UT ACTLab shutdown amid record courses and enrollment.

Joey’s Geeky Life: As reported in the Daily Texan, classes for the ACTLab program in New Media at the University of Texas at Austin, for which I helped both build as a student and as a teacher, have been canceled effective Fall 2010. This unfortunate event has come due to the retirement of its founder, Professor Allucquére Sandy Stone. Professor Stone is retiring from active teaching, however she will become a Professor Emerita, thus retaining the ability to teach courses at the University of Texas at Austin.

How to Manage Time

Ian's Messy Desk: If you’re anything like me, your day is full of things to do. We expend energy rushing through the day trying to keep up with ourselves. While technology has given us tools to improve and simplify our lives, we have added so much more to our schedules that we are as pressed for time as any generation. Often the day seems so full that it is impossible accomplish everything we would like.

Downstage Center - B.H. Barry - May, 2010

American Theatre Wing: Progenitor of fight direction in America and 2010 Tony Honor recipient B.H. Barry talks about his decades of developing and staging fights across the country, starting with Hamlet in 1978 at Arena Stage and continuing with countless productions for the New York Shakespeare Festival, such Broadway shows as the fabled 1981 Frankenstein, City of Angels, My Favorite Year, An Inspector Calls and most recently Dividing the Estate. He discusses his upbringing and education in England, his early days as an actor and how he was drawn into fight directing, his role in establishing the Society of British Fight Directors -- and his lack of participation in its American counterpart, how he develops fights by probing the director's vision of the characters participating in the fight, why his fights are rooted more in acting then athleticism, and what it was like to be part of a tabloid saga when actors famously strayed from his direction in Broadway's I Hate Hamlet.

Custom AutoCAD Linetypes the Super Simple Way

The CAD Geek Blog: Linetypes play an integral role in visually separating certain elements of our designs. Most of the time one of the 40+ linetypes that come with AutoCAD will suffice, but there’s always that perpetual need for one more linetype. While its true linetypes must be developed, the good news is that it’s not as difficult as it sounds.

Steppenwolf’s Other Ambitious Production

Steppenwolf Theatre Company Blog: Early in November, our Gala team (Director of Major Gifts Brooke Walters, Events Management Director Lori Davidson, Special Events Manager Kendra Stock, Special Events Associate Molly Kobelt, and myself) went to view the unrented retail space at the Blackhawk on Halsted building. For the first time in 12 years, Steppenwolf was considering forgoing the tent that had consistently housed our annual Gala parties. Walking into that space, it was both challenging and exciting to think about what it would look like on the night of the party.

Filmmakers flock to forum on state tax credits

Company Town | Los Angeles Times: Symposium Question: How do you pack a theater with jaded movie industry professionals?
Answer: Show them the latest hot information on film tax credits.
Nearly 200 people crammed into an auditorium at the Landmark Theatre in West Los Angeles recently to learn the latest skinny on the kind of topic that would set an accountant's heart aflutter.

Cirque du Soleil seeks to inspire local innovation and creativity

7thSpace Interactive: Cirque du Soleil, a Canadian organisation providing artistic entertainment and producing its own costumes and props, today (May 12) announced the opening of its first production workshop in Hong Kong. From a group of 20 street performers in 1984, Cirque du Soleil has grown to employ 5,000 staff, including more than 1,200 artists, from about 50 countries. The company produces costumes and props for its multiple shows staged around the world.

Work Smart: Unconventional Cures for Meeting-itis

Fast Company: At Google, large meetings stay on track with the help of a four-foot-tall timer. There, meeting agendas are highly structured and allocate a certain amount of time to each topic. The timer is a simple program running on a computer and projected onto the wall so it's visible to all. It counts down the amount of time left for a particular agenda item or the entire meeting.

Foamcoat - Milwaukee Public Museum

Rosco: The exhibits staff of the Milwaukee Public Museum created the artificial stones for the cave and walkway in the exhibit area. The staff first made CAD drawings, then accomplished the work in their own workshops. Emilio Bras, the coordinator for this exhibit, listed the steps he and his team followed

Floods Wreak Havoc On Nashville Music Scene

NPR: The flooding in Nashville last week took 31 lives and is approaching $2 billion in property damage. It also took a toll on the city's musical heritage and infrastructure. The Grand Ole Opry House was inundated. The Nashville Symphony lost two Steinways when its basement flooded. But the most concentrated instrument loss took place at a facility beside the Cumberland River called Soundcheck, where hundreds of the city's musicians stored their treasured instruments.

