CMU School of Drama


Showing posts with label Performance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Performance. Show all posts

Friday, October 02, 2026

Interview: Joe Serafini On Playing Evan Hansen at the John W. Engeman Theater

BroadwayWorld: The John W. Engeman Theater presents DEAR EVAN HANSEN, the winner of six Tony Awards including Best Musical, running through October 25, 2026 in Northport. Featuring a book by Steven Levenson and a score by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the show tells the story of Evan Hansen, a young man on the outside looking in, whose letter to himself sets off a lie that spirals into everything he ever wanted. The production is directed by Scott Weinstein with choreography by Robin Levine.

Thursday, October 01, 2026

Interview: Deborah Hope of GLORIA: A LIFE at Cypress Stage

BroadwayWorld: Cypress Stage launches its inaugural season with Emily Mann’s Gloria: A Life, running October 2 through October 18. Houston theater veteran Deborah Hope directs the production, which explores the life and work of feminist icon Gloria Steinem. Hope spoke with BroadwayWorld writer Brett Cullum about the new theater company, her personal connection to Steinem, her career in Houston theater, and why she believes the city’s theater community is so special.

Monday, September 28, 2026

Can a ballerina do a stomp? Natalia Osipova on making her fearsome, foul-mouthed acting debut

Stage | The Guardian: When Natalia Osipova started rehearsals for her first ever play, it didn’t go well. “I cry. I’m shaking. I’m stressed and completely lost on the first day,” she reports. “I think, ‘I’m a piece of shit!’ I want to take a taxi and run away.”

Friday, September 25, 2026

Benjamin Pajak on finding his ‘superpower’ with The Lost Boys

Curtaincallbwy.com: After making his Broadway debut in 2022 in The Music Man alongside Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, and playing the title role in Oliver! at Encores! NY City Center, Benjamin Pajak is back on Broadway to originate the stage role of Sam Emerson in The Lost Boys.

Monday, September 21, 2026

Interview: Madison Palmer On Originating Dyanne in MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET at Paramount Theatre's Stolp Island Theatre

BroadwayWorld: Paramount Theatre's production of MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET, staged in the new Stolp Island Theatre designed to immerse audiences in the world of Sun Studio, continues its long run. Based on the real events of December 4, 1956, when Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins had a chance encounter at Sun Studio in Memphis, the show captures one of the greatest impromptu jam sessions in music history, featuring 'Blue Suede Shoes,' 'Walk the Line,' 'Great Balls of Fire,' and more.

SCHMIGADOON!’s Kaleigh Cronin Recalls Performing Until She Was 8 Months Pregnant: ‘I Felt Brave’

BroadwayWorld: At around 34 weeks pregnant, Kaleigh Cronin said farewell to her fellow Schmigadoonians in the Broadway musical Schmigadoon! — but felt so good, she could’ve stuck around for more. “Honestly, up until the day I went into labor, I was like, ‘I could still be doing this,’” Cronin, now mom to six-week-old Charlie Joseph De Simini — whom she shares with husband John De Simini — exclusively tells BroadwayWorld.

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

Andrew Scott Had to Re-Learn Shakespeare for Elsinore

www.thewrap.com: Like many of Britain’s great actors, Andrew Scott is very familiar with “Hamlet,” having played the title role dozens of times on the West End. But to take on the role of Ian Charleson in “Elsinore,” he had to toss much of how he approached the Prince of Denmark out of the window…except for the memories of how much it took its toll.

Tuesday, September 15, 2026

Meet Michael Man, the versatile actor playing Gollum at the Stratford Festival

Intermission Magazine: There’s something delightfully impish about the way Michael Man moves onstage. I noticed it when I saw the actor in the Stratford Festival’s world premiere production of Jovanni Sy 施崇梵’s The Tao of the World as Dr. Wilson Wong, a sexually repressed, buttoned-up physician from Saskatchewan caught in the social chaos of a wealthy Singaporean family. I noticed it again in The Hobbit, when he played the instantly recognizable Gollum, a creature who has spent centuries skulking around Middle-earth obsessing over a certain band of gold.

Monday, September 14, 2026

In The Attic, Shana Carroll Reflects on a Life Spent on the Trapeze

Playbill: Shana Carroll’s distinguished career in the circus arts—during which she’s performed as a Cirque du Soleil soloist, co-founded the Montreal-based circus-theatre collective The 7 Fingers, and earned a Tony Award nomination as co-choreographer and circus designer for Water for Elephants—began with a simple yet transformative encounter at age 18.

