Tuesday, December 03, 2024
'Wicked' Success and a Look Back Hollywood's Bumpy Road to Oz
www.hollywoodreporter.com: Jon M. Chu’s musical Wicked (Part One), starring Ariana Grande as Glinda and Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, is set to defy gravity over the coming weeks as the blockbuster event of the holiday season. Adapted from Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s long-running Tony and Grammy Award-winning Broadway musical, itself based on Gregory Maguire’s fantasy novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, Wicked has the kind of built-in fan base most Hollywood musicals can only dream of.
Las Vegas Sphere plans to boost profits — how much fans will pay for tickets
Entertainment: Operators of the Sphere believe they’re getting the hang of boosting profitability for the giant performance venue now that it has been open for more than a year.
Sphere Entertainment Co. has said the public can expect more events there — possibly multiple shows each day — and that one of the goals is to have something going on in the 17,000-seat venue every day of the year.
DISNEY ON BROADWAY: 30 YEARS OF MAGIC Extended At The Museum Of Broadway
www.broadwayworld.com: The exclusive exhibit, presented in partnership with Disney Theatrical Group and created exclusively for The Museum of Broadway, will be on-view through January 12, 2025, with special events celebrating 30 years of Disney on Broadway taking place throughout December at The Museum of Broadway.
Worker dies while dismantling Iron Maiden stage
IQ Magazine: Investigations are ongoing after a worker fell to his death while dismantling the stage following Iron Maiden’s concerts in Chile.
The rock band performed two nights at the Estadio Nacional (National Stadium) in Santiago on 27-28 November, promoted by DG Medios.
AeroLock Connector Creates Faster Rigging Without Tools
New Equipment Digest: AeroLock connector technology eliminates common risks associated with traditional steel shackles and knotted synthetic connectors, making it a game-changer for high-risk industries like commercial marine towing, offshore operations, and heavy lifting.
Speaking in Draft: Emily Jung
Intermission Magazine: I got in touch with Emily Jung, one of the co-founders of the collective, who generously agreed to an interview. Jung, like so many talented artists in the Toronto theatre scene, is a multi-hyphenate. Outside of Labour in the Arts, she is the director of communications at the Theatre Centre, a playwright, and a visual artist. Noticing a lack of mentorship for early-career arts workers in the sector as a whole, Jung and her colleagues did a deep dive into the history of the Canadian theatre sector.
Magic mirrors turn Tesco shoppers in to Wicked witches
www.avinteractive.com: Grocery chain Tesco has rolled out an interactive marketing campaign that enables shoppers to become one of the two main characters from the new Wicked movie.
The Witch Flavour Are You? campaign – which is promoting drinks brand Robinsons’ new glittery squash – features an augmented reality (AR) ‘magic mirror’ that can transform people into Elphaba or Glinda in real time.
Front Porch Theatricals Brings Home 'Baby' and 'Sunday in the Park With George' in 2025
onstagepittsburgh.com: On a celebratory night of songs and surprises, Front Porch Theatricals announced the company’s 2025 summer shows, both Tony Award rivals for best musical in 1984.
How Lin-Manuel Miranda's Family Almost Ruined His Broadway Debut
Playbill: Miranda visited The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon December 2 to share some wisdom ahead of Fallon's Broadway debut in the very same show; Fallon will join Miranda in the comedy January 28, and perform through February 2.
Watch: Documentary Details the History of the Tony Kiser Theatre
www.broadwayworld.com: As BroadwayWorld previously reported, Second Stage Theater will vacate the Tony Kiser Theatre at the end of this year. The company is begin let out of its lease at the venue, located in a former bank building at the corner of West 43rd Street and Eighth Avenue, due to high rent and "unfavorable" terms in the lease.
London Stage Adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove Will Be Screened Worldwide
Playbill: The world premiere stage adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove will be released to cinemas next year via National Theatre Live. The acclaimed production, which continues at the Noël Coward Theatre through January 25, 2025, will hit silver screens worldwide beginning March 27.
Viewpoint: Pittsburgh needs to step up for the performing arts
Pittsburgh Business Times: One of the best-kept secrets in Pittsburgh – though ironically not among the rest of the national or global performing arts scene – is the extent to which our region punches far above its weight as a haven of theater, music and dance. Ask any professional performer who makes a stop here, and they’ll tell you. Our venues, our talent, our education programs and our productions rank just a tick behind New York, Los Angeles and Chicago in their renown, amazing given that our population is only a fraction of theirs.
Monday, December 02, 2024
‘It’s an outrage’: stars join fight against cuts as Welsh arts go into meltdown
Wales | The Guardian: Not every Welsh valley can reverberate with choral singing and declaimed poetry, despite the stereotype. But leading figures in Welsh culture are warning that a different environment is looming: “An alien who landed in the country today would look around and think, “Wow, there do seem to be an awful lot of problems here for all the arts,” said Graeme Farrow.
Questions confronting theater at the onset of possible tyranny
DC Theater Arts: For decades, the DC, Maryland, and Virginia region has been well regarded for producing theater with social vision and impact and progressive values. With the election over, now what? What lies ahead for the DMV theater community? Will the region find itself in dark times? Will the theater community be or think itself immune? Will the community be part of some nonprofit resistance to the national shift right?
'Die Hard N'At' Brings Bricolage Back With a Vengeance
onstagepittsburgh.com: Everything old is new again isn’t just a saying this holiday season. It’s a promise of more of what has proven popular, and in one case in particular, a welcome back.
Bricolage Production Company’s popular Midnight Radio live shows, dormant 2019, is roaring back with Die Hard N’At at barebones productions’ Braddock theater, starting December 6, 2024.
