CMU School of Drama


Sunday, March 26, 2017

NFTRW Weekly Top Five

Here are the top five comment generating posts of the past week:

Why High School Musicals Should Be As Respected As Sports Programs Are

www.theodysseyonline.com: When I was in middle school and high school, I felt like I lived for the musicals that my school orchestrated. For those of you who don’t know, a musical is an onstage performance wherein actors take on roles that involve singing, and often dancing, to progress the plot of the story. While it may sound a little bit nerdy to get up in front of an audience to perform in this manner, this is something you cannot knock until you try it. For some reason, though, many public schools have de-funded arts programs that would allow these musicals to occur, while increasing the funding for sports teams. There are a few things that are being forgotten when sports are valued more than musical programs in high schools.

How do theme parks make fake seem so real?

www.themeparkinsider.com: People who work at theme parks throw around the word "magic" a lot. And they should, because that's exactly what the best theme park designers create. Now, I'm not talking about the sappy popular meaning of the word "magic" — I'm talking about magic as an act of stagecraft. It's a visual con, designed to make you believe that you are seeing something that can't possibly be in our normal, natural world.

For the First Time Ever, An Asian-American Has Been Cast In a Classic Tennessee Williams Role

L.A. Weekly: When Linda Park takes on the role of Maggie the Cat in Antaeus Theatre Company's production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, she'll be the first Asian woman to portray the character in a professional production. “It was both a dream role and something that I never thought would happen,” Park says.

Park first discovered the role (and the play) when she was in high school and saw the 1994 film Double Happiness, which stars Sandra Oh as an Asian woman who dreams of becoming an actress.

Women of “The Great Comet of 1812”

THE INTERVAL: The Great Comet of 1812 by Dave Malloy and directed by Rachel Chavkin features an immersive set with audience members on stage and actors running through the audience; an eclectic score; a story loosely based on an excerpt from War and Peace; and the majority of actors in the cast making their Broadway debuts. Among those actors making their Broadway debuts are Brittain Ashford, Gelsey Bell, Amber Gray, and Grace McLean. The four of them come from performance backgrounds as diverse as the characters they’re playing. We recently sat down with them to discuss archetypes, the physicality of the show, balancing doing eight shows a week, and more.

Shining The Light: How One Teacher Brought The Ghostlight Project To His High School

Breaking Character: A lot of my students, right now, in 2017, are scared. A lot of that is the usual teenage concern about not fitting in, the changes in their bodies and the like, but lately something is definitely different. There’s an edge to the fear my students are feeling. I know because I feel it too. I am a British-born high school theatre teacher in America, I witnessed the results of the UK referendum to leave Europe, and then, well, November, USA happened. A consistent thread of these populist movements is the apparent normalization of being openly hostile to minorities, specifically people who are non-white.

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