A History of Broadway Grosses

BroadwayWorld: Broadway grosses are a significant part of how both professionals and the public learn about Broadway on a regular basis. Each week, the Broadway League reports official statistics including how much money each show earned in gross ticket sales, how many theatergoers attended, and how this compares with the previous week.

Claypaky Turns 50

Lighting&Sound America Online - News: Today, 50 years after its foundation, Claypaky celebrates its golden anniversary. It was on August 28, 1976, that Pasquale Quadri "Paky" -- a musician passionate about photography and optics -- founded the company in Bergamo, Italy, with an idea that was anything but obvious at the time: light could be much more than illumination. Paky saw a different future: light could become an active creative element, capable of moving, transforming, interacting with music and, above all, generating emotion.

Don’t Tear It Down. Tear It Apart

Architect Magazine: What do we remember and how? Those are the key questions to which two exhibitions of signal importance and achievement on view in Los Angeles right now provide very concrete answers. Presented at the Geffen Contemporary site of Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) (through May 3) and at the independent art space The Brick (through May 7), Monuments focuses on how we remember the struggle to liberate black people in this country, a still ongoing conflict in which it has been until recently only the supposed losers of Civil War have erected physical reminders.

Historical Frenemies: Hurston & Hughes, Kramer & Fauci

AMERICAN THEATRE: Maybe the title should have been a warning. In attempting to adapt one of her short stories into a major theatrical work with the poet Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston might have looked twice at the name “The Bone of Contention.” That’s precisely what the writing project between this pair of Harlem Renaissance icons turned into, when their efforts to turn Hurston’s story into an ambitious folk epic of Black life, which they gave the new title Mule Bone, imploded over copyright claims and recriminations, with disastrous ripple effects on an entire artistic ecosystem.

Number of plays attributed to 16th-century playwright Thomas Kyd double in new edition

Stage | The Guardian: The number of plays attributed to the 16th-century playwright Thomas Kyd has more than doubled in a major new edition. The forthcoming second volume of The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd makes a substantial case for his sole or part-authorship of plays previously attributed to William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe.

A Look at Black Broadway, 1820 – 2026

New York Theater: For every well-known showcase of Black Broadway – “Porgy and Bess,” 1935; “A Raisin in the Sun” 1959; last year’s “Purpose,” winner of both the Tony and Pulitzer — there are little-remembered milestones ranging over the past two centuries. The gallery below, in honor of Black History Month (which several federal agencies now have banned employees from celebrating), samples the history of theater by, for and with Black Americans, taken from collections at the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and the Museum of the City of New York

This Month in Theatre History

AMERICAN THEATRE: The Majestic Theatre opened in Chicago’s then-tallest building on New Year’s Day, 1906. Occupying the lower floors of the Majestic Building, which also housed a hotel, the theatre was designed by Cornelius Rapp of the architectural firm Rapp and Rapp. Following Illinois’s legal regime of racial segregation, the venue’s design featured disparate entrances for white and Black audiences, who were seated in different levels of the theatre

The History of the 'Howie Scream' Sound Effect

laughingsquid.com: This sound effect, which rivals the “Wilhelm Scream”, may have originated with the 1986 psychological drama The Ninth Configuration but was finally named after actor and NFL player Howie Long, whose character, Master Sergeant Kelly, was launched off of a train in the 1996 John Woo movie Broken Arrow.

Boo! How Artists Have Envisioned Ghosts Throughout the Centuries

news.artnet.com: People have believed in ghosts since time immemorial. Our enduring fascination with these spooky spectres has seen them haunt all manner of popular media, from folklore to film, and art. But, trapped between our earthly realm and whatever awaits, ghosts are often felt as an intangible presence. Only sometimes are sightings reported, so how best to represent the supernatural?

The Confidence of a Mediocre White Man, 19th-Century Edition

AMERICAN THEATRE: Most books about history begin with a question or puzzle that sparks the author’s curiosity. In 2008, when I first scrutinized Harry Watkins’s diary in the Harvard Theatre Collection’s reading room (a space that has since been shuttered), one question pestered me more than any other: Why had no one cared about Harry Watkins? The many citations of One Man in His Time by Otis Skinner and Maud Skinner demonstrated that historians knew about this mediocre actor’s diary, but apparently, no one had attempted to find it.

