219 stories from Howard Sherman
A great deal has been written about the diminishment of arts journalism in general, and criticism in particular. Editors want to focus more only on big name productions, or celebrities, as b…
A few weeks ago, the headline of a review rubbed me the wrong way.
I didn't have an issue with the review itself, by Charles McNulty for The Los Angeles Times. But the headline for the pi…
As I write, if you visit the website of the Fargo Moorhead Opera, you'll find an evocative image of a beautiful young Asian woman used in conjunction with the company's production of Madama …
People are dumbfounded. People are incredulous. People are angry.
In the past few hours, a month-old story began circulating on social media about a production of Katori Hall's widely…
"Is there a link for this so I can read the whole thing if there's more?"
"Maybe this wants to grow up and become a blog post?"
"I've been encouraging him to do so!!!!"
"This, I fee…
"This is a community art, built only on the goodwill between artists, and there isn't enough money to bring in lawyers."
If you ask me, that quote in The Los Angeles Times, from playwrigh…
Please consider the following two statements.
In a description of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado: "The location is a fictitious Japanese town."
"There are no ethnically specific rol…
Members of the Greensboro College community have the right to be free from gender-based discrimination, sexual harassment, and sexual misconduct of any kind.Â
" from the Greensboro Colle…
If you haven't been reading Toronto's The Globe and Mail every weekend this summer, then you likely haven't come across J. Kelly Nestruck's terrific series in which he followed a single h…
Four years ago, I pondered whether, in this age of social media and vastly accelerated information distribution online, "Will The Embargo Hold?" I was referring to the long-accepted practice…
Labor negotiations only tend to break into the news when they concern large public sector unions or when things are going badly. This does not concern the former or, so far as I know, the la…
It would be hypocritical of me to speak out against precisely how people have expressed their feelings about, and to, Words Players Theatre in Rochester, Minnesota, because I spend so much o…
It is not my habit to offer my opinion about current productions, and I tend to even avoid doing so retrospectively. But I do want to briefly discuss the shows I've seen over the past week o…
It is, without question, the feel-good theatre and pop culture copyright story of the day.
"Taylor Swift comes to rescue of Sydney's Belvoir Street Theatre over use of hit song Shake It Off…
Last weekend, I shared a story and wrote a blog post about Dylan Lawrence, a 13-year-old in Lincoln, Nebraska who staged what appeared to be a fairly impressive production of Shrek The Music…
I should say right up front that, until about two hours before I began writing, I didn't know anything about the Words Players Theatre of Rochester MN or its parent organization, Northland W…
Sundays tend to be slow days for theatre news, if you get most of your theatre news online. By the time I sit down to trawl through "the Sunday papers" for theatre stories to share, primaril…
Seemingly out of nowhere, The Wall Street Journal published a column yesterday, "A Silenced Shakespeare in Washington:Â Shakespeare without puns is like French cooking without butter,"Â …
If you are a musical theatre fan in general, and a Rent fan in particular, and you're going to church in or around Tullahoma, Tennessee this Sunday, there's a chance you may not like a bitÂ…
"You can't draw sweet water from a foul well," critic Brooks Atkinson wrote of his initial reaction to the musical Pal Joey. I don't know whether Christopher Hart of The Sunday Times in Lond…
If you're like me, someone deeply committed to the arts " in practice, in education, in media coverage, in every aspect of life " you've probably had the same fantasy I've had over the years…
'You give us $150 dollars and we'll review your show.' It sounds like a bizarro-world version of 'You give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world.'
But that is, boiled to its essence, what…
I can't compete with the literally hundreds of online tributes that are proliferating in advance of David Letterman's final show this evening, except to say that I've been watching him since…
The story practically writes itself: fundraiser for anti-censorship group gets censored. Ironic headline, attention-grabbing tweet, you name it. That's exactly what has happened in the past …
"You know, if we all agreed to stop putting critics' quotes in our ads, they'd lose their power over us, and we could just sell our shows on what we think is best about them."
I will conf…
