*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Ghostlight Ensemble is seeking short scripts (a maximum of 15 minutes) that are geared toward young audiences. Priority will be placed on scripts that are ethnically and culturally diverse, and written by writers of color and/or LGBTQ writers.
Playwrights will receive $25 per selected script.
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Chain Theatre Play Writing Lab continues its commitment to developing new plays by diverse artists and underrepresented voices in the American Theatre. Since its inception, Chain has developed plays focusing on what unites us, links us together as well as what divides us. This is a highly collaborative process with a personal, intensive focus on the playwright, your story, and your words.
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All Out Arts is accepting script applications for a new series of RadioPlays, to be presented this winter, as part of the Fresh Fruit Radio podcast. January – April 2022.
These can be original drafts for radio, or adapted for Radio from your existing works.
The play must have a running time of 25 to 55 minutes, in either a 1 or 2-act format, and involve a cast of 2 to 6 principals.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** QUEENS ON STAGE ***
The spectacle and the glitz of Broadway is back at last, and joyous, messy Six has joined the party. This show can deliver a blast of the energy and exuberance that Broadway at its best excels at, the energy that everyone in that theater has palpably longed for over the past 19 months.
Is that enough to make audiences overlook the utter mess Six makes of its attempts at feminism? Judging by the rapturous reception among my fellow theatergoers at Saturday’s press preview, the answer is likely yes. But I found myself just as bothered by Six’s messiness in 2021 as I was in 2020, and if anything time has made me more vengeful. I’m more dazzled by the spectacle now than I was then, but less inclined to forgive the disarray.
Still, Six has a neat, eye-catching premise and a breezy confidence that seems to say, “Don’t worry about it too much, it’s fun!” every time the details stop making sense. The six ill-fated wives of King Henry VIII of England (divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived) are hosting a pop concert. But the concert also doubles as a contest, with each queen facing off to see who had the worst time as Henry’s wife. Given that there are two separate “beheadeds” in that group and only one “survived,” the competition is stiff.
One by one, the queens take the stage in a solo song, each wife channeling a different modern pop act as she makes the case that her trauma was the worst trauma. And when Six is at its best, the pairing of each queen to her given musical style (all dreamed up by co-writers Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss as seniors at Cambridge; Moss also co-directs with Jamie Armitage) feels fresh and witty and exhilarating.
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You can see why the original Globe theatre production of Anne Boleyn sold out, and why Howard Brenton’s iconoclastic re-imagining of Henry VIII’s second wife was subsequently sent on a tour of the UK: the show is a hands down, no-arguments crowd-pleaser. Brenton and returning director John Dove have pulled of the admirable trick of capturing the dramatic essence of the 16th century England period setting in all its witty, bawdy glory and at the same time giving the proceedings a modern polish with language and jokes that never feel anachronistic.
Brenton has done a convincing job of re-creating an Anne Boleyn as neither the passive victim of her ambitious father and her licentious king, as she was portrayed in the BBC bodice-ripper The Tudors, nor the scheming femme fatale as imagined by Hilary Mantel in her novel Wolf Hall. Brenton’s Boleyn is something in between the two, but also something more: a figure of state who was instrumental in making England Protestant, but also a woman who was passionate in her personal relations and fervent in her religious beliefs.
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Diana: A True Musical Story, a new production about the late Princess of Wales, had to postpone its opening due to the coronavirus outbreak. While originally set to open March 31, 2020 the show is now scheduled to debut on Broadway this November. The musical originated at the La Jolla Playhouse in California and later this year, it will play at the Longacre Theatre to a much larger audience. However, you'll be able to see the new musical from your own home at an earlier date. Here is everything we know about Diana:
The musical premiered on Netflix ahead of the Broadway opening.
A filmed version of Diana is now available to stream on Netflix. The new Diana movie was filmed in 2020 without an audience at the Longacre Theater and features the original Broadway cast.
“The chance to share our show, first with Netflix’s global audience, and then welcoming a live audience back on Broadway, is something we’ve all been dreaming about for more than a year. We could not be more thrilled to finally share both the film and the Broadway musical with the world,” the Diana producers said in a joint statement.