Did Ancient Egyptians Build the Great Pyramid With a Hidden Pulley System?

news.artnet.com: The Great Pyramid of Giza—the largest of Egypt’s pyramids—consists of about 2.3 million limestone blocks. The smallest of these weigh two tons, while the largest weigh over 60. History says laborers built this monumental tomb in 20 years. That means a block got laid every minute. How did they do it? Everyone wants to know.

New books on the theater, its history, and artists

DC Theater Arts: Theater-lovers everywhere can keep up with their reading with a selection of four publications offering a range of topics for all ages and interests, from a child’s introduction to a Shakespeare classic and a little-known endeavor of a musical theater legend to the collected works of a Black playwright and the long saga of blackface minstrelsy in America.

How Maggie Andersen found her voice

Chicago Reader: Chicago theater lore sometimes still seems stuck in Steppenwolf in the 70s, despite the emergence of so many notable ensembles since the days when Gary Sinise, Terry Kinney, and Jeff Perry began putting on shows in the basement of a Highland Park church. In some ways, it’s understandable—Steppenwolf provided an enduring blueprint for ensemble-based companies that emphasized grit and guts over glitz, even as their first members departed for careers in Hollywood and big Broadway productions.

Watching the World in a Dark Room: The Early Modern Camera Obscura

The Public Domain Review: Centuries before photography froze the world into neat frames, scientists, poets, and artists streamed transient images into dark interior spaces with the help of a camera obscura. Julie Park explores the early modern fascination with this quasi-spiritual technology and the magic, melancholy, and dream-like experiences it produced.

How 20th-century DC theater helped African Americans take center stage

DC Metro Theater Arts: Examining presence in a theatrical context is a provocative idea, and a challenging one. A performance gives presence to the narrative, characters, and ideas of a play. The theater gives presence to the artists and audiences that the company gathers together in the construction of a community. A performance and a theater make the lives, the values, the hopes and aspirations, and the people of that constructed community visible beyond themselves.

BIOMIMICRY: HOW NATURE INFLUENCES INNOVATION

News | CFDA: The definition of biomimicry is the act of using nature as a model for human inventions. It is a technological-oriented approach focused on putting nature’s lessons into practice. To see nature as a model, study the model and use it as inspiration for designing and solving humans complex problems.

Dun, Dun Duuun! Where did pop culture’s most dramatic sound come from?

Music | The Guardian: There’s surely only one thing that unites Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the 1974 comedy horror Young Frankenstein and The Muppets’ most recent special on Disney+. Regrettably, it is not Kermit the Frog. The thing that appears in all of these works has no easily recognisable familiar name, although it is perhaps one of the most recognisable three-beat musical phrases in history. It starts with a dun; it continues with a dun; it ends with a duuun!

Behind the scenes at East London’s art-deco gem – The Troxy

www.ianvisits.co.uk: One of East London’s art-deco gems is being restored to its original glory as decades of clutter and mess are cleared away. This is the Troxy, built in the 1930s as a cinema, later an opera rehearsal site followed by two fat ladies as a bingo hall, and now being restored as a music and entertainment venue.

Preserving, Documenting, and Archiving Theater. An Interview with Dmitrii Rodionov, Director of the State Central Theatrical Museum in Moscow.

The Theatre Times: An 1890s red brick, neo-gothic mansion, situated on a busy intersection of central Moscow, houses one of the largest and richest world collections—including visual art, a library, archives, and more—dedicated to the history of theater. Founded in 1894 by Aleksei Bakhrushin, a Russian entrepreneur, collector, and theater enthusiast, as a small private museum, it evolved in a major museum visited by hundreds of thousands of people every year—the State Central Theatrical Museum (GTsTM after its Russian acronym), named after its founder, A.A. Bakhrushin.

Hyatt Hotels says it takes concerns that CPAC stage resembled Nazi symbol “very seriously”

Salon.com: Hyatt Hotels on Sunday said it was treating concerns that the stage for Conservative Political Action Conference — held at the Hyatt Regency in Orlando — resembled a Nazi symbol "very seriously" and condemned symbols of hate as "abhorrent."