At a Kansas University, Censoring a Student’s Anti-Censorship Project
The irony is almost too neat: a college student plans a program of songs from musicals that have faced censorship – and with less than two days’ notice, her university informs her she has to take it...
View ArticleDespite Pandemic, High School Shows Still Being Shut Down, For New Reasons
Given the disastrous reduction in live theatre that has marked the pandemic since March of 2020, one might assume that incidences of high school shows canceled over content concerns would have been...
View ArticleC-a-n-c-e-l-i-n-g ‘Spelling Bee’ at a Maryland Middle School
The communication announcing the cancelation of a production of the musical The 25thAnnual Putnam County Spelling Bee at Hyattsville Middle School in Maryland could not have been more terse....
View ArticleAt Neil Simon Festival, A Contest Entry Fee That’s No Laughing Matter
If one looks around the website of The Neil Simon Festival, a yearly theatre event held in Cedar City, Utah, there’s a list of donors to the company. On that list are seven entries at the $100+ level....
View ArticleTina Landau: “A Home in the Theatre”
I was asked to deliver the Keynote Address for BroadwayCon, a three day expo for fans of Broadway theater. The theme of the Opening Ceremony was “Home,” and included performances by Susan Egan...
View ArticleTeaching Students & Audiences About Swastikas, The SS and “The Sound of Music”
If you see a stage production of The Sound of Music, here are some words you won’t hear: Nazi. Hitler. Here are some words you will hear in the stage version: Gauleiter. Anschluss. Third Reich....
View ArticleWorry About The Censorship and Homophobia First, Then The Prayers
As word about a scuffle over a theatre production at Mitchell High School in Mitchell County NC has started to make its way beyond the local North Carolina media, accounts seem to be placing their...
View ArticleAt One California High School, Gender Neutral & Color Conscious Casting in...
Editor’s preface: Austin Tichenor of the Reduced Shakespeare Company wrote an extensive Facebook post after seeing a production of 1776, directed by his sister, the author of this essay, at their old...
View ArticleQuotation Marks Don’t Soften a Slur in Chicago
Now there is a redaction, an editor’s note, and an author’s apology. But for roughly 24 hours between Wednesday and Thursday this week, in a theatre review in the Chicago Reader, the racially...
View ArticleOn The Front Lines, In School And In Theatre
I am tired. I am tired of reading posts about “my rights” to a hobby that includes automatic rifles. You like guns, fine. But accept the fact that guns are dangerous and require strict regulations. I...
View ArticleJose Jimenez is Alive and Well and Performing in Utah
Even when intended benignly, brownface is an offense. Your saying the character is not a stereotype doesn't make it true.
View ArticleFacebook Needs To Explain Its Problem With A Sondheim Ad
As investigations into political tampering with the 2016 US election on Facebook have made headlines and perhaps spurred corporate introspection, one would hope that the company is in the process of...
View ArticleTelling James Franco’s lawyer, “Your client does not have any valid claim”
This summer, when an attorney for actor James Franco sent New York’s People’s Improv Theatre a cease and desist letter regarding the venue’s planned presentation of the play James Franco and Me, PIT’s...
View ArticleAt North Shore Music Theatre, An Absence of Race, Ethnicity and Understanding...
It’s a bit hard to follow the thinking of Bill Hanney, the owner and producer at North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly, Massachusetts. Initially, it was hard because Hanney was silent, not responding to...
View ArticleContrary to What You’ve Heard, You Can Cast Albee Plays Diversely
It is unlikely that many people in the theatre are unaware of the controversy that arose in mid-May, when a small Portland, Oregon theatre company proposed a production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid...
View ArticleJames Franco Won’t Like This and There’s Nothing He Can Do About It
Those who have followed the career of James Franco, and at times it has almost been hard to avoid, are aware that the actor had a period where he was a perpetual student, described in 2008 in Vanity...
View Article“Judas Iscariot” Doesn’t Deserve This Treatment
If you happen to be going to see the current production Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Last Days of Judas Iscariot at the Shelton Theater in San Francisco the next ten days, you’ll find an insert in the...
View Article“Assassins” in the Age of Trump
This week, Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s 1990 musical Assassins will have its first major New York performances since the 2004 Roundabout Theatre Company production*, in a concert version as part...
View ArticleSo Are They All, All Honorable Corporations
Does anyone remember last summer’s The Taming of the Shrew in Central Park? It opened with an entirely non-Shakespearean beauty pageant and talent show, led by a buffoonish figure costumed to look very...
View ArticleWas Boston Children’s Theatre Censored for Pushing Boundaries?
One doesn’t expect to hear the words “nudity” and “children’s theatre” discussed in the same sentence. But there’s been a lot of that juxtaposition going around up in Boston as a result of the Boston...
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