Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
Off-Broadway in the Boros Fest
The Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) announces the Off-Broadway in the Boros Fest, a series of Off- and Off-Off-Broadway theatrical performances running from September 29 through October 3 at various locations throughout the five boroughs. Coming on the heels of Broadway’s official reopening weekend, the five-day festival aims to shine a light on local performing artists while offering free entertainment to New Yorkers in neighborhoods hardest hit by the pandemic.
Each two-hour performance will take place at a designated Department of Transportation Plaza, Open Street or Open Culture location, which leverages an existing NYC program that allows communities to embrace new public spaces and support small businesses. The performances will feature a combination of theatrical elements, including concert versions of current or new Off- and Off-Off-Broadway musicals, musicians playing Jazz and Dominican Rock Fusion, tap dancers, singers, circus performers, Brazilian drummers and LatinX dance troupes.
The full festival lineup is as follows:
Wednesday, September 29, 12-2pm
Location: Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn - Marcy Avenue Plaza between Fulton and McDonough Streets
Performances: STOMP
Hell’s Kitchen Happiness Krewe
The Bushwick Starr presents ‘Music from Jillian Walker’s SNiNFoLK: An American Show’
Fogo Azul NYC
Thursday, September 30, 3-5pm
Location: Jackson Heights, Queens - 34th Avenue between 77th and 78th Streets
Performances: Gazillion Bubble Show
Hell’s Kitchen Happiness Krewe
Pregones/PRTT’s “TORCHED!”
Bindlestiff Family Cirkus
Friday, October 1, 3-5pm
Location: Washington Heights, Manhattan - Dyckman Street, Between Payson and Seaman Avenues
Performances: STOMP
Yasser Tejeda & Palotre
Hell’s Kitchen Happiness Krewe
Luis Salgado and Company
Special Guests:
Candace Bushnell, author of Sex and the City and the upcoming, one-woman show Is There Still Sex in the City?
Saturday, October 2, 4-6pm
Location: Bronx - 1 Fordham Plaza
This performance is in partnership with the Bronx Night Market taking place every Saturday from 4-10pm.
Performances: Winnie the Pooh: The New Musical Adaptation
Pregones/PRTT’s “TORCHED!”
Hell’s Kitchen Happiness Krewe
Luis Salgado and Company
Sunday October 3, 12-2pm
Location: Staten Island - Snug Harbor Cultural Center, 1000 Richmond Terrace, Northeast Meadow
Performances: Gazillion Bubble Show
Hell’s Kitchen Happiness Krewe
Bindlestiff Family Cirkus
Fogo Azul NYC
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Staged in local coffee shops throughout the five boroughs, New Play Cafe creates a cozy, come-as-you-are platform for playwrights in NYC and beyond. This round, we're looking for unproduced plays written in the past few years. So if you're an inexperienced writer with a big idea or a seasoned writer who just wants to try something new, we'd love to hear from you!
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The Snowdance® 10 Minute Comedy Festival is a festival of original comedies that run 10 minutes or less. Submitted scripts will be judged by the Snowdance Selection Committee. A selection of scripts will be chosen for production during the Snowdance Festival in the winter of 2022.
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Are you a writer whose life has been touched by adoption? We want your story for a new theater event that will highlight personal stories about adoption from diverse perspectives, with all viewpoints welcomed and encouraged.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** THEATER COSTUME DESIGNERS ***
William Ivey Long’s Stunning Costume Designs from Nine, Hairspray, and More
The six-time Tony Award winner has worked on everything from the musical Chicago to next month’s TV remake of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
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In Susan Hilferty’s bustling studio workshop on West 24th Street in New York, you will find shelves overflowing with books and drafting tables covered in papers. This is Hilferty’s invaluable “image library”, where the designer finds pictures that spark her imagination. Anything will serve: newspaper clippings, magazine photos, or illustrations in books. For the intensive research and visualisation needed to create the astonishing costumes of Wicked, Hilferty searched far and wide, from the contemporary fashion design of John Galliano to the Edwardian couture that she “twisted” to create many of Wicked’s unique Tony Award-winning costumes.