Jerry Manning is Seattle Rep's new artistic director

Seattle Times Newspaper: Seattle Repertory Theatre has appointed a new artistic director, one from within its ranks. The new honcho will be Jerry Manning, a respected staffer at the Tony Award-winning Seattle company since 2001.

Backstage: What 'Helen Hayes Recommended' means; 'Paige in Full' at Flashpoint

Washington Post: If you've noticed the phrase "Helen Hayes Recommended" in ads for Washington area theaters and wondered how it relates to nominations and awards that won't come out until next year, you're probably not alone. Linda Levy Grossman, president and CEO of the Helen Hayes Awards, says it began in January as a year-long experiment to get more "paying butts in seats."

For Its 25th Anniversary, Alabama Shakespeare Fest to Mount World Premieres With Local Flavor

Yahoo! News: Alabama Shakespeare Festival will stage three world-premiere productions of plays set on its home turf - Montgomery, AL - in the 2010-11 season.
The ten-show 25th anniversary season also features three "encore" productions, including the return of the hot-selling Bear Country, the story of Alabama football coach Paul "Bear" Bryant.

Lights Go Out at Broadway's 'Enron'

Yahoo! News: The Broadway production of British playwright Lucy Prebble's acclaimed London play, Enron, a highly theatrical look at the infamous case of American corporate greed, closes May 9 after the 7:30 PM performance.

Casting Workshop Crackdown

Backstage: California has changed the way many casting directors do business in the state, leaving some scrambling to comply with a new law they don't yet fully understand.

Iron Man 2

Carnegie Mellon University: When the hotly anticipated "Iron Man 2" starring Robert Downey Jr. hits theaters this week, Andrew Birdzell (CFA'06) won't be just any moviegoer. He'll be watching his own work on the big screen.

Sala Udin reprises role he originated in August Wilson's 'Jitney'

Post Gazette: "Car service."
Those words are synonymous with jitneys, the private taxis still operating in Pittsburgh's black neighborhoods -- neighborhoods that white-owned cab companies ignored for years.

'Speech & Debate' a dark comedy with a lot to say

Post Gazette: Who knew high school speech and debate competitions were so structured, competitive . . . and emotionally intense?
But they're really just a means to an end in "Speech & Debate," Stephen Karam's affecting dark comedy about three teenagers for whom speech and debate (and extemporary commentary, dramatic interp, declamation, group interp, all those categories) are also just means to an end -- mechanisms for personal discovery, or speaking out, or getting even, or perhaps just hiding out in plain view.

City Theatre season features 2 premieres

Post Gazette: Two premieres, including a commissioned work about Pittsburgher George S. Kaufman, pace City Theatre's 2010-11 season.
Playwrights Eric Simonson and Jeffrey Hatcher, who teamed up on the Frank Lloyd Wright play, "Worksong," that played at City in 2004-05, return with "Louder, Faster" in May 2011.

Pappas to direct 'Carnage' at the Public

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: Pittsburgh Public Theater has chosen "God of Carnage" for its final show of the 2010/11 season.
Yasmina Reza's contemporary comedy that won the 2009 Tony Award for best play will be performed May 26 to June 26, 2011, at the O'Reilly Theater, Downtown. Producing artistic director Ted Pappas will direct.

International children's festival brings acts from around the world

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: Think globally, act locally might well be the slogan for the 24th Pittsburgh International Children's Festival.
The five-day festival that gets underway May 12 in Oakland brings performers and performances from far-off countries such as Russia, Italy and Scotland.
The core of the festival is the six live stage shows by international artists that employ puppetry, circus arts, acrobatics, dance, music and drama. They're chosen to entertain and expand the horizons of children as young as one year old, and the adults who bring them.

City Theatre fills final open slots in 2010-11 season

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: City Theatre has filled the three open slots on its 2010-11 season of six subscription offerings and two non-subscriber shows.
In addition, performance dates have been chosen for all eight productions.

'How They Run' a fun but chaste British farce, director says

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: Innocent isn't usually a word associated with a British farce.
But director Jim Mikula says "See How They Run," being staged by the Valley Players of Ligonier this weekend, is much calmer than some.
"This was one of the first British farces ever written. It was written in 1949," he says. "It wasn't until the 1970s or '80s that the farces started to get more risque. It does have the chase scenes and people in and out of doors, but it doesn't have the sexual suggestions that the later farces have."

