Theatre Golden Age

[goldencanstay]

Important

[soph-okonedo]

Cush Jumbo in Josephine and I (2015)

[thefederalistfreestyle]

what you ‘bout to see is no John Trumbull [x x]

[marorie7]

Cast of Hamilton in Cosmopolitan 

[playbill]

Audra McDonald Emphasizes the Importance of New Work

[goldencanstay]

Alexander Hamilton: Let me tell you something about Aaron Burr. We were best friends in the revolution. I know, right? It's so embarrassing. I don't even... Whatever. So then in 1789, I started working as Secretary of the Treasury with General Washington who was totally gorgeous but then he stepped down from office, and Burr was like, weirdly jealous of him. Like, if I would blow him off to hang out with Washington or the other delegates, he'd be like, "Why didn't you invite me into the room where it happens?" And I'd be like, "Why are you so obsessed with me?" So then, for the election of 1800, which was between Jefferson and Burr, I was like, "Burr, I can't endorse you, because I think you're a pushover." I mean, we couldn't have a pushover in office. There were gonna be people in there deciding the *future of our country*. I mean, right? He was a PUSHOVER. So then he wrote me a letter and started yelling at me, it was so retarded. And then he challenged me to a duel because no one would talk to him, and he came back in the summer, and we went to New Jersey and he was totally weird, and now I guess he's the villain in your history.

[suspendourdisbelief]

i feel

[bluepeets]

Your swagger and your bearing

[itsdlevy]

We’ve told people that avant-garde theater is not for everybody. We could do more of what the fashion industry does—they make avant-garde fashion something you want to see. You may not want to wear it, but you want to see it and experience it. So if theater could figure out a way to convince people that unconventional forms are exciting. “Oh you might get bored by this? That’s exciting!” The idea that the play or the performance is supposed to solve everything for you in the moment is insidious. No, it’s supposed to offer you a conversation—after. To me, performance is about inspiring people to do things. The time that you’re sitting in the theater is about giving you context for what you’re going to do after—it’s not the thing. I think that’s all theater artists really do.

Taylor Mac, in this interview in BOMB Magazine (via itsdlevy)

[womenofbroadway]

Cynthia Erivo, the English daughter of Nigerian immigrants, was a total unknown here until she opened as Celie in John Doyle’s stripped-down revival of The Color Purple. