I’ve been into preordering books lately. By the time they show up, I’ve usually forgotten about them. It’s like a present from my past self. Which is to say that I had forgotten entirely about Working on a Song: The Lyrics of Hadestown by Anaïs Mitchell, until it showed up at my doorstep. Once I […]
You know when you see something over and over again, and you just want to ask if other people see it too? That’s where I am today. During These Challenging Times, one of the things I have appreciated the most, in terms of content provided by theaters, is the honest, direct, behind-the-magic conversations that they’ve […]
We had the world premiere of Sperm Donor Wanted last night. It was really fun. Because we had attended various live online theater events where an actor’s mic dropped in the middle of the show or the stream cut out for somebody, we decided to pre-record the show the night before. We premiered it on […]
Today is the one-year anniversary of one of my favorite days of my whole life. We did Antony and Cleopatra at the Rose. It was the culmination of a journey I had been on since I directed my first production of that play, sixteen years earlier. Although it was a good production, it didn’t match […]
One of the most exciting developments in the way people create theater that has happened in the course of my career as a professional director is a shift in professional standards around how we talk about and work with actors’ bodies. I’m old enough to remember a high school director telling a boy who was […]
Directing again, and it feels so good. I’m directing a play reading of Sperm Donor Wanted, by Pittsburgh genius TJ Young. Working with a living playwright is so fun. Shakespeare can’t hear me complain when he gives me a hard problem to solve, but TJ is right there, chuckling in the background. The story is […]
I went to see an actual play, in person, with humans. The last play-ish thing I saw was Bread and Puppets on March 10. I don’t know if I have gone five months without seeing or doing a play since I was in middle school. Probably not. I went mostly because I was curious about […]
Paula Vogel has started a play reading series, called Bard at the Gate that is focused on highlighting works that, for whatever reason, aren’t getting programmed at major theaters, despite being excellent. This past week, the selection was Meg Miroshnik‘s The Droll. The play was originally written in 2009, but some of the lines landed […]
The book itself (oh, right, this is a Book Report post!) is a fantastic tool for actors and directors. It’s more accessible than Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, but more advanced than Mastering Shakespeare. I loved how, throughout, Block connected rhetorical and rhythmic concepts to playable actions. This is not an abstract text; it’s grounded in the work of the theater.
Some folks on a Shakespeare Facebook group had questions and opinions about Shakespeare’s musical stage directions, and when I said I had done one of my masters’ theses on this topic, they wanted to know more. Apologies in advance. If you read Shakespeare’s plays, particularly the histories, you’ll quickly notice stage directions like, “Sound trumpets […]