Pittsburgh Playwrights sticks to original cycle with August Wilson's 'Jitney'

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: When Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company debuted in 2003, its first production was August Wilson's "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom."
It also was the start of a mission for the company's founder and producing artistic director Mark Clayton Southers.
"When we started the company, we wanted to do a unique cycle," Southers says.

Kids plays range from classics to new sci-fi

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: An environment-themed, sci-fi children's play from a local playwright will make its debut this weekend at the Pittsburgh Playhouse's Rauh Theatre, where the creator hopes that kids will be inspired to recycle. Meanwhile, two beloved classic shows -- "Annie" and "Seussical" -- will entertain kids at other theaters.

'Young Frankenstein' offers bawdy humor, lots of laughs

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: Despite all attempts to have vaudeville declared dead, it's alive at the Benedum Center, Downtown as a the final presentation of the 2009-2010 PNC Broadway Across America — Pittsburgh series.
"Young Frankenstein," aka "The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein," has its two big monster feet firmly planted in the traditions of borscht belt, vaudeville and burlesque humor with just a touch of Monty Python added to the mix.

CLO's co-productions score 4 Tony nominations

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera had at least four reasons to be happy when the Tony nominations were announced on Tuesday.
"The Addams Family" and "Come Fly Away," the two Broadway musicals that Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera helped produced, each received two nominations.

In Tony Nominations, Art and Commerce Duke It Out

NYTimes.com: Broadway producers banked more than ever this theater season that stars onstage would fill seats, and in many cases were proved right. On Tuesday, though, the 2010 Tony Award nominations drew a sharp distinction between commercial interests and artistic success, with recognition going to several shows with few, if any, stars and small audiences.

Long Gestation - Turning ‘The Kid’ Into a Musical

NYTimes.com: WHEN the musical librettist Michael Zam first read “The Kid,” a 1999 memoir about a gay couple adopting a baby, he was certain that he wanted to turn it into a musical. He loved the acerbic tone of the book’s author, the syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage, and the frank portrayal of a gay man’s dream for a family. But rather than plunge into adaptation, Mr. Zam made it a long-term project, because he felt it would take time — years, it turned out — to wrest a successful show out of this particular book.

Feeling Guilty About Taking Time Off

FreelanceFolder: One of the coolest perks about being a freelancer is that there’s absolutely no nine-to-five and no one around to scream at you if you’re late to work. I’m definitely not a morning person, so this was a big factor when I decided to go into business for myself.
The problem with this though is that we’re so ingrained to “work, work, work” that this perk begins to become a liability. You start feeling guilty because you’re at the nail salon on Thursday, playing with your kids at Chucky Cheese’s on Tuesday and hanging with friends on Friday. I mean, everyone else is working, shouldn’t you be too?

Williamstown Theatre Festival Appoints First Female Artistic Director

Women & Hollywood: It only took 55 years, but Williamstown Theatre Festival the most prestigious summer stock theatre, has finally appointed a woman to run the Festival. Jenny Gersten who was the associate producer from 1994-2006 will return to take charge after this summer from Nicholas Martin.

Actors unions' appear ready to walk down the aisle

Los Angeles Times: Hollywood's once-bickering actors' unions appear to be warming up to the idea of a marriage.
That's the takeaway from an upbeat message published in the Screen Actors Guild magazine from a guild task force exploring the idea of merging SAG with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. The guilds earlier this year opted to restore a long-term bargaining partnership that had broken off two years ago because of a host of disagreements.

Coraline and Rapid Prototyping

Props: This is where this may become useful. One day, these machines may be inexpensive enough to sit on every desktop; but for now, they’re expensive. Not to mention the time it takes to draft an object in three dimensions on a computer can easily be as long as the time it takes for a props artisan to sculpt it.

Flame Retardant Fabrics: What’s the Difference between FR, IFR, DFR and NFR Fabrics?

Rosebrand: Fire safety is serious business and Rose Brand offers years of experience, dedicated support, and practical solutions to keep you and your audiences safe. While local fire codes may vary and local enforcement is open to interpretation and discretion, almost everyone has the same question in mind: Does the fabric self-extinguish if exposed to a small flame?

Hardware Terminology

Technical Direction Tidbits: Sometimes the hardest part about finding the ideal piece of hardware is knowing what to call it.

