WELCOME to the #TheatreClique Round Up — my (mostly) weekly newsletter dedicated to clicking on some of the most interesting, intriguing & noteworthy writing about drama, theatre & performance (at least, so says me)…
This Week's #TheatreClique-ing:
For this week’s opener, in part because West Side Story’s on my mind, I lift this conversation between NBC’s Lester Holt and “both” Anitas — Ariana DeBose and Rita Moreno…
And here is some what’s been clicking since my last newsletter…
at The Yale Review, director Liliana Blain-Cruz and playwright/composer Michael R. Jackson go deep in a far-reaching conversation about the future of theatre “post-pandemic” • at Forbes, theatre producer/journalist Lee Seymour assesses how an accumulation closures, accidents and illnesses remind us that “Broadway’s recovery is a work in progress” • and in Harvard Magazine, scholar/writer Robin Bernstein reflects on the experience of being (alive) in the audience of Broadway’s Company on November 26 — the day “lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim died [and] the Omicron variation of the COVID virus made headlines”…
at AmericanTheatre, scholar/critic Christian Lewis considers the centrality of guns in Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, the current Classic Stage production, and how it plays “in an age of mass shootings and the Capitol insurrection” • in New York Magazine, actor/advocate Colton Haynes offers a harrowing “first person” account of how starting out as an openly gay actor became a major “liability as I tried to make my way through the [entertainment] industry” in the early 2000s • at PublicBooks, medical-ethicist/writer Sharrona Pearl considers how playwright Sarah Ruhl’s Smile reaffirms the power of memoir to invite and activate feelings of connection, perhaps especially in our masked and disconnected present • and Princeton’s Jamie Saxon talks to interdisciplinary performance-maker (and my colleague) Elena Araoz about “going big and asking for the world” • Theatrely’s Nathan Pugh offers a searching, powerful review of the pre-Broadway production of A Strange Loop at DC’s Woolly Mammoth • and scholar/critic Christian Lewis — again at AmericanTheatre — “clock[s] the missed opportunities, missteps, and outright transphobic tropes in three currently running musicals”…
and — as if responding to scholar Jeffrey Melnick’s invocation — “the discourse” around the Spielberg/Kushner adaptation of West Side Story has well and truly begun. Amidst the wash of mostly enthralled reviews, the critical pieces catching my attention this week include Women’s Media Center’s Erica González Martínez’s remarkable thread detailing “how to watch West Side Story through a decolonized lens”; TheDailyBeast’s Mandy Velez asking the question “Why Can’t West Side Story Just Cast a Puerto Rican Maria?”; Variety’s Rebecca Rudin reports on why West Side Story has been banned in a half dozen countries in the Middle East; LatinxLens’s Rosa’s warily ambivalent review; and — most essentially — writer/filmmaker Frances Negrón-Muntaner talks to the Washington Post about why it’s so “hard to think that [West Side Story] is still what we’re talking about”… (See below for information about my own first contributions to “the discourse”…)
On This TheatreCliquer's Dance Card…
I’ll be zooming in to join this Monday afternoon tertulía addressing the new iteration of West Side Story with Drs. Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Virginia Sánchez Korrol and Jillian Báez at Centro: Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter!
and also listen for me — in conversation with Drs. Sarah Bay-Cheng, Ian Garrett and Elizabeth Hunter — in the next (bonus) episode of OnTAP: The Theatre & Performance Studies Podcast as…
Voices from Behind Academentia's Paywall:
If you are not academically-affiliated, or if your institution does not subscribe to these journals, shake the social media trees to see if some academic somewhere might hook you up with a pdf or two. Or check with your friendly neighborhood librarian to see if they can help. But download the pdf directly if you can. Because ACADEMIC CLICKS COUNT too!
This week brought word that Robin Bernstein ’s essay —“‘You Do It!’: Going-to-Bed Books and the Scripts of Children's Literature” as published in the October 2020 issue of PMLA — was recognized with the William Riley Parker Prize as outstanding article published in that journal. This news prompted me to read the essay, which spoke to so many of my academented pleasure points. I’m always down for an informed discussion of genre formation and, with the meticulously lucid argumentation that is her authorial signature, Bernstein details not only the formal features of what she terms “going-to-bed” books (like Good Night Moon) but she also evinces the constellation of social actions scripted by this genre that anchor its popularity, ubiquity, canoncity and versatility as a genre. (And if any of y’all PerformanceStudies-types might welcome — or might be in need of — a “refresher” on the meaningful distinctions between a “performative” and “constative utterance”… or on the sometimes consequential reverberations of “failed performatives”… this essay offers a worthwhile tutorial.) And be sure to savor the witty (and subtly perverse) manner of conclusion that Bernstein chooses. Really worthwhile essay.
Also this week, I was reminded that I’m glad for my daily GoogleScholar alert email. This is a feature in which you can request Google to automatically run a “search” for whatever terms, phrases, keyword or citations you specify and then deliver the results directly to your inbox as per your specifications (re. the number of search returns and regularity of the email). Because it’s Google and it’s anybody’s guess what they’re searching, the results are un/predictably random, but occasionally my GoogleScholar email alerts me to gem I don’t know I would have ever found on my own — as it did this week with Megan Wright and her “Art Is Work: A Dancer’s Reflection,” New Labor Forum (December 2021). Wright’s essay offers a brief, accessible and instructive (ie ideal for teaching) explication of the snarled history and defining inequities of the philanthropic-industrial complex in the US. The essay narrates how Covid-19’s disruption to the non-profit-art-making-machine compelled Wright to reassess all she had been trained to think about her practice as an artist and to methodically consider how — and, indeed, whether — art-making could be part of her post-pandemic life (again, so useful for teaching). Again, really worthwhile essay…
PROGRAMMING NOTE…
I’ll be driving cross-country this week to (finally) spend a good chunk of time in New Mexico, so there’ll definitely be no new newsletter next week (and possibly the week after that). BUT in case any of y’all were wondering, the newsletter will continue in the new year, albeit with some likely adjustments to publication schedule and format. (More on that soon.) For now, though, I’ll leave you with this bit of seasonal sentiment — my favorite xmas song of the last decade (aka a 2016 SNL sketch I queue to play on loop each December) which I sincerely hope might soon become a seasonal standard…
Happy holidays, dear #TheatreClique, may each holiday gift you receive bring you joy (and/or the joy of regifting)… AND SPEAKING OF RE-GIFTING: please share this newsletter with those friends, colleagues and students who might appreciate the opportunity to encounter the many voices gathered in each week’s edition. Errors and oversights published in the newsletter will be corrected in the archival versions. And, in the meantime, keep clicking those links — good writing needs good readers and our theatre clicks count!