Theater and Drama

As a young theatre company, Up In Arms has already traversed the best new writing stages with two plays written by their co-Artistic Director, Barney Norris. When I spoke to him, and his directorial partner Alice Hamilton, I wanted to find out how this small touring company, thrust into the spotlight for rural work about everyday lives, was evolving. Their first two plays - Visitors and Eventide - were firmly set in experiences around Salisbury Plain and therefore the 'home' lives of the company's directors (though both now live elsewhere). How would they tackle their new piece but old work - Robert Holman's German Skerries?

I have conversations with studio heads and at some point when I'm passionately advocating using film they'll say 'at the end of the day doesn't storytelling trump everything?' I say 'no it doesn't, otherwise we'd be making radio plays, it would be a lot cheaper.'

Word on the street is that they are thinking of removing the arts from the schooling system… I'm sorry. WHAT?! Do my ears decieve me? JUST because it isn't considered 'academic'…? I'll tell you now, anyone who has trained in the arts knows just how important it is and how you can learn things even more useful than Pythagorus … Life skills!

This year there were three separate productions of Glengarry Glen Ross in the Bay Area meaning the play was running for four months straight: one production in San Francisco, one in Berkeley, and one in Alameda. I should say there was one ten day stretch where GGR wasn't playing, but there was also one ten day stretch wherein two were happening at the same time, 11 miles apart, so they sort of cancel each other out in my non-scientific mind. I wonder if both of those Ricky Romas were looking up at the same moon.

Rentals and classifieds for theaters in the US.

Reading and watching William Shakespeare's plays shouldn't make you feel stupid. But the 400 years between when they were written and today have put up barriers of culture and language that make it hard to read or watch them clean. People (alive and dead) are always telling you what to think about these plays instead of just letting you engage them yourself.

Legends and Worlds is a tool that allows authors to move beyond the final prose, and collaborate on concepts and ideas. Explore the events, characters, locations, and stories that make up the author's creative universes.

For those of you who are new to furniture painting. Here's a quick overview of the basic steps of furniture painting. Of course we can't cover everything here - but here's a start to finish flow chart!

As a person who has had a long stage career as a performer AND a producer/director, I could spend time advising you on all of the things one should do to further their career in theatre. I'm not going to do that. While it may seem like I'm focusing on the negative, it is this humble writers opinion that it's more important to know what NOT to do. A vast majority of actors, singers, dancers, comedians, variety artists, technicians, and stage managers make one or many of these 6 mistakes far too often during their careers, and sometimes unknowingly hurt their chances at booking work. Employers talk to one another, and sometimes one bad reference is all it takes for you to lose the job. And you'll never know why you didn't book it. By avoiding these critical mistakes, you can set yourself apart from all of your contemporaries. While talent and craft is important, the most gifted performer can make themselves completely un-hirable by committing these career sins:

Staged Play Filmed by Jasmine Castillo

"Tools like Evernote make organizing and finding information really simple. Yet despite that, I still often find myself using the humble notebook to jot down valuable ideas, especially when I'm on the go."

"Artists frequently hide the steps that lead to their masterpieces. They want their work and their career to be shrouded in the mystery that it all came out at once. It's called hiding the brushstrokes, and those who do it are doing a disservice to people who admire their work and seek to emulate them. If you don't get to see the notes, the rewrites, and the steps, it's easy to look at a finished product and be under the illusion that it just came pouring out of someone's head like that. People who are young, or still struggling, can get easily discouraged, because they can't do it like they thought it was done. An artwork is a finished product, and it should be, but I always swore to myself that I would not hide my brushstrokes."

" Our most ambitious live show ever! (get the video!) We pulled together a massive team of theater pros at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Opera House - nearly 50 singers, actors, dancers and musicians. The result? Journalism turned into a Broadway musical (the cast album is here), into opera. Mike Birbiglia, Sasheer Zamata, Stephin Merritt, Josh Hamilton, Lindsay Mendez, Lin-Manuel Miranda and others. "

"In this insightful and contextualizing Festival Portrait, actor Simon McBurney highlights the risks of the co-dependent relationship between the audience and performers - the capacity for success, but also the capacity for spectacular failure."

"This video is about Mother Hicks 2013"

"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?"

A hand-picked directory of the best free resources for creatives.

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"Alice Barker is 102 years old, was a famous dancer in the 30s, but never saw herself on screen until now. Video credit: Tenfresh"