Draper/Cutter - Williamstown Theatre Festival

The Producer's Perspective Classifieds: Draper/Cutter for its 2010 Summer Season comprised of four classic/contemporary plays on our 550 seat Main Stage and 4 world premieres on our 170 seat Nikos Stage.

Iron Man 2's Secret Sauce: 3-D Printing

Fast Company: On screen, with all those suits whirling into place, you'd probably assume that the "costumes" are merely virtual. Actually, they're not: Maybe the most cutting-edge facet of Iron Man 2's production was the real-life fabrication of the suits. Using 3-D printers, the film's production company, Legacy Effects, was able to have artists draw an art concept--and then physically make that concept in just four hours.

New 'Planet of the Apes' Will Do Away with Those Stupid Realistic, Intricately-Detailed Costumes

I Watch Stuff: Rumor of another attempt at rebooting Planet of the Apes have lingered for a while, but throughout them all, I'd foolishly been assuming that, whatever form the next film took, it would retain the charming, convincing costume-work that was a mainstay of the original series and the saving grace of Tim Burton's 2001 film. Not the case! It turns out we can now make apes "photo-realistic" with computer machines, so we're just going to do that.

Can Appropriation Artist Claim Copyright Over Artwork Appropriated From The Same Original?

Techdirt: Here's a fun one found via Boing Boing. It involves a band, named Elsinore, that is about to put out an album and has run into a rather bizarre copyright issue that highlights some of the insanity in today's copyright law. For the cover of the album, they used a painting done in an art class by a friend of the band named Brittany Pyle.

critics still crucial to theatre

The Stage: So the votes are in and the verdict delivered. Given how grudging I've been in the past about polls in the Stage newspaper, it would be churlish to deny that I'm delighted by its current survey of theatre critics. Its results give myself and Lyn Gardner key places among the most read and valued. That's nice. But, more to the point, it shows that the Guardian itself is the preferred option of many people engaged in theatre's unholy trade.

Theatre critics still pack a punch

guardian.co.uk: So the votes are in and the verdict delivered. Given how grudging I've been in the past about polls in the Stage newspaper, it would be churlish to deny that I'm delighted by its current survey of theatre critics. Its results give myself and Lyn Gardner key places among the most read and valued. That's nice. But, more to the point, it shows that the Guardian itself is the preferred option of many people engaged in theatre's unholy trade.

A quick curtain call. Then bed: Child actors in adult theatre

The Guardian: It's a blissfully sunny spring Saturday, a perfect afternoon for kids to kick a football in the park or play on the swings. Yet eight-year-old Lennie Harvey is locked indoors, in the warren of dressing rooms backstage at the Apollo theatre in London's West End. Lennie does have games to play, though: Ludo and table tennis. Of the latter, Lennie says: "I play it with some of the actors. There's someone called Tom. I've beat him twice, and I've beat my pretend Mum, and I've beat one of the men who beats up my Dad. And because I beat them all, someone gave me a chocolate bunny."

SAG Beats Drum for Merger

Backstage: Last month, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists devoted two pages in its official magazine to a call for merger with the Screen Actors Guild. This week, SAG doubled that effort.

Plug pulled on school play; parents, students protest

Daily Herald:A last-minute cancellation of the play "Promedy" - a spoof on prom and school life - prompted a student protest Wednesday at West Chicago Middle School. Via BackstageJobs.com

Just the Nominees, Please: 2010 Tony Award Nominations Announced

Playbill.com: The complete list of 2010 Tony Award nominees

Point Park alum thriving on the Great White Way

Post Gazette: Tony-winning director/choreographer Rob Ashford's big week included the opening of "Promises, Promises" on Broadway and giving the commencement speech at his alma mater, Point Park University, on Saturday.

PBT offers variety in benefit production

Post Gazette: It's been said it is never too early to plan for retirement. Artists with the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre will be doing just that when they showcase their talents at the 2010 PBT Dancers' Trust Fund performance. The annual benefit production to raise money for the dancers' retirement fund is Saturday at the George R. White Dance Complex at Point Park University, Downtown.

Short film seeking crew

Craigslist: I am crewing up for the short film, Anywhere but Here, co-winner of this years Steeltown Film Factory competition.

Painter sought to create portraits for staged Picture of Dorian Gray!

