NFTRW Weekly Top Five

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

Why Those Post-Show Diner Trips Meant Everything

OnStage Blog: Theatre people understand that post-show hunger is not normal hunger. It is a full body emergency. You just spent two hours singing, dancing, quick-changing, carrying set pieces, pretending to die, or all of the above. Of course you need mozzarella sticks at 12:14 a.m. Be serious.

In Defense of the Closet Drama

HowlRound Theatre Commons: When I started trying to work as a playwright, I would often insist that I wasn’t writing plays to sit on a hard drive somewhere. I was writing plays to be performed. In the decade-or-so since then, I have been fortunate enough to have some of my work performed, but the most I have ever seen many of my plays come alive is at a reading. For many years—and, to some extent, still—I felt as if these works I loved so much were never allowed to be fully born.

Puppetopia: The Magnificent Ms. Pham

New York Theater: This elaborate, tuneful puppet musical doesn’t just tell the story of the journey of Kim Pham from Vietnamese “hometown girl” riding a water buffalo to young romantic in Saigon to war refugee “boatperson” to mother of four sons in Houston, Texas. It threads the tale with Vietnamese history and mythology, populates it with elephants, lions, dragons and demons, presents it as shadow puppetry and a contemporary downtown spin on traditional Vietnamese water puppetry (complete with a stage-wide pool of water), and accompanies it with sixteen songs from rock to pop to country – all in 60 minutes. It’s a lot to take in: clever and colorful, but also crowded and confusing.

Squirrel Hill Lunar New Year parade canceled amid ICE fears

90.5 WESA: Squirrel Hill’s annual Lunar New Year celebration has been canceled this year, amid fears in Pittsburgh’s Asian community about the surge in federal immigration enforcement. The decision was made in January, according to Maria Cohen, executive director of the Squirrel Hill Urban Coalition, and was made in partnership with the Pittsburgh chapter of the OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates.

Do we need AI-optimized resumes?

The Verge: With AI-backed hiring on the rise, tips for “hacking” your resume are all over social media. As job search companies increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to sort through applications, job seekers wonder how to best position themselves with those filters in mind.