Last year my cousin Joseph, the other big theatre fan in our family, turned 16. As his self-proclaimed mentor and teacher of all things theatrical, I wanted to get him an amazing gift, and as it so happened, around that time the perfect thing fell into my lap. I was cleaning out my desk in […]
The post Growing Up Thespian in the Digital Age, or Why I Feel Old appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
My husband, Matthew, came home the other day with a gift for me. One of those “for no reason” gifts that you just kind of happen upon. He brought me home a book, The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson. The only reason, he says, is that it had won a Pulitzer Prize (2013). He […]
The post Siding with Pulitzer appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
We all love a sadistic villain. We can’t get enough of those delicious creatures of the night, giving so many stories a shadow to cast over our heroes as they trek through hell and high water to claim their holy grail. Audiences eat it up. The smarter, the sicker, the more manipulative, the better. The […]
The post “Who’s That Woman?”: Ambiguous Villainy in Sondheim appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
The last three shows that I saw on Broadway, Violet, The Bridges of Madison County, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, have some interesting things in common. All three were produced on Broadway this season for the first time. All three feature daring and beautiful scores, written for the musical stage by important musical theatre […]
The post We Were That Kid: Tony Eligibility Rulings and Why They Matter appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
At a completely fundamental level, there are two kinds of participants in art: there are the artists, and there are the observers. Artists have the gift of intention, the ability to say what they want in the way that they want, for reasons clear to them. The observers also have a gift, and that is the […]
The post Open-Intention/Open-Perception appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
One week ago today, the cast of the recent Pulitzer Prize finalist Fun Home, along with its writers, Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, and Alison Bechdel, author of the musical’s graphic novel source material, traveled to Charleston, South Carolina to present a concert version of the show. Recently, the College of Charleston lost a significant portion […]
The post “I Know You”: Fun Home in Charleston and Theater as Activism appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
Recently Playbill asked their Twitter followers who they would want most to play the King of Siam in the forthcoming Broadway revival of The King and I, and posted what one presumes were the nine most popular responses on their site. Of those nine, four of the profiled actors were not Asian. Of those four, […]
The post On Kings, Kims, Coalhouses, Capulets and Consideration appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
As a Director one of the hardest things to ever know is how an audience is going to react. Locked up in a rehearsal room, you get to know the text better than anybody else, often to a point where you are totally unsure if anything is engaging, funny or even makes sense. You have […]
The post To Stand Or Not To Stand? appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
It can be easy for us to look at certain musicals from the past and claim them to be groundbreaking, revolutionary, or just plain great. But trying to put ourselves in the mindset as those who were in the audience when these shows opened is a different story. One of my all time favorite moments […]
The post Making Things “New” All Over Again appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
Hi there. My name is Margaret, and I love musical theatre lyrics. Like, really love them. I love to listen to them, read them, write them, and through it all, to break them down into tiny little pieces and analyze what I love about them. Like any good lyric enthusiast, when I headed out for […]
The post Looking Closely at Lyrics, or “God is in the Details” appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
As I sit trying to think of what to write next, I’m listening to Philip Glass’s opera theatre piece In the Penal Colony, after the Kafka story by the same name (really great, I highly suggest it). I find myself thinking of the difference between opera and what is generally perceived as straight up musical […]
The post The Art of the Opera-Beast appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
Like probably most of you reading this post, I watched The Sound Of Music Live a week ago today. Since then, I feel like I’ve read more articles responding to the audience’s response – via social media, of course, with even DiGiorno Pizza playing along – than responding to the performance itself. It’s that meta-commentary that […]
The post How We All Watched The Sound Of Music #Together appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
It is ten years ago. You are reading The New York Times and you come across this sentence about the latest musical to open on Broadway: the show “does not, alas, speak hopefully for the future of the Broadway musical.” And if somehow that piece – along with the production’s other scathing reviews – is […]
The post You’re Gonna Be Populist appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
To anyone, but mostly, the “me”s, I am a white, cisgender, gay man, writing musical theatre in New York City, and I am not uncommon. The amount of “me”s I see writing and performing and garnering awards and taking new jobs and making names for themselves is staggering. The inherent male/white/and yes, even in this case, gay […]
The post Being Aware appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
This is the maiden post of the NewMusicalTheatre.com blog. Welcome! I have the great honor and responsibility of popping the proverbial cork. Clearly, it shouldn’t be me. I made a boat allusion. Like, we were about to embark on something more Anything Goes than blog. Though perhaps “anything goes” isn’t such a bad description. We […]
The post The First Post appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
