CMU School of Drama


Tuesday, October 30, 2012

NFTRW Weekly Top Five

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

Blue Man Group adds new material, including Showbot character

Entertainment / Neon - ReviewJournal.com: You have your new toys, but the Blue Man Group does too. Just don't expect Smoke Drums or a Neuronulum to fit in your pocket. Phil Stanton, a Blue Man founder and one of its three original performers, admits to phone separation anxiety like the rest of us. He doesn't just have to have it on his person: "I realize how much I actually have it in my hand."
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François Hollande wants to abolish homework. Is that a good idea?

washingtonpost.com: My colleague Valerie Strauss reports that French president François Hollande has called for abolishing homework. The idea is part of a broader set of proposed education reforms, which include longer school weeks (they’re currently only four days) and hiring more teachers. The appeal to students is obvious, but is this such a good idea? François Hollande wants to abolish homework. Is that a good idea?
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Stage fright: which plays have left you reeling in horror?

Stage | guardian.co.uk: The terror season is upon us in British theatre. Jack the Ripper is already stalking the streets around London Bridge, and Nosferatu will soon be rising from the dead at the Barbican. Like the late 19th-century theatregoers who flocked to the Theatre du Grand Guignol in Paris, where the blood came by the bucketful and medics were on hand to minister to those who passed out at the sight of severed limbs, modern theatregoers have a taste for theatrical splatterfests. Maybe we are not all that different from our Jacobean counterparts, who loved plays such as The Revenger's Tragedy on the grounds that "when the bad bleeds, then is the tragedy good" (in the words of Vindice, the play's sniggering antihero).
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Actors told to beware fake casting scams

News - The Stage: Equity recently issued safety guidelines via its website and told performers to beware of casting directors whose information could not be checked through the Casting Director’s Guild or official sites. In the case that sparked the warning, an email account and Facebook page was set up in the name of a high profile casting director, and used in an attempt to lure actresses to auditions. One actress was asked to provide nude photographs after she responded to an advertisement for a lead role in a film.
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What's the point of theatre programmes?

guardian.co.uk: What do you really want from a theatre programme? I know what I don't want: to be charged £3 upwards for an ugly piece of print which is either a bit of shameless self-promotion for the show for which you've already bought a ticket, or an ill-designed and uninformative vehicle for the selling of advertising space. You can tell quite a lot about a regional theatre's audience by the number of adverts for private schools and hand-crafted kitchens there are. Most of us can live with the adverts as long as there is interesting content, and not just a thematically related article largely culled from the internet. If there's no proper content (and no, pages of rehearsal pictures do not count as proper content), I'd prefer just to have a free cast list.
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