#240407 ~ ON BOOKS, BOPS, & BROADWAY BOUNCING BACK?
Brian Eugenio Herrera's #TheatreClique Newsletter for April 7, 2024.
WELCOME to #TheatreClique — my irregular newsletter dedicated to encouraging you to click out to some of the most interesting, intriguing & noteworthy writing about drama, theatre & performance (at least, so says me)…
This Week's #TheatreCliquery:
For this week’s opener, I lift this music video of one of the genuine (and genuinely funny/freaky) “bops” from the Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs musical Teeth, currently in performances at Playwrights Horizon (NYC). See my thoughts on both my first time and then my second experience of Teeth.
EDITOR’S NOTE: whenever possible, whenever linking to paywalled pieces, I “gift” the article to #TheatreClique readers. In other words, clicking out to articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, and Wall Street Journal should neither present hassle nor burn through your monthly allotment of free views. Here’s hoping more outlets — hello LATimes! hi ChicaoTribune! yo NewYorker!— adopt similar technologies for subscribers soon...
#NowClickThis…
Wherein I highlight a dozen or so of the most click-worthy links I’ve encountered in the last few weeks…
The Washington Post’s Thomas Floyd talks to eight interpreters of one of Stephen Sondheim’s most iconoclastic roles to commence an “oral history of Mrs. Lovett”;
The New Yorker’s Helen Shaw profiles theatre director Lila Neugebauer and how her work as amplified the “sense of haunted quiet, which has become a dominant tone of American drama”;
Vulture’s Rachel Handler consults a fascinating array of experts after she decides “to try to teach myself how to stage cry”;
at Dance Magazine, writer/editor Jennifer Heimlich surveys the evolving contemporary definitions of “Broadway dance”;
at Gothamist, WNYC’s Ryan Kailath interrogates why theatre tickets are “so expensive right now”;
at TDF, culture writer (and publisher of Transitions) Joey Sims reports on the return of the NYC “Fringe” and notes some “promising signs that Off-Off Broadway is rebounding”;
NYPost’s Johnny Oleksinski considers how the recent (and ongoing) successes of three particular “Off-Broadway gems offer an optimistic lesson to theaters everywhere”;
at Out, arts administrator/educator Giselle Byrd reflects on being the “first Black trans woman to lead a regional theatre company in the United States”;
Playbill announces the publication of Breaking the Binary Theatre’s 2024 Cloud Nine Zine, a digital publication featuring twenty works from from transgender, non-binary, and Two- Spirit+ (TNB2S+) artists;
at Broadstreet Review, trans actor/advocate Bruce Baldini details the implicit biases at work in a Philadelphia company’s recent casting call for an “all-male” cast for one of Shakespeare’s “most ferocious and testosterone-driven tragedies”;
at American Theatre, the Atlantic Journal-Constitution’s Christopher A. Daniel tallks to theatre alumni, faculty, and students from historically Black colleges and universities about “the HBCU edge”;
also at American Theatre, freelance journalist Jacquinn Sinclair reports on the 10th-anniversary convening of the Latinx Theatre Commons;
at DC Theater Arts, freelance arts/culture writer Colleen Kennedy describes Baltimore Center Stage’s Mexodus by Brian Quijada & Nygel D. Robinson as “an exhilarating theatrical experiment” telling true story of an Underground Railroad that led south to Mexico;
at The New York Public Library Blog, theatre curator/historian Douglas Reside crafts a preliminary list of notably Sondheimian “Easter eggs” in Here We Are;
at Variety, arts/culture writer Manuel Betancourt reviews Georden West’s Playland — billed as “a boundary-pushing, transdisciplinary, hybrid film centered around the raucous activity of a time-bending night in Boston’s oldest and most notorious gay bar, the Playland Café” — and notes that Playland “feels more like an installation than a feature film”;
Remarking on the passing of Christopher Durang (1949-2024), the inimitable Michael Cadden observed: “A genius playwright passes. Our Aristophanes, our Jonson, our Moliere. What hours of often bone-chilling delight he brought…” See also: Durang’s 1999 interview with himself at American Theatre; NYTimes’s Alexis Soloski’s NYTimes obituary; David Lee White more personal remembrance; and this poignant 2013 profile from State of the Arts…
Books of the Month
Quick survey of some of the books I most enjoyed reading over the last month or so...
Alisa Zhulina • Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life (Northwestern UP, 202 ) • A richly engaging — and delightfully readable — excavation of the hidden-in-plain-sight economic histories of some of the most influential plays within the canon of “Modern Drama” (including oft-taught/staged plays like Doll’s House, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Uncle Vanya, and the like). The mind-blowing discussion of Anton Chekhov’s “pre-playwright” work as an economic reporter is reason enough to pick up this supersmart and super-useful book.
Ajuan Mance • Gender Studies: True Confessions of an Accidental Outlaw (Rosarium Press) • So much admiration and affection for this book (and its author); a stunning assemblage of smart, sweet, funny, moving, and incisive memoiristic stories told in comic form.
Carmen Maria Machado • In the Dream House (Graywolf Press, 2019) • An enthralling literary memoir (ostensibly "about" intimate partner violence) that defies convention and expectation at nearly every turn. Machado’s deftly executed experiment in form — you never really know what's going to happen stylistically on the next page — both sustains the narrative's propulsive tension and dodges the pitfalls that so easily beset stories about abuse. A potent, resonant achievement.
an important aside: In the current climate, especially in certain parts of the United States, each of the above titles could plausibly be targeted and at risk of — to borrow the language of PEN America — “disappearing from library shelves, being challenged in droves, being decreed off limits by school boards, legislators, and prison authorities.” So take heed of this reminder from the United against Book Bans initative…
Listen Up!:
Wherein I highlight recent theatrically-inclined podcasts and playlists…
In the latest episode of OnTAP 071, co-hosts Pannill Camp, Shayoni Mitra and I discuss Alisa Zhulina's new book Theater of Capital, the Wilma Theatre's production of My Mama and the Full-Scale Invasion by Sasha Denisova, and the 10th anniversary convening of the Latinx Theatre Commons.
And Lest I Forget — Adventures in Fornésiana…
Wherein I highlight noteworthy recent or upcoming engagements with the life, work and legacy of legendary playwright, director and teacher María Irene Fornés...
