My geekling daughter, who in Willy Wonka flashed Mr. Spock’s Vulcan greeting during Veruca Salt’s contract-signing scene, also worked a Star Trek reference into Godspell. Here as she says goodbye to Jesus, she is doing the Vulcan gesture in a tribute to Spock’s death (in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan). The needs of the many outweigh the needs of…
What kind of boss hires a thwarted actress for a business-to-business software startup? Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s 42-year-old cofounder and CEO, whose estimated double-digit stake in the company could be worth $300 million or more. He’s the proud holder of an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Canada’s University of Victoria and a master’s degree from Cambridge…
I’m preparing to teach Shakespeare again this fall. Seton Hill offers the course every other year, so each time it comes around, it feels new. The course will focus on plays, but I do like starting out with a brief unit on the sonnet in order to help my students get accustomed to the language. It occurred…
The image (by Magee and Griffin) is an excerpt from a rough draft; a slightly different version is available as a poster, on mugs and totebags etc., from the National Theatre Shop. Similar:Laughter and Light Abound in Prime Stage’s “Twelfth Night” Kudos to Prime Stage for a Twelf…CultureWhat gives you comfort? I collect lights. Some of…
Pick a play. Click a line. Instantly see articles on JSTOR that reference the line. Understanding Shakespeare is a collaborative project between JSTOR Labs and the Folger Shakespeare Library. It’s a research tool that allows students, educators and scholars to use the text of Shakespeare’s plays to quickly navigate into the scholarship written about them—line…
I spent a few hours today working on a video for Stage Right. I usually use Screenflow for my videos, but today for some reason I thought I’d try iMovie. Big mistake. Of the eight video clips I wanted to use in iMovie, seven seem to have imported properly, but the eighth has this little…
Before a school play, a principal worries parents will complain about all that lost test-preparation time. [T]his principal assumes I will be alarmed that my child takes a weekly visual art class, a dance class, and a music class. She is pretty sure I’m going to think there’s something fishy going on, that Real Learning…
“It is over three hours long, and it is like a cross between Noel Coward and The Terminator” – Ivor Benjamin describing the original version of “R.U.R.”Last Wednesday I went to see an adaption of Karel Čapek’s play “Rossum’s Universal Robots”, presented at the British Library. | There was one question from the audience that…
Clever little Easter eggs in this article about the history of My Fair Lady refer to lyrics from the show. I played Col. Pickering in high school 30 years ago. One night during “The Rain in Spain,” when Higgins threw the xylophone mallet in the air, it got stuck in the drapes above the stage.…
I’d like to say a few words in defense of community theatre: why are we so hard on it? I’ve done it. You’ve done it. Sure, sometime it can be rough around the edges, but more often than not, like this production, it produces something genuine and authentic and beautiful. A quick glance at…
I’ve had the privilege of being this amazing person’s father for 13 years. Similar:In-person classes heighten age-related hearing problems (opinion)My family tells me I’m starting to speak…AcademiaGetting ready to run a ChoiceScript workshop for Computers and Writing 2023. #cwcon #cwcon…PersonalIgnorance Meets an Invisible DisabilityI’m sure my young, healthy-looking frien…CultureSpring office cleaning thoughts: 1) I used…
This is nice, but what I really want to see is an Elizabethan-style revenge play featuring Clippy. December 9, 1968… in an underground convention center in the heart of San Francisco, Doug Engelbart gave The Mother Of All Demos, introducing the world to an astonishing slew of technologies including word processing, video conferencing, windows, links,…
This is the concept of Inside Hamlet, an interactive performance that takes place this weekend and next in the real Elsinore, at Denmark’s Kronborg Castle. Over the course of three five-hour acts, 100 actors will assume the roles of royals and servants of the House of Hamlet—and other related houses who have taken refuge at…
E. A. Sothern as the foppish and silly Lord Dundreary stole the show. His part was originally small, but his ad libs were received so well by the audience that his part was expanded. Our American Cousin wasn’t just the last play President Lincoln saw. It was one of the great commercial successes of its…
If the pre-1978 laws were still in effect, we could have seen 85% of the works published in 1986 enter the public domain on January 1, 2015. Imagine what that would mean to our archives, our libraries, our schools and our culture. Such works could be digitized, preserved, and made available for education, for research,…
My daughter, who plays Young Estella in Pict Classic Theatre’s “Great Expectations,” was interviewed on Tony Marino’s WCNS “Steppin’ Out” local arts radio talk show. I’ve embedded the 10-minute segment below. During the segment, she told a ghost story about the Charity Randall theatre, she said her favorite scene is the manners lesson Pip receives from…
I didn’t watch the show (our cable-less TV doesn’t get that channel), but I found his to be a fascinating take on what was wrong with both the concept and the execution of this show. All this forces the question of who the intended audience was for NBC’s production of Peter Pan Live, a three-hour…
My daughter Carolyn appears as Young Estella in PICT Classic Theatre’s Great Expectations, the first of NEXT Pittsburgh’s “Top 8 events not to miss in December” 1. PICT Classic Theatre’s Great Expectations: December 3 – 20, Stephen Foster Memorial Kick off the holidays with a timeless moral tale that begins on Christmas morning. Follow along with…
I wonder what additional measurable benefits come from *performing* in live theater? Field trips to live theater enhance literary knowledge, tolerance and empathy among students, according to a study published this week by researchers in the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform…. “What we determined from this research is that seeing live theater produced…
I am thrilled to be part of this great cast. “The thing that makes ‘Fiddler’ so special is the story of family, the story of tradition,” says Tony Marino, artistic director at Stage Right Theatre Company, which brings a production of “Fiddler” to The Palace Theatre in Greensburg from Nov. 21 to 23. Marino says…