“If you conduct a poll of young people who want to make their career in the theater, many of them will say they want to be a performer. But of those who want to pursue a career in the arts will have changed their focus by the time they get out of college. Why?”
Read More“Whatever your idea is, if it’s important to you, truly important for reasons other than ego, there’s a way to make it work. It may take a lot of tweaking and restructuring and, well, WORK, but no truly meaningful idea is just trash. I was thinking about this while watching the 2022 film “Don’t Worry Darling.””
Read More“With the proliferation of musicals starring children on Broadway, a lot of people have asked me what it was like being a child in a long running show.”
Read More“Except for some very talented, successful, well-known actors, most actors are “starving artists” and need to grow up already and get a real job.”
Read More“Acting seems to be the area where most people whether they’re in the entertainment industry or not seem to have the greatest judgments. These are the stereotypes I hear most commonly perpetuated.”
Read More“‘Snow White’, and fairy tales, in general, are important – but not as superficial cash grabs, but rather as a means to explore the human condition and how to move through our lives. Fairy tales are a bit of a Rorschach test, and we can always find new and surprising things in them – often just what we need at that moment in our lives.”
Read More‘The rehearsal process was fascinating. By the very nature of what we were doing we all had to have candid conversations about our experiences both with our own gender identity, and with our understanding of and thoughts about a gender identity opposite to our own – ultimately creating remarkable understanding and empathy. We had to teach each other about how we experienced gender.”
Read More“I want an adaptation of “Lolita” that mirrors the experience I had when reading the book. Of feeling like abuse was being called out in a really interesting way. That could allow victims to feel seen. And it made me mad when I saw the adaptations of “Lolita” that exist and basically felt gaslit.”
Read More“So what exactly happened with the “Bridgerton” musical? Let’s get into it.”
Read More“They don’t give you an instruction guide when you decide you’re going to be a creator. Maybe they should. There are ins and outs of the creative process that we usually have to glean on our own – often with problematic consequences. One of those things, that made headlines last year were issues surrounding intellectual property - or what exactly your rights are as a creator to both defend your own work or adapt someone else’s.”
Read More“We need to start valuing physical limitations as actors and the freedom they provide. Likewise, we need to erase this double standard of sex scenes vs. literally every other type of scene in a film. It is our job to organically execute a performance while still following the technical specifications required of us.”
Read More“Art is human beings talking about the human experience – making sense of what it means to be human. We can’t let a machine tell us what it means to be human.”
Read More“A first hand deep dive into getting into and attending a performing arts high school".”
Read More“It would be easy if this were simply a case of some folks at the top being greedy and trying to get unpaid labor. While I’m sure that is the case in some instances, it’s far from the actual story going on within the machinery of the economics of theater in the United States that is making this a problem at large.”
Read More“Camelot is the story in the general public consciousness that comes closest to describing a real-life utopia on earth - examining both how it was created and made to flourish because of what is best in humanity, and how it collapsed because of what is most tragic in human nature”
Read More“The story of Alice, an inquisitive young Victorian girl getting lost in the zany world of Wonderland, should be simple to tell. And yet, it’s probably the most unsuccessfully adapted tale ever, consistently inspiring projects whose only common thread is that they completely miss the mark".”
Read More“K-pop is a herald of the future of electronic music both in the music industry and, eventually on Broadway. We need to pay attention, not dismiss it.”
Read More“Part of the problem with a lot of modern entertainment is that it’s trying so hard to be everything that it ends up being nothing.”
Read More“The mainstream media has largely given us, in a post-Wicked world, stories about how the person we thought was evil isn’t really evil at all. Now, that’s not a problem in and of itself…when it does become a problem is when the very existence of evil seems to be wiped out of the story altogether.”
Read MoreAshley talks with ballet stars Adrian Blake Mitchell and Joy Womack - two American dancers working in Russia who had to flee their companies, communities, and careers to escape the war in Ukraine.
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