GLP Creos – a new definition of LED wash
LightSoundJournal.com: With the new Creos, GLP pushes the boundaries of the LED wash light, giving you so much more than just the classic wall wash. The Creos is a high-performance, IP65-rated LED wash light with 18 x 40 W RGBL LEDs, motorised zoom and a motorised, 190° swivel head. Thanks to its clusterable design with consistent LED pixel pitch, several devices can be linked horizontally to create a seamless, gigantic LED bar.
Watch the Broadway performances from the 2024 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade
www.broadwaynews.com: On Nov. 28, Macy’s celebrated its 98th annual Thanksgiving Day Parade. Broadcast on NBC and Peacock, the first hour of parade coverage featured performances from three currently running Broadway shows: “Hell’s Kitchen,” the 2024 Tony Award-winning Best Musical “The Outsiders” and the newly opened “Death Becomes Her.” Later in the parade, Idina Menzel sang from her upcoming musical, “Redwood,” atop a new Bronx Zoo float.
4 Homegrown Companies Building Healthier Dance Ecosystems
Dance Magazine: When Gavin Stewart and Vanessa Owen were launching the contemporary company Stewart/Owen Dance in Asheville, North Carolina, they received some surprising advice. “Someone who worked in marketing in this region said that, when describing our company, ‘You probably shouldn’t mention that you’re from here, because that could negatively impact your ticket sales,’ ” Owen recalls.
With ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ One Look Wasn’t Enough
The New York Times: Something I wish I had the chance to do more often as a reporter is to see shows multiple times, deeper into their runs — the “Notre Dame de Paris” musical, which I’ve seen seven times, and “The Phantom of the Opera,” which I’ve seen six times, come to mind.
Residential Stair Code Basics
Fine Homebuilding: Stairs are essentially the obstacle course of buildings, and along with bathrooms, they are one of the most hazardous features in a house. Unlike with water heaters, electrical service, or fire-protection safety features, the safety of stairs is directly related to how the occupant uses them. If we all got on our knees and slowly crawled up and down every set of stairs, fall-related injuries would cease.
Book Review: ‘How Sondheim Can Change Your Life,’ by Richard Schoch
The New York Times: In the early 1980s, the librettist and director James Lapine asked the composer Stephen Sondheim what sort of musical he wanted to write. The pair were in the early stages of creating “Sunday in the Park With George,” their first collaboration of many, and the response given by the older to the younger man was very Sondheimish indeed.
How Do You Manage?
AMERICAN THEATRE: In November 2022, Lisa Smith was weighing whether to continue stage managing or to scale up her part-time job at a gardening center into a full-time gig. She’d been stage managing in the Twin Cities for 20 years, 15 of those as a member of Actors’ Equity Association (AEA), when the forced break of the pandemic reminded her what a full night’s sleep felt like. When theatres opened again and she returned to stage management, she grew wary of some companies’ plans for reopening and their failure to create contingency plans for any personnel but performers. Understudies are great—but what happens if the stage manager gets Covid and there is no backup?
Jason Laks Named President of Broadway League
The New York Times: The Broadway League, the trade organization that represents commercial theater producers and the industry’s powerful theater owners, has chosen Jason Laks, a longtime official at the organization, to be its next president at a time when the sector is still struggling to recover its prepandemic financial strength.
How 3D Printing is Transforming Education
Fusion Blog: 3D printing, also known as additive manufacturing, is a production technique that creates three-dimensional objects from computer-aided design (CAD) files. This process involves depositing materials—typically plastics, metals, wax, or composites—layer by layer to build a shape. The entire procedure is controlled by a computer. Thus, making 3D printing a cost-effective, efficient, and accurate method to create objects of almost any geometry or complexity.
Sunday, December 01, 2024
NFTRW Weekly Top Five
Here are the top five comment generating posts of the past week:
Will The AI Boom Hurt Creativity? Not If Humans Lead The Way
www.forbes.com: As we experience the ups and downs in the use of AI in business, an important underlying question is the extent to which AI hurts or help creativity. I wrote in 2022 on how we need to be careful not to over use AI in a way that makes us human borgs. Now the question is more relevant than ever, as the availability and use of generative AI has exploded since the launch of ChatGPT last year.What Stage Management Teaches Us About Guiding Teams
StageLync: As stage managers, we work behind the scenes, ensuring that everything runs smoothly while the spotlight shines elsewhere. What many people don’t realize is that the skills we use—managing moving parts, anticipating challenges, and balancing creative and technical demands—are directly transferable to leadership.Shiz University: How 'Wicked's Epic Oz School Was Built
variety.com: Production designer Nathan Crowley has been waiting his entire career for a film in which he could build an entire fantasy world. He found that with “Wicked.” When director Jon M. Chu called on him to work on “Wicked” for the film adaption of the Broadway musical, Crowley’s dream came true. “Jon wanted it to be fantastical. He wanted it to be joyous.Beam Clamps and Rigging Pulley Systems for Circus
Trix Circus: Beam clamps are designed to be used in applications where a load is placed on a structural beam (such as an I beam, universal beam, H beam, RSJ). They attach to the lower flange of a structural beam and allow for secure fixing without the need for welding and drilling. The most widely available beam clamps are called girder clamps and they can be very useful for circus rigging if you are intending to hang apparatus as a direct vertical load.Lighting Designer Chiara Carucci On Preserving The Darkness
Live Design Online: Chiara Carucci, a Europe-based lighting designer, has been named winner of the first ever Wildlife Night Watch Award from DarkSky International. The DarkSky Awards are given in recognition of designers working to protect the night from light pollution.
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