Group items tagged

This lesson uses video segments from Great Performances: The Little Mermaid from San Francisco Ballet to help students explore the role of the author in relation to his/her work. In the Introductory Activity, students discuss the structure of the original The Little Mermaid tale as they remember it. Students then read the original story and compare their memories to the original text. In the Learning Activity, students examine John Neumeier's artistic interpretation of the classic fairy-tale by looking at two video segments that feature the main characters of the ballet. Finally, for the Culminating Activity, students craft their own contemporary interpretation of a classic fairy-tale (e.g., Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty).

"I'm absolutely thrilled to be with you. I can feel the energy in the room. I fell in love with high school students a couple of years ago. I was invited to speak at a high school theatre conference in Utah. I walked in-I was literally in a basketball stadium-and the basketball stadium was full of high school students, thousands of high school students and every one of them was a theatre lover. And if I said in my address: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, they would all cheer yeah! There were these two guys at the conference who were sitting behind me, and you might have heard of them-their names are Benj Pasek and Justin Paul?"

As part of the Playworks Program here at the International Thespian festival, students have the opportunity to audition and rehearse one of the plays being workshopped. The audition day was very intense. We sat through auditions from 9:00 am straight through to 12:45 and then we have half an hour to cast the roles between five plays. Students were put in groups and performed in scenes from the individual plays with monologues, duets or trios. Over the course of the morning, we say 185 students and that doesn't count the students we saw twice who were called back. By 11 am we were starting to feel the time crunch. Call backs were discouraged, repeat reads had to be culled down, we had to see the groups and move on if we were ever going to make sure every students got their moment.

Housch-ma-Housch is one of the funniest and most talented comedians in the world. His one man show is the result of many years of work. He delights the audience with a performance combining miming, clowing and magic. This comedian is an absolute multi-talent and palette of his roles is almost limitless.

An Edmonton theatre company has cancelled its production of Othello after controversy erupted over the casting of a white woman as the lead, traditionally a role filled by a person of colour.

" But why does mere revision make so many Shakespeare fans so uncomfortable? Some people don't like any alterations to Shakespeare's text nor even presenting them in anything other than their historical settings. To me, such an ultrapurist approach can lead to what I somewhat derisively call "museum piece Shakespeare"-though, I must say, I do enjoy visiting and spending hours in museums, and among my favorite stagings of Shakespeare are text-centric, historically costumed productions. But even these are cut for length. Furthermore, to varying degrees, each could be called an "adaptation" because any time an actor picks up a Shakespearean role, he or she is adapting it for that production, and sometimes adapting it from performance to performance, depending on the theater and audience."

Equally comfortable playing romantic leads and action heroes, he has never been quite a force in theatre. This is partly a matter of choice. He has prioritised screen roles over stage opportunities. The last time he acted on stage was in 2009 in a popular West End production of Richard Greenberg's three-hander Three Days of Rain. In the mean time he has been taking a while to shake off the halo of urgent youth. He has tended to play callow characters more sinned against than sinning - the closest he's come to anything like villainy is as Idi Amin's morally compromised medic.