Craigslist: The Rage of the Stage Players, Pittsburgh’s alternative performance company specializing in original horror, adult-oriented comedy, and mature fantasy productions, just to name a few of our strange genres, is searching for a skilled oil/etc. portrait painter to paint about five ever-decaying portraits of the title character for their spring 2011 production of THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY. We are prepping nearly a year in advance to both locate the perfect actor for the lead, and to provide ample time for the paintings to be created (size can be discussed).

'Fela!,' La Cage' top Tony noms

Hollywood Reporter: "Fela!" and the revival of "La Cage Aux Folles" are tied for the most Tony nominations with 11 each. The announcement of the nominees for the 64th annual Tony awards was made May 4 by actors Jeff Daniels and Lea Michele at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts.

The Hip-Hooray and Ballyhoo! Tony Nominees Offer Their Reactions to Being Honored

Playbill.com: The Tony Award nominations for the 2009-10 Broadway season were announced in the early hours of May 4. Playbill.com talked to some of the honored to get their reactions.

2010 Tony Nominations Announced; Fela! and La Cage Top List

Playbill.com: "Glee" and Spring Awakening star Lea Michele and God of Carnage's Jeff Daniels announced the nominations for the 64th Annual Tony Awards May 4 at the The New York Public Library for Performing Arts.

2010 Tony Award Nominations

NYTimes.com: A complete list of nominations for the 2010 Tony Awards, with links to the original New York Times reviews.

No Obvious Front-Runner in Tony Race

NYTimes.com: The new Broadway musical "Fela!" and the revival of the musical "La Cage Aux Folles" received the most Tony Awards nominations on Tuesday, 11 apiece, while the revival of August Wilson's "Fences" received the most for any play, at 10, in a year when no one show emerged as dominant and several high-profile performers were snubbed.

Scenofest 2011

Scenography: The PQ & Scenofest this week revealed details of the Scenofest 2011 Program. Last week we met with Jessica Bowles (The Scenofest 2011 Artistic Leader) to discuss this exciting festival of scenography. The 2011 although smaller in scale to the 2007 is still as compelling and might we dare say… more manageable!

Let’s Put Ageism on the Agenda by Elinor Block

Women & Hollywood: Shouts of “We can do it!” rang in the air last week as the Women in Film and Television (WFTV) event Enough of the Games… Let’s Put Ageism on the Agenda became like a women’s lib meeting. The event discussed the issue of ageism in the film and TV industry and debated the discrimination against women in the industry.

Color Color and more Color

Chart Porn: XKCD performed a lovely survey of his readers on color perception.

Songwriters Guild Claims The Internet Makes It Impossible To Create Content

Techdirt: Ah well. Last Friday we highlighted that the White House had posted the public comments on the IP enforcement plan, and pointed out a few of them. We had avoided the ones from most of the well-known lobbying groups because they tread on ground that had already been trampled to death, but a bunch of you have been submitting the filing from the Songwriters Guild of America, which takes ridiculous arguments to entirely new levels. Phillip pointed us to Ars Technica's take on the comment, highlighting the utterly ridiculous claim that bank robbery is less of an issue than copyright infringement, but the rest of the filing also raises some bizarre arguments as well.

Professors and Social Media

Inside Higher Ed: Professors, particularly those in the senior ranks, might have a reputation for being leery of social media. But they are no Luddites when it comes to Web 2.0 tools such as Facebook and YouTube, according to a new survey scheduled to be released today.
The data suggest that 80 percent of professors, with little variance by age, have at least one account with either Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Skype, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr, Slideshare, or Google Wave. Nearly 60 percent kept accounts with more than one, and a quarter used at least four.

Green Day And Jay-Z Productions Earn Tony Nominations

MTV News: It looks like Broadway could be the boulevard of fulfilled dreams for Green Day. Just weeks after opening, the Grammy-winning punk-pop band's rock opera "American Idiot" has been nominated for a Best Musical Tony Award.

Fela!. La Cage aux Folles, lead Tony nominations

Reuters: "Fela!," a new dance musical that tells the story of Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, and a revival of the musical "La Cage aux Folles" led the nominations for Broadway's top theater honors, the Tony Awards, announced on Tuesday.

‘La Cage,’ ‘Fences,’ ‘Fela!’ Top Tony Nominations

Bloomberg.com: “Fela!,” a Broadway musical about the Nigerian pop musician and activist Fela Kuti, and a downsized revival of “La Cage aux Folles” each earned 11 Tony Award nominations today.

