Dear Theatre Critics,
July has been a dark month for you. It seems you can say nothing right! After years of artists cowering in fear of what you might say about them, artists are standing up for themselves (and for each other) to call you out on the way you abuse the hand that feeds you.
The post Is Theatre Criticism Dead? appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.“Who lives? Who dies? Who tells your story?” These questions challenge the audiences of the blockbuster musical sensation Hamilton every day. Anticipation and excitement for Hamilton has dogged the musical since its inception. One of the taglines on the production’s publicity materials is “An American Musical,” noting the show’s content as well as its country […]
The post From Opera To Musical Theater: Old Stories in A New Millennium appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
Imagine yourself eating lunch at the food court of your local mall. Everything about your day so far has been totally normal. Then, out of the blue, the people around you – a food court employee, a janitor, a fellow mall-goer, even the security guard – start singing to each other. This may be the […]
The post “Musicals in Real Life” and the Magic of Spontaneous MT appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
Not too long ago, my heart stopped for a small second when Pasek and Paul sent out this tweet: 52 years ago today, Eddie asked Rose to go to a party. — Pasek and Paul (@pasekandpaul) November 21, 2015 Every fan of Pasek and Paul's Dogfight will be familiar with the particularly charged and fateful conditions […]
The post Picking a Rose: Casting and Fatness in Pasek and Paul’s DOGFIGHT appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
Musical theatre is intrinsically a medium of showing, not telling. Characters sing to elucidate thoughts that can’t be articulated simply through dialogue and dance in specific choreographed patterns that hold some narrative meaning; the various design elements in a production coalesce to visually reinforce content transmitted through the show’s text. When all is said and […]
The post Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Shows Your Story: The Narratology of Women in Musical Theatre appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
Last month, my writing partner Derek and I were contacted by Mixing Bowl Productions, a small and brand new theatrical troupe in Cape Town, South Africa. They were gearing up for a three-night concert of American “New Musical Theatre” called No Jazz Hands Allowed that would feature multi-song sets by nearly a dozen American songwriters, […]
The post What is “New Musical Theatre”? appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
This past theatre season was a very important one for women. This idea has been talked about since before the Tony Awards back in June, with articles and open letters written (like this great one by The Interval) and infographics made depicting why the 2014-2015 season was so important in terms of female representation. A […]
The post Where Are The Women? Representation in Musical Theatre appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
Night after night, audience members walk out of the Broadway production of Hamilton feeling inspired. People are talking not only about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s score and Alexander Hamilton’s life and legacy, but also about the intersection of identity and performance in American musical theatre. For many avid theatregoers, they are inspired by the change this musical […]
The post Musical Theatre as a Vehicle for Change appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
I recently returned from a trip to New York City where, among other things, I was lucky enough to see An American In Paris. I absolutely loved the show, and among other positive things, the word “classic” kept floating around the theatre in relation to the show. This got me thinking – what exactly constitutes […]
The post The Mark of a Classic appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
While spending my afternoon surfing the Internet, as we all do, I ran across an interesting piece by Ben Brantley from 2010 (yes, ages and ages ago). This article basically asked the question: when did political figures become inappropriate for American musicals, and will we see a resurgence of them soon? This was written just […]
The post Why the “Great White Way” Needs the White House: Political Musicals on Broadway appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
Last semester I was required to write a very long research paper for my Research and Bibliography class- something I was not looking forward to, but hey, that’s part of graduate school. Little did I know, I would be completely inspired by my topic and grow to write more on the subject than I even […]
The post Why I Care About Rap Musicals appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
If I have learned anything from my time studying Theatre, it’s that musical theatre rarely receives the amount of respect from academia that it deserves. Usually, musicals are blindly labeled “spectacles” and Broadway is given the sort of wide berth that Mufasa orders Simba to give the Shadowlands. Or at least that is what I […]
The post Challenging “All That’s Known”: The Brechtian Elements of Spring Awakening appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
If you’ve gotten to read my “Meet the Bloggers” page, you might have stumbled upon my list of favorite musicals – and “favorite” is most certainly an euphemism here, as I am totally obsessed with those – which include A Chorus Line. There might be such a universal truth – especially to performers – conveyed […]
The post Lessons from A Chorus Line on its 40th Anniversary appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
Bootleg. What a simple, unassuming term. The child of the words boot and leg, all she wants to do in life is to perform her duty of giving us very low quality audio and video recordings of popular Broadway shows, but there are people out there who seek to destroy her humble goal: to combat […]
The post On Bootlegs, Broadway and Breaking Barriers appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
I’ve recently found my new favorite musical theatre song. And by recently, I really mean that I first listened to this song about four weeks ago, and I’ve had it on repeat ever since. What could this fabulous piece of music possibly be? Why, it is “Waving Through a Window” from the new musical Dear […]
The post When Musical Theatre and Pop Collide appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
Time continues to tick as war rages on. Factions of people with differing opinions and the willpower to make their opinions the majority are on the rise. Instead of “seeing eye to eye,” “an eye for an eye” becomes the golden rule. Blood spills and hearts are heavy as the struggle for something better continues. […]
The post Would You Care For a Revolution?: An Almost Essay appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
