The achievements of Lin-Manuel's Hamilton are significant and expansive, so much so that I need not add to the proliferation of reviews, essays, parodies, think pieces and so on engendered b…
"In America, where we have diverse populations, even if you're in a community theatre, I think it's better to not do the show rather than do it in yellowface or blackface." "The show" in que…
When a student-devised piece of theatre begins as The Politics of Dancing, an examination of relationships springing from Ibsen's A Doll's House, and is ultimately produced as This …
Hearing the word 'vagina' aloud before 1996, outside of a medical setting, was a bit startling. Encountering it in an article was likely to cause many readers more than a bit of surprise. Se…
If you're not familiar with Julia Pascal's 2003 play Crossing Jerusalem, that's because the play has only had two productions in the U.S. Or perhaps it is more correct to say that it has …
There's nothing quite like getting a cease and desist letter. It may be commonplace if you're an attorney and you're receiving a cease and desist claim on behalf of clients, but for artis…
Let's start with the basics: no one can possibly prevent critics from reviewing shows if they want to do. Whether it's requested or even imposed by theatre company, a venue, a rights holder,…
I am not given to reveries about bygone days or a review of my life choices on my birthdays. The same holds true for New Year's eve and day. But just in time for my birthday this year,…
It's a reflex action for those in the arts to recoil and get angry when creative work is described as "intolerable blasphemies." But it's probably worth giving a small shout out to the Ameri…
"Welcome to a new kind of tension. All across the alienation. Where everything isn't meant to be okay." The details are very sketchy. The drama director hasn't yet responded to a call or …
At first, they were a few lunchtime tweets, which proved of little interest, it seemed. But when I collected a couple, and added a few more, for a Facebook post at 9:30 pm on New Year…
If the location of your office compels you to visit Times Square regularly, you are confronted at least twice a day (going to work and on your way home) by a crush of people, gaping tourists…
Oh, New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players, what are we going to do with you? It was surprising to many that you thought you could do a "classic" yellowface Mikado in New York in 2015. But yo…
I was certainly going to the theatre, and to Broadway, by the 1980s, but I never did see a show in the Mark Hellinger Theatre on 51st Street before it was sold to the Times Square Church. I'…
I honestly wish I could figure out what makes one blog post a roaring success, and another a blip on the radar. Certainly the topic under discussion has some impact, but readership seems jus…
If you're a dedicated fan of the musical Hamilton, or if you follow me on social media, you may well have come across of the streetside #Ham4Ham show videos I've been sharing since late July…
There's been a great deal of discussion in the past couple of months about the rights of playwrights, the legal protections of copyright and licensing agreements, the prerogative of director…
In the wake of the recent casting controversies over Katori Hall's The Mountaintop and Lloyd Suh's Jesus in India, there have been a number of online commenters who have cited Lin-Manuel Mir…
I assume most people, either as a child heard, or as a parent deployed, the timeworn phrase, "If someone told you to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it?" My parents had a variant …
I am delighted to report that all of the smoking, drinking, drugging and sexual references will be intact " tonight, tomorrow and Sunday " in the production of Maxwell Anderson's 1950s ps…
"I come at this more like a lawyer, who would say that everybody has a right to a fair trial. Or a journalist, or a priest, who would hear the confession." " Anna Deavere Smith On Novembe…
In the many press accounts of director Michael Oatman casting a white man to play Dr. Martin Luther King in Katori Hall's The Mountaintop, stories have all acknowledged Oatman's orig…
"What will you learn?" asks the home page of the website of Clarion University in Pennsylvania. In the wake of the school's handling of the casting of white students in Asian roles in Llo…
"The students are victims," writes playwright Lloyd Suh, regarding the events that led to his play Jesus in India being canceled a little more than a week before it was to be produced at Cla…
Four words. Why do four words bother me so much? After all, they appear in one review of an As You Like It production at the National Theatre in London that I'm highly unlikely to ever se…