“In many ways, I consider myself a historian, a sociologist, and an art historian – in addition to all the other things that I do with clothes. To me, what was so exciting about Wicked was trying to understand a world that had a connection to the turn of the century as we know it. But I also had to incorporate the idea that animals talk, that there is magic, and that there are Munchkins in this place called Oz. So the design process meant researching history and creating a parallel universe.
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We sat down with Emilio during a fitting, to talk about his inspiration for the costume and what he loves most about the Christmas Spectacular.
Where are you from?
I’m originally from the Dominican Republic and I grew up in the South Bronx in New York City.
What inspires you about Christmas?
What inspires me most about Christmas is that it’s the one time that we all come together and celebrate as one. We put our differences aside and come together as people – as family, friends, co-workers –the Christmas season is about coming together and seeing how we as people can become our greater selves and not be so wrapped up in our own issues. Christmas allows us to become more human.
What is your favorite number in the show?
There’s something about the “Living Nativity.” We all know the story, but seeing it in front of you to that magnitude of spectacle with the actors, the animals, the costumes, the lights, the music – it really just makes it so special and puts me in the Christmas spirit. When I was growing up, we always had a little nativity scene so seeing it live brings me back to being a kid.
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In 1971, Willa Kim designed costumes for Weewis by Margo Sappington for the City Center Joffrey Ballet. The ballet marked her introduction to a then brand-new fabric called spandex, which had only been invented recently. At that time, there was stretch-able fabric, but it didn’t bounce right back—it didn’t have “memory.”
“Willa realized that it would be a great dance fabric,” recalled Richard Schurkamp, a friend and executor to Kim’s estate, who knew her for almost 40 years, until her death in 2016. “As we all know now! Everybody in the world, the dancers and people who do yoga or go to the gym or anything wear this fabric.”
Kim also quickly discovered that spandex could be painted, and a whole world of painted stretched costumes opened up for her. Schurkamp worked with her on the 1995 Broadway musical Victor/Victoria. He remembers the dance number “Le Jazz Hot!,” which began with three men, purportedly in a jazz club, playing piano and trumpet and trombone. They danced with their instruments in three-piece suits that weren’t suits at all but single units crafted of spandex; the actors simply stepped into them and were zipped up the back. They were silver gray with stripes of red up the side, and when they moved, the jacket didn’t pull away from the vest, and the vest didn’t separate up from the pants. It was a complicated construction, and it was all Kim.
“It seems a very quintessential Willa costume to me—the zipper was hidden, and you couldn’t ever see that it wasn’t a three-piece suit,” said Schurkamp.
What set Kim apart from a lot of other designers, Schurkamp feels, was her wit. There was always humor in her costumes, he said. Not that they were goofy or overtly funny, but there were slight touches of humor. One always knew when they were seeing something by Kim, he said, because there were often clever little jokes in the design.
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Sweeney Todd has been one of the most iconic and long-lasting characters of the Victorian Period. Making its first appearance as a villain of the Victorian penny dreadful serial The String of Pearls, in 1847, his tale became an urban legend in London. In 1979 the acclaimed Tony-Award winning Broadway Musical “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” by Stephen Sondheim, gave the character a much deeper personality and depicted him even more as the demon he always intended to be.
The most recent version of this story is Tim Burton’s 2007 musical film “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street“, which is an adaptation of the Broadway musical. In this film, just like in other occasions, we witness how Tim Burton and the legendary costume designer Colleen Atwood, unite forces and talent to create an amazing Gothic-Victorian world, of course with the outstanding performance of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter as the main characters.
“I’ve worked with Colleen Atwood many, many times, and she’s as important as anybody on a movie. Costumes are another character in the movie. Most of the great actors I’ve worked with, when they put on the costume they become the character. It helps them find who the character is” -Tim Burton
Sweeney Todd, former Benjamin Barker, is a barber who is unjustly convicted by Judge Turpin, a man who wanted to take his family from him. Todd is exiled to Australia and after many years, he is able to return to London, seeking revenge against Turpin. He starts working as a barber again, but hate has invaded his entire soul and killing becomes an obsession. He murders his customers with a razor while his partner in crime, Mrs. Lovett, bakes their flesh into meat pies.