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Maxwell Anderson's 1930 verse play, Elizabeth the Queen, explores a number of intriguing issues: Whether it is more courageous to wage peace than war, whether women rule more wisely than men, and whether power is a stronger impulse than love.
At its core, however, the play is a study of two characters, Elizabeth I and the Earl of Essex. Individually, these two were extremely complex figures, which made their emotional attachment all more complicated. And, from his use of verse to his inclusion of a Shakespearean play-within-a-play, Anderson appears to have been striving to create a drama of Shakespearean scope.
But Elizabeth the Queen falls short of this mark, and British director Richard Clifford's production at Washington's Folger Theatre - and especially actress Michael Learned's depiction of the title character - accentuates its shortcomings by reducing the play's central relationship to a clash of wills.
The production does boast a number of fine performances, chief among them, that of Martin Kildare, whose Essex is a confident, smart, born leader whose major - and ultimately fatal -flaw is a vain, almost boyish inability to turn the other cheek when his valor is challenged. It is this weakness that drives Essex to lead a futile campaign into Ireland, against Elizabeth's wishes and his own better judgment, and when that campaign is sabotaged, to return to England with a rebellious army determined to place him on the throne.
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Last year Robert Icke made Oresteia the most compelling drama in London. Now he stages Mary Stuart, written in 1800, to explosive effect. Schiller’s play has been stripped back, rewired. Icke’s adaptation is sculptural, rich and incisive. Hildegard Bechtler’s bare, round design creates an arena in which characters try to break out of circular arguments. Juliet Stevenson and Lia Williams are mighty.
The dare of these actresses. Mary Stuart deals with the relation between Mary and Elizabeth I, and centres on an imaginary meeting between them. Stevenson and Williams go on stage each night not knowing who is to be Mary and who Elizabeth. That is determined in front of the audience by the spin of a coin – presumably a sovereign.
Not a gimmick but an insight. There is nothing logical or inevitable about who ends up in power. And these queens are two sides of one coin: Catholic and Protestant; lover and virgin. Mary is in prison, but the crown is also “a prison cell with jewels”: it takes free will from the woman who wears it.
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London is never shy or short of Shakespeare. Nevertheless, there’s nothing like a well-cast Antony and Cleopatra to send pulses racing. And 30 years after Anthony Hopkins and Judi Dench set the National alight, Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo make their own mark. They are a charismatic match as the misfiring alpha couple — he vigorous as the general who’s lost his way, she vivacious as the living legend turned drama queen, both flesh and blood fools as they dive hedonistically into disaster.
Simon Godwin’s production reteams the director and Fiennes after their superlative Man and Superman in 2015, also at the National. The inspiration is to bring Okonedo into the mix, fresh from her success in Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? last year. It’s not just that the pair have screen actors’ fizzing chemistry, but that both — she 50, he 55 — are willing to present two people who remain vital and attractive, yet are conspicuously clinging to youth through their impolitic revels.
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The Regina Monologues is an interesting and unique step back into history. Each queen presents their own telling of a piece of their history and invites the audience to examine or re-examine their story.
The performance takes place in the Meat Market Stables, which has three separate but close together rooms that audiences can flick between to see their favourite queens from history deliver their own monologue. Each of the monologues puts its own spin on history with the common thread between them all being a modern exploration of feminism and power.
Although the proximity of the rooms creates a bit of sound bleeding, I thought that the echo of each actor’s voice throughout the space creates a livelier atmosphere. Also, the constant sight of historical queens wondering through each room helps to fill the void of having no set, as the scattering of royal figures nicely accents the space.
Bashford and Kumar’s costuming was one of the highlights of the night with each queen dressed to represent her culture and the time period that her monologue is set in. For example, Virgin Mary is re-imagined as a teen pregnancy and as such her costume is a catholic school uniform, while Persephone Queen of the underworld is dressed in a green traditional styled Greek tunic to reflect her role as goddess of spring.
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