Wednesday, September 09, 2026

Between Land and Tide: giant starfish washes up in Portsmouth in this apocalyptic performance art

theconversation.com: Five women slowly process across Portsmouth’s municipal park, covered in hessian-coloured layered fabrics. On their heads they wear what look like strange overgrown dreadlocks, making them a group of connected beings. They move towards a deflated hessian starfish shape on the floor. Circling it, they enact a ritual performance, animating the space and quietly paying homage to the five-armed symmetry of echinoderms.

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

Disneyland's Cast Members Work Behind the Scenes to Create Magic

variety.com: In a 400,000 square-foot warehouse in Anaheim, Disney cast members create magic. It’s the facility where cast members create decor for the park — right now they are putting the finishing touches on Halloween and have already started winter holiday-scapes — fix everything from restaurant appliances to the iconic spinning teacups

Friday, April 17, 2026

New Seattle improv program offers more than performance skills

The Seattle Times: Among the tools that have helped Seattleite Saya Jenks manage anxiety most effectively, here’s one that might seem unexpected: improv. The theatrical art of performing or enacting scenes with no script has also helped her create community when moving between cities, recover from the social isolation of the pandemic and learn to “embrace failure” and be “OK with things not going perfectly,” she said.

Monday, April 06, 2026

Monica Barbaro: ‘Yesterday I went home thinking I’m a terrible actor and they’re finding out’

Theatre | The Guardian: “I feel like I’m imitating an American accent, but it really is mine,” Monica Barbaro jokes. The actor has spent the morning rehearsing in an English accent for her stage debut in the National Theatre’s revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. During interviews, she says, she switches back. “I feel it’s best to use my own voice.”

Friday, March 27, 2026

‘It feels like flying!’ Sadie Sink and Noah Jupe on child stardom, passion and the heady rush of Romeo and Juliet

Theatre | The Guardian: Noah Jupe and Sadie Sink are comparing their CVs. “Noah has more Shakespeare experience than me, for sure,” says Sink. “Oh yes, I think so,” replies Jupe. “How many lines?” asks Sink. “Quite a few, actually,” he reports. “More than 10!”

Thursday, March 12, 2026

Four actors on the high-stakes art of being an understudy

www.thestar.com: Being an understudy is one of the most challenging roles in the theatre. These actors, who can be called on in a moment’s notice to step in when a lead actor cannot perform, are the living embodiment of the “the show must go on.” The Star recently spoke with four current and former understudies, who shared their insights on the unique role.

Pouring It On for PICT: Michael Patrick Trimm Takes on ‘The Smuggler,’ a Solo Thriller in Rhythmic Verse

onStage Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh International Classic Theatre first announced Michael Patrick Trimm in the role of bartender/smuggler/immigrant Tim Finnegan for March of last year, working with director Patrick Cannon and expected at Riley’s Pour House in Carnegie. Fate and fire intervened, and Riley’s burned to the ground in November 2024, with Trimm moving on to a two-hander, the excellent co-production King James, at both City Theatre and Cleveland Play House.

Tuesday, March 10, 2026

15 Questions in 15 Minutes with Christopher Borg

DC Theater Arts: Originally trained as an actor by the late Kenneth Washington at the University of Utah, and then in the classics as an Acting Fellow under the tutelage of Michael Kahn at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC, Christopher Borg has since gone on to a multi-award-winning career in NYC’s innovative off Broadway and indie theater scene.

Friday, February 27, 2026

Black Actress Sues Harvard Theater Over Horrific Hair Experience

www.theroot.com: Her story revolves around the 2025 production of “The Odyssey” that was taking place at Harvard University’s American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. While there, Imoru said she was made to get cornrows in her hair as required for her role.

Wednesday, February 25, 2026

How to Fill a Clown Car (Lessons from Julia Proctor’s Clown Gym)

HowlRound Theatre Commons: New York City, 2021. Isolated, over-snacked, and starved for a creative community, I joined a virtual playwriting group. I was writing an existential dark comedy (as one does during a pandemic-induced lockdown) and thought, this play has clowns. Where do I find those?

Wednesday, February 04, 2026

"The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana

www.thesegalcenter.org: For longtime frequenters of the downtown New York theatre scene, Carmelita Tropicana is a household name. In her decades-long career as a performance artist, actor, author, and teacher, she has built a body of work that alloys raucous humor and fantastical role play—with the help of a roster of memorable personas and characters—to interrogate the entanglements of queerness, ethnicity, nationality, and gender.