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The story takes place in London sometime between 1830 – 1865, and it combines elements of different parts of the city. It portrays a suffering and poor English society with classic and gothic elements as well. Atwood shared in an interview for USA Today that her main inspiration for creating the costumes for this musical was the music itself. She said, “It’s the starting point of all of it. It’s a moody piece, so I wanted a lot of texture in the costumes. I wanted you to be able to feel them on screen.” One of the main plots in the story is the class struggle that both Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett face in their lives due to power abuse. Costumes are an excellent means of exposing the difference in social classes, where people had to either wear worn out and recycled clothes or have a shiny cravat and top hat if they were wealthy. The main silhouette of the period is absolutely accurate, we see bustles, chemise, and corsets in the ladies clothing, and frock coats, vests, trousers, top hats, and cravats for men. Every single detail in the costumes works within the period and status of each character, creating another magnificent work of art by the outstanding Colleen Atwood.
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Tony Award-winning costume designer Clint Ramos says he felt his “very selfhood slip away” when the industry he loves shut down in March 2020, and with two Tony nominations pending – he’s up for Best Costume Design/Play for The Rose Tattoo, and Best Scenic Design/Play for Slave Play – the designer, born and raised in Cebu, the Philippines, should be unreservedly delighted with the recent rush of planned Broadway openings. So why has he “been unable to muster a wholehearted sense of hope?” In a guest column for Deadline, Ramos, a lifelong advocate for an equitable landscape in theater and film, poses a series of questions to the industry, raising concerns that he says weigh heavily on the hearts of colleagues of color. “I am delighted at the notion of a return to the American theater,” Ramos writes. “But not as we left it. I want to return to a truly equitable American theater.”
Many theater practitioners feel a profound closeness to their work. It is their life’s purpose. It is their essence. That is how I feel about the theater. So, when Covid drew stage curtains across prosceniums throughout the American stage, I felt my very selfhood slip away.
The joy and hope that many feel amidst the rush of announcements of shows returning to Broadway and the ultimate reopening of the American theater is wonderfully valid and re-affirming. But lingering questions burn a hole in my stomach with each announced reopening. Questions that countless others have asked for years. Questions that remain unanswered.
Why have I been unable to muster a wholehearted sense of hope?
Of course, the idea of returning and restoring that sense of self is a reason for joy and excitement. I am delighted at the notion of a return to the American theater. But not as we left it. I want to return to a truly equitable American theater.
As a theater worker of color, my sense of self, as for so many other theater workers of color, has always been fractured. Pieces of us are allowed to cross the threshold of the stage door. Other pieces are not. As Playbills start going to press again, I and so many of my colleagues of color find ourselves returning to a state of being in which it is necessary to perennially negotiate our fractured selves within an industry that does not seem to acknowledge what we have been saying about racial equity – not only this last year but for a very long time.
I cite racial equity specifically because Americans clearly see now more than ever, from stolen land to stolen people, the centrality of institutionalized racial supremacy to the country’s formation and development. The American theater and its de facto national theatrical institution, Broadway, just need to catch up.
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Seattle Opera sat down with Costume Director Susan Davis to learn more about the costumes for Carmen, which were envisioned by Gary McCann, Production Designer. Every Seattle Opera production takes approximately six weeks to costume from start to finish. This includes making garments from scratch, modifying or refurbishing existing costumes, and making any modifications that come up before opening night. This is the 10th time Seattle Opera has presented Carmen, and each time it looks a little different, Davis says. Bizet set his opera in the 1840s, and the fashions of this time period have an almost comical flair to modern sensibilities, Davis says. "But when you see an opera in a time period you recognize, it can offer audiences a closer connection to the story."
What’s your favorite thing about the costumes for this show?
It’s interesting to be doing this Carmen—it’s definitely new and different from what you saw on our stage last time, in 2011. Stage Director Paul Curran and his collaborator Gary McCann have set the work in the late 1950s. So onstage, you’ll see real clothes; vintage pieces (things you may recognize from your own closet if you were alive in the 1950s), and costumes used in Opera Philadelphia's production. As director of this work, Paul is thinking a lot about the haves, and the have-nots—from the factory workers struggling to make ends meet, to the upper-class in this story without a care in the world.
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