Wednesday, March 17, 2021
Given the disastrous reduction in live theatre that has marked the pandemic since March of 2020, one might assume that incidences of high school shows canceled over content concerns would ha…
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 12:48PMWednesday, April 24, 2019
The communication announcing the cancelation of a production of the musical The 25thAnnual Putnam County Spelling Bee at Hyattsville Middle School in Maryland could not have been more terse.…
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 10:54AMTuesday, January 29, 2019
If one looks around the website of The Neil Simon Festival, a yearly theatre event held in Cedar City, Utah, there’s a list of donors to the company. On that list are seven entries at the …
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 05:31PMWednesday, January 16, 2019
I was asked to deliver the Keynote Address for BroadwayCon, a three day expo for fans of Broadway theater. The theme of the Opening Ceremony was “Home,” and included performance…
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 04:43PMTuesday, December 18, 2018
If you see a stage production of The Sound of Music, here are some words you won’t hear: Nazi. Hitler. Here are some words you will hear in the stage version: Gauleiter. Anschluss. Third …
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 03:03PMTuesday, November 13, 2018
As word about a scuffle over a theatre production at Mitchell High School in Mitchell County NC has started to make its way beyond the local North Carolina media, accounts seem to be placing…
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 07:49PMWednesday, July 4, 2018
Editor’s preface: Austin Tichenor of the Reduced Shakespeare Company wrote an extensive Facebook post after seeing a production of 1776, directed by his sister, the author of this essa…
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 10:53AMSaturday, March 31, 2018
Now there is a redaction, an editor’s note, and an author’s apology. But for roughly 24 hours between Wednesday and Thursday this week, in a theatre review in the Chicago Reader, …
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 08:53AMSaturday, February 17, 2018
I am tired. I am tired of reading posts about “my rights” to a hobby that includes automatic rifles. You like guns, fine. But accept the fact that guns are dangerous and require …
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 04:00PMSunday, February 11, 2018
Even when intended benignly, brownface is an offense. Your saying the character is not a stereotype doesn't make it true.
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 07:57AMFriday, October 20, 2017
As investigations into political tampering with the 2016 US election on Facebook have made headlines and perhaps spurred corporate introspection, one would hope that the company is in the pr…
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 02:22PMThursday, September 28, 2017
This summer, when an attorney for actor James Franco sent New York’s People’s Improv Theatre a cease and desist letter regarding the venue’s planned presentation of the pla…
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 10:58AMThursday, September 14, 2017
It’s a bit hard to follow the thinking of Bill Hanney, the owner and producer at North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly, Massachusetts. Initially, it was hard because Hanney was silent, not …
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 02:51PMFriday, August 18, 2017
It is unlikely that many people in the theatre are unaware of the controversy that arose in mid-May, when a small Portland, Oregon theatre company proposed a production of Edward Albee’s W…
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 02:35PMMonday, August 7, 2017
Those who have followed the career of James Franco, and at times it has almost been hard to avoid, are aware that the actor had a period where he was a perpetual student, described in 2008 i…
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 12:44PMFriday, August 4, 2017
If you happen to be going to see the current production Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Last Days of Judas Iscariot at the Shelton Theater in San Francisco the next ten days, you’ll find an i…
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 05:28PMMonday, July 10, 2017
This week, Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s 1990 musical Assassins will have its first major New York performances since the 2004 Roundabout Theatre Company production, in a concert ver…
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 08:49AMMonday, June 12, 2017
Does anyone remember last summer’s The Taming of the Shrew in Central Park? It opened with an entirely non-Shakespearean beauty pageant and talent show, led by a buffoonish figure costumed…
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 12:14PMTuesday, May 9, 2017
One doesn’t expect to hear the words “nudity” and “children’s theatre” discussed in the same sentence. But there’s been a lot of that juxtaposition going around up in Boston as…
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 04:01PMMonday, April 24, 2017
According to an old aphorism, “dog bites man” is not big news, however “man bites dog” is something to report. Consequently, in the arts world, “board of directors fires staff” m…
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 02:08PMWednesday, April 12, 2017
The shutting down of a high school play at East Newton High School in Granby, Missouri last week may have set a new low in bad timing for such incidents. The show was not canceled after cast…
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 10:24AMWednesday, April 5, 2017
If you happen to have been giving any thought to producing Langston Hughes’s 1935 play Mulatto at the Ames Center in Burnsville MN, save yourself some time and either move on to another p…
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 03:09PMTuesday, April 4, 2017
Despite its origin in a 1988 film from John Waters, the underground master of camp, shock and transgression, the story of Tracy Turnblad, as told in multiple iterations, has become wholly ma…
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 05:19PMTuesday, March 28, 2017
Context is everything. If you ask the average parent whether, in the abstract, they want to hear a student, any student, saying the n-word from the stage of their local high school auditoriu…
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 03:30PMThursday, March 2, 2017
When incidences of high school theatre censorship arise, the point at which they occur, and when that breaks out beyond school walls, can be central to efforts to reverse the decision. At ot…
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 01:09PMTuesday, February 21, 2017
Even if you’ve never read the quote, you’ve no doubt seen the meme, in all of its arts-affirming, damn the torpedoes glory. Just one small detail: it isn’t true. I am referring to …
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 10:28AMFriday, February 17, 2017
This is a revised and updated version of a prior post from earlier today, which has been withdrawn, because it suggested, based upon news accounts, that the UW theatre department had been si…
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 07:16PMThursday, February 16, 2017
Beginning one week after the November presidential election, New York’s Primary Stages commissioned a collection of over 70 pieces written by a diverse array of playwrights from their …
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 03:09PMFriday, January 27, 2017
On January 20, the Cherry Hill Public School system in New Jersey announced their intent to censor racially charged language for their upcoming drama group’s production of the musical …
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 04:02PMTuesday, January 24, 2017
There is no question that there are racially charged words in the musical Ragtime, just as there were in the novel upon which it is based. In telling the story of black characters, of Jewis…
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 12:35PMFriday, November 25, 2016
Anyone claiming that there is equity or equality – by gender, by race and ethnicity, by disability – in the American theatre would have to be willfully ignoring the evidence. The Dramati…
SOURCE: www.artsintegrity.org at 01:46PM 
