After spending an hour on Zoom with the Apple family in Richard Nelson’s latest low-key play, I was surprised by my reaction, which I could sum up as: Hallelujah! What Do We Need to Talk About? is splendid. Streamed live on April 29 but available on YouTube at least through May 3rd, this fifth play […]
Archives for April 2020
Review: Round House Theatre’s Homebound: Episode One, “Connect!”
The first episode of Round House Theatre’s new weekly webseries Homebound is a quick, slick, fluid slice of life in the pandemic. The opening sequence—a close-up of hand washing as if it’s an extreme sport followed by the required forehead temperature check—encapsulates the reality of America these last six-ish weeks. Then, flashes of the quarantine […]
Director Alan Schneider. Beckett and others trusted him with their world premieres.
One summer evening in 1941, a young graduate student home visiting his parents from Cornell University, attended a performance at Catholic University directed by Walter Kerr. Schneider was so taken with Kerr’s work that he went backstage and told him that he had never before seen anything of such high quality. Alan Schneider had been […]
Quarantine playlist: Daniella’s 6 comfort songs opens with Sondheim
It’s been about six weeks since I came back home to New Jersey after my college moved to online classes for the rest of the semester, and like many students, it’s taken some adjusting. At this point, it’s all about learning to be okay living in a period of waiting and finding the comfort in […]
Update: Jurisdictions struggle to get promised CARES Act unemployment benefits to theater workers
Updates: Maryland’s system for new unemployment claims suffered system crashes in its first weekend of operation, but is now (Monday, Apr 27) receiving applications. The District of Columbia began accepting claims as of this morning (Monday, April 27), however, they require that PUA applicants first file for standard unemployment benefits. Local governments in the DC […]
Broadway.com’s Sondheim’s 90 birthday. Rocky start. Brilliant finish. Watch it here.
To celebrate Stephen Sondheim’s 90th birthday, Raúl Esparza organized a concert extravaganza on the 50th anniversary of the opening of Sondheim’s Company, featuring some 45 songs and tributes which ran over two and a half hours last night and drew, at one point later in the show, close to 90,000 viewers. Jonathan Mandell at NewYorkTheater.me has […]
3 free must-sees this weekend
Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration Free Sunday, April 26, 8pm. New video link Legendary Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim will be toasted with an all-star birthday concert, streaming live on this Sunday. Hosted by Raúl Esparza, with musical direction by Mary-Mitchell Campbell, and coinciding with the 50th Broadway anniversary of Sondheim’s […]
Quotidian Theatre to stage one last play before closing. A casualty of Covid and time.
Quotidian Theatre, the Bethesda-based company which specialized in the work of Horton Foote and, to a lesser extent, Conor McPherson, will close its doors for good after a production of Foote’s The Day Emily Married, “most likely” next spring. The company will not mount its previously-scheduled performance of Ibsen’s Ghosts, which had been cancelled due […]
Hamilton launches free EduHam at Home learning and performances
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (GLI) and Hamilton have launched EduHam at Home, a free digital program for students and their families to explore the world of Hamilton and America’s founding era together—ultimately creating and performing their own narrative in the form of a song, rap, spoken word, or scene. Students follow in […]
Brush up your Shakespeare. It’s (almost) his birthday. Invites from 3 companies to celebrate
So Bill Shakespeare would have been 456 on Thursday, April 23, and under normal circumstances, I know, you would have been enjoying a fat goose and a few tankards of mead with a dozen or so of your besties. But: coronavirus. So now what? Do not despair. Three nearby Bard-centric theatre companies have your covered. […]
Review: The Grapes of Wrath, by ASC’s touring company, now online
Take an 80-year-old, 169,000-word novel, which begins with a journey halfway across the country, in the midst of the Depression, features the death of important characters, violent fistfights, a murder, the burning of a camp, a woman giving birth to a stillborn baby, which is moreover filled with pittoresque asides and a little bit of […]
How I got hooked on theatre: Simon Godwin
It began with sawdust, clowns, and the high wire. It began with walking excitedly across muddy English fields to a gaudy big top. It began with spectacle and a world elsewhere. Then, on my ninth birthday, sawdust met the stage when my mum took me to see the ultimate circus musical, Barnum, starring Michael Crawford […]
You must be logged in to post a comment.