Brand-new theaters planned for off-B'way

Crain's New York Business: In the past few months, Catherine Russell has been receiving calls constantly from producers trying to rent a stage at her off-Broadway theater complex.
In fact, the demand is so great that Ms. Russell—whose two stages are filled with the long-running shows The Fantasticks and Perfect Crime—plans to build more theaters. The general manager of the Snapple Theater Center at West 50th Street and Broadway is in negotiations with landlords at two midtown locations to build one complex with two 249-seat theaters and another with two 249-seat theaters and a 99-seat stage. She hopes to sign the leases within the next two months and finish the theaters by October.
“There are not enough theaters centrally located in the Broadway area,”

'Ragtime,' 'Scottsboro' Lead Drama Desk Noms

Backstage: "Ragtime" and "The Scottsboro Boys" came up big as the nominees for the 55th annual Drama Desk Awards were announced today. The short-lived Broadway revival of the Terrence McNally musical and the new Off-Broadway tuner each received nine nominations, more than any other production.

'Fela!,' 'La Cage' Lead Tony Nominations with 11 Each

Backstage: "Fela!" and the revival of "La Cage Aux Folles" are tied for the most Tony nominations with 11 each. The announcement of the nominees for the 64th annual Tony awards was made May 4 by actors Jeff Daniels and Lea Michele at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts.

TV Academy Honors 8 TV shows 'With a Conscience'

Backstage: A "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" episode about prejudice and an Alzheimer's documentary with Maria Shriver are among eight programs to be honored Wednesday for demonstrating the power of TV.

'Ragtime,' 'Scottsboro' top Drama Desks

Variety: With Tony nomination coming today, Monday's Drama Desk nominations have, as many such lists do, stirred up as much talk about who was overlooked as who actually got the nod.

'Fela!,' 'La Cage' top Tonys

Variety: "Fela!" and "La Cage aux Folles" led the list of 2010 Tony Award nominations with eleven nods each. "Fences" notched ten, while "Memphis" garnered eight.
"Fela!" and "Memphis" vie for the top new musical prize with "American Idiot" and "Million Dollar Quartet."

Mel Brooks still bubbles with comedy at 83

Post Gazette: Meet Mel Brooks, 2,000-year-old Renaissance man.
Actually, he's a youthful 83, full of vigor and ready to tell a joke at the drop of a "Hello."
The comedy writer, filmmaker, musical theater maestro and hilarious perpetrator, with straight man Carl Reiner, of the 2,000-Year-Old Man, has been enjoying a recent run of career honors: the Kennedy Center Honors, the TV Land Legend Award and, on April 23, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Vincent dancers explore emotions

Post Gazette: The Pittsburgh Dance Council ended its 40th anniversary season Saturday on what some in the audience might have termed an inexplicable note, something easy to tell by several puzzled conversations around me and the repetitious squeaking of the Byham Theater seats. In this era of "Dancing with the Stars" and "So You Think You Can Dance," they want programs full of athletic Velveeta -- in other words, a highly processed dance blend solely aimed at satisfying the public's appetite.

This Dr. Frankenstein attracted to Pittsburgh and its audiences

Post Gazette: Roger Bart is theoretically on his way to Boston, but in fact, he's taking a detour to New York to spend some time with his younger daughter, 9-year-old Eller.

Mel Brooks' 'Young Frankenstein' still singing, dancing

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: Mel Brooks loves musical theater.
For more than five decades, Brooks made audiences laugh: first on 1950s television shows such as "Your Show of Shows" and later with scripts for classic film comedies -- "The Producers," "High Anxiety," "Blazing Saddles" and "Young Frankenstein" among them.
It wasn't until 2001, when his musical "The Producers" opened on Broadway -- and won 12 Tony Awards -- that he discovered his new love.

Looking for Film Students for crew

Craigslist: I am a film student at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. I am shooting a short May 15th with a back up of the16th

Stage Manager Needed

Craigslist: McCaffery Mysteries, Inc. is in need of a stage manager for ongoing shows. We are interested in High school or College students looking to build their resume

Drama Desk Award Nominations Announced; Ragtime and Scottsboro Top List

Playbill.com: Tony and Drama Desk Award-winning actors Brian Stokes Mitchell (Ragtime, Man of La Mancha) and Cady Huffman (The Producers, Will Rogers Follies) announced the nominations for the 55th annual Drama Desk Awards May 3 at 9:30 AM at the New York Friars Club.

Books About Shakespeare’s Identity

NYTimes.com: Shakespeare is not only peculiar in himself, but the cause of peculiarity in others. The surviving traces of his life, which the Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt describes as “abundant but thin,” depict a man whose parts aren’t entirely in sync: a provincial who grew wealthy but sued for paltry sums, a literary genius who seems never to have written a letter — or owned a book. But the alternate histories offered by people who reject Shakespeare’s authorship are far stranger, abounding in secret ciphers, baroque conspiracies and readings of the plays as fantastical as what’s in them. Barring the discovery of a ­doorstop-size autobiography or the invention of a time machine, we’ll never get a really satisfying explanation of how “Hamlet” and “Henry V” and all the rest were written, only varying degrees of ­improbability.

Tomio Tada, Influential Immunologist And Playwright, Dies at 76

NYTimes.com: Toward the end of his scientific career, Dr. Tada, who studied literature in college, took up writing Noh plays, a genre that features masked characters and blends elements of the spiritual and earthly worlds. New Noh plays were rare in Japan; most were written 400 years ago.

Scott Pask Names His Design Inspirations for ‘Promises’

NYTimes.com: “THAT GIRL” flirts with “Mad Men” in the set design for the new Broadway revival of the 1968 musical “Promises, Promises,” a frisky tale about trysting in the ’60s that stars Sean Hayes and Kristin Chenoweth.

Zimmermann and de Perrot’s ‘Gaff Aff’ at Baryshnikov Center

NYTimes.com: Definitions are clearly for wimps. Or journalists. What do you call a performance in which an everyman, dressed in a suit and tie, wild-eyed and haggard, staggers through daily routines on a revolving stage, all the while accompanied by an implacable D.J.?

Plays Vie for Scarce Space in Broadway Theaters

NYTimes.com: AFTER opening in November to some of the best reviews of the theater season, the Off Broadway production of “The Orphans’ Home Cycle” seemed on a fast track for Broadway. Three of New York’s most prominent play producers began trying to raise $2.5 million to move the show, even though its length (nine hours, broken into three parts) and lack of star performers made it an iffy investment for commercial Broadway. But the producers thought the show, the final opus of the acclaimed writer Horton Foote, had a good shot at Tony Awards — which go only to Broadway productions — and they believed that a wide audience would want to see the work, given the huge demand for tickets at its 160-seat Off Broadway house.

Gatekeepers of the Tony Awards Prepare Nominations

NYTimes.com: The 27 theater professionals selecting this year’s nominees for the Tony Awards plan to meet as scheduled on Monday at the Cafe Edison in the theater district, with organizers of the Tonys saying that a failed bombing attempt in Times Square on Saturday night did not upend the weekend work leading up to the nominations.

West Side Systems First with iPad Lighting App – BeamCalc Updated

iSquint.net: The race for the first iPad lighting App has been won. Let me re-phrase that, the first iPad lighting app TO MARKET, has been won. I have heard about a bunch of great idea’s for iPad apps as well as seeing a couple of neat beta’s.

From Twilight to Grand Theft Auto, These College Classes Are Real

CollegeSurfing Insider: Have you ever heard about a wacky college class and wondered, “You can actually get credit for that?” So have we. Thanks to funky pop culture and the rabid fans that go along with it, colleges are getting pretty creative with their curriculum. Rest assured, these classes are far more than just fluff—but still, we wish these were around when we were undergrads.

Power behind British theatre

Scotsman.com Living: EMPIRE builder, entrepreneur, mother and vintage rocker. It is not every day that you get to sit down and chat with the woman currently hailed one of the two most powerful people in British theatre – the other being her husband. Yet here we are, in the VIP bar of the Edinburgh Playhouse, ahead of the opening night of Les Miserables.
It has been well documented how Rosemary Squire met Howard Panter some 31 years ago. She was working in the box office of a London theatre, selling tickets for a well received but financially catastrophic play he was producing.
They met, worked together, bought some theatres and then, 15 years later in 1994, they married.

Some shows delayed but B'way goes on after bomb

Yahoo! News: Broadway upheld a time-honored tradition despite a bomb scare that shut down Times Square on the most popular night of the week: The shows went on.
"There were no evacuations from Broadway theaters," Charlotte St. Martin, executive director of The Broadway League, said Sunday, adding that "all Broadway matinee and evening shows will go on as scheduled today."

What's in the running for this year's Tony Awards

Washington Post: What, I wondered, was wrong with this picture? I was sitting in one of Broadway's smallest theaters, the Helen Hayes, on a Friday night toward the end of this Broadway season of outsize disappointments. What unfolded before me was an insightful comedy-drama on a provocative but accessible topic, the kind of play that, well, just doesn't materialize much in Times Square anymore.

O'Neill Theater Center wins Tony Award

The Day: The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, which has been a prominent incubator for American theater for the past 46 years, will receive the 2010 Regional Theatre Tony Award, one of the industry's top prizes.

'Orphans',' 'Scottsboro' Win at Lortels

Backstage: "The Orphans' Home Cycle," by Horton Foote, won the Lucille Lortel Award for best Off-Broadway play Sunday night. The awards are administered by the Off-Broadway League, and the winners were announced at a ceremony hosted by Bryan Batt and Bebe Neuwirth at Terminal 5 in New York.

Bomb scare roils Broadway

Variety: The Times Square area returned to normalcy Sunday following discovery of a crude car bomb that shut down several blocks of the theater district Saturday during a high-traffic period on a warm spring night and caught network news operations off-guard.

PICT wins $25,000 NEA grant

Post Gazette: Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre Friday scored a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts under its Shakespeare for a New Generation program.

The Unmistakable Sensibility of Sondheim

NYTimes.com: A wonderful, little-known song that leaps out of the biographical revue “Sondheim on Sondheim” is a taunting show tune, “Now You Know,” from the 1981 musical “Merrily We Roll Along.” One of that revue’s six numbers from “Merrily,” it encapsulates Stephen Sondheim’s skeptical worldview as tartly as anything the composer has written.

Amra-Faye Wright to Play Velma Kelly in Japanese

NYTimes.com: Plenty of actresses with good lungs and great legs have played Velma Kelly, the publicity-hungry killer in “Chicago,” now the longest-running revival in Broadway history. But Amra-Faye Wright, who has been in and out of the New York cast since 2006, will be the first to do the part in English on Broadway and then in Japanese overseas.

Register Now for PGH Art + Tech’s Biggest Party of the Year!

Pittsburgh Art + Technology: Join the Pittsburgh Technology Council for the 2010 Annual DATA Awards and Exhibition, featuring 40 of the region’s most innovative creatives. Come out to the only event that honors our region’s leading-edge intersections of tech and creativity!

Top 5 Ways NOT to Build a Younger Audience

2am: It popped up in my newsfeed again: another article about an opera/museum/symphony theater company’s new initiatives to attract a “younger audience.”
I open these articles with a combination of dread and excitement these days. Maybe this time, this new organization (that spent a couple hundred thousand dollars on a market research study) will announce a genuinely new idea- something that really addresses the interest gap between young pop culture enthusiasts and high culture curators.
Instead, it is the same five tired ideas that every other arts organization has tried.

Theatre for One

BLDGBLOG: LOT-EK and set designer Christine Jones will be premiering their collaborative project called Theater for One in Times Square, two weeks from now. It "will be up for 10 days, with performances open to the general public"—but, as the architects point out, the public is only invited "one at a time."

Interactive Projection Mapping

Fubiz™: After Interactive Multitouch Sphere, here this interactive projection centered on the mapping for the Nokia customer and his product “Ovi Maps”. A produced installation with Covent Garden in London by the Seeper collective. To discover in video in the continuation of the article.

'Jacob's House' Rises from 'JB's' Ashes

Backstage: Tonight, Flux Theater Ensemble will have its NYC premiere of the play "Jacob's House." But that's not the play they were planning to do just a few weeks ago.
In just a short time, the young company received a real-world education in how to make the best of a difficult situation.

'Orphan's,' Viola Davis Lead NYDCC Winners

Backstage: In a rare move, the New York Drama Critics Circle has issued an award for best play, but no honors for best foreign play or best musical. After three ballots, "The Orphan's Home Cycle" by the late Horton Foote emerged as the choice for best play.

For Actors, Choirs Offer a Performing Outlet

Backstage: "To simply stand still and let your voice be the sole communicator in a song is wonderful," says New York actor Ronn Burton, "and it fuels a different part of my creative spirit."

'Fences' draws diverse crowds

Variety: Attracting an African-American audience to productions of August Wilson plays can be surprisingly tough. Or so goes the conventional wisdom on Broadway.
But the current revival of "Fences" bucks that notion.