Theater and Drama

Here is a big ole' list of links to Lesson Plans for Drama Teachers. And see the bottom of this post for a printable PDF: Top Ten Tips For Writing Awesome Lesson Plans!

"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.

Official color codes for the world's biggest brands

"YouTube-mp3.org is the easiest online service for converting videos to mp3. You do not need an account, the only thing you need is a YouTube URL. We will start to convert the audiotrack of your videofile to mp3 as soon as you have submitted it and you will be able to download it. Different from other services the whole conversion process will be perfomed by our infrastructure and you only have to download the audio file from our servers. Because of this our software is platform-independent: You can use it with your Mac, a Linux PC or even an iPhone. All our conversions will be perfomed in high quality mode with a bitrate of at least 128 kBit/s. Do not worry, our service is completely free. We need approximately 3 to 4 minutes per video."

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

"Diana Agrest believes architecture is so much more than a marriage of form and function. For more than four decades, she's been trying to get her students to believe that too."

"Gene Wilder sat down with Robert Osborne at 92Y on June 12 for a rare public appearance. He spoke about his disdain for the Willy Wonka remake, working with Richard Pryor and Mel Brooks, Gilda Radner, Young Frankenstein, and more. "

"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."

Staged Play Filmed by Jasmine Castillo

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:

He adds "I had my luck because Robert Mackintosh decided to drive to Guilford to see Putting it Together. I wouldn't be here now if that hadn't happened. Actually, I'd say it's 60% who you know and 40% what you know."

An IPA entry tool so good, it's delicious

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?

The new experimental study published in Education Next examines the impact on students of attending high-quality theater productions of either Hamlet or A Christmas Carol. The researchers found that viewing the productions leads to enhanced knowledge of the plot, increased vocabulary, greater tolerance and improved ability to read the emotions of others.

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.'