
View ArticleShaliko's 'Strangers,' Part 2
[Here’s the second (and last) part of my analysis and examination of Leonardo Shapiro’s last big performance piece, Strangers, built with his New York City company, The Shaliko Company. I pick up here...
View Article'Kung Fu'
David Henry Hwang has been writing his whole career about the culture clash between East and West. He’s based plays on his own family (Golden Child, reported on ROT on 9 December 2012) and Chinese...
View Article'The Open House'
Family plays. We’ve been staging the sagas of troubled families since at least Aeschylus’ Agamemnon in the middle of the 5th century BCE; probably the most dysfunctional family is the one in...
View ArticleArts & Education
[In the past several months, the PBS program NewsHour ran two reports on arts programs in public education, a subject readers of ROT will know is important to me. The first report, “Arts Education,”...
View ArticleThe Last Frontier, Part 1: The Land Tour
[Almost a dozen years ago, my mother and I took a trip to Alaska, principally to see the fjords along the southeastern coast. The trip, booked through the Holland America Line, was a combination of...
View Article'Appropriate'
This season at the Signature Theatre Company has been a different experience for me. For a combination of reasons, first the constitution of the schedule as an All-Premiere Season made up of plays by...
View ArticleThe Last Frontier, Part 2: The Inside Passage (Seward to Sitka)
[In Part 1 of “The Last Frontier” (posted on ROT on 26 March), I described the land-tour portion of my 2003 trip to Alaska and the Inside Passage. In the continuation of the log of that trip, my...
View Article'The Most Happy Fella'
I haven’t gone to a lot of Encores! Shows over the years, but all of a sudden, they’re offering some that interest me for various reasons. Last July, I saw Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock...
View Article“Sign of the Times: The Geopolitics of Name-Dropping”
by Liesl Schillinger [The world changes. Even within our own lifetimes. If you travel at all, you’ve probably visited some country that didn’t exist a decade or two ago—or one that’s got a different...
View Article'New Jerusalem' (2008)
[Next week, I’ll be publishing my report on a performance of David Ives’s new play, Heir Apparent, an adaptation of the 18th-century Le Légataire universel byJean-François Regnard (1655-1709). I’ve...
View Article'The Heir Apparent'
On Friday evening, my theater companion, Diana, and I met at the Classic Stage Company’s East 13th Street home to see the New York première of David Ives’s The Heir Apparent. I’ve seen a couple of...
View ArticleThe Last Frontier, Part 3: The Inside Passage (Juneau and Ketchikan)
[I left off “The Last Frontier” with Part 2 on 5 April. It covered the first leg of the cruise down the southeastern coast of Alaska, through the Inside Passage from Seward, where we embarked on the...
View ArticleLady Gaga and 'Once'
by Kirk Woodward[Once again, my friend Kirk chimes in with an interesting contribution to ROT, this time covering two topics in tandem. He saw the Broadway production of Onceon a recent evening and...
View ArticleThe Last Frontier, Part 4: Vancouver, British Columbia
[This is the final installment of my Alaska travelogue, covering the added visit to Vancouver, British Columbia, following our disembarkation from the MS Statendam and the voyage down the Inside...
View Article'Pacific Overtures' (1976)
[While I was in the Washington, D.C., area recently, the Washington Post ran a brief column reporting that Jonathan Tunick, the orchestrator and arranger of many stage musicals, was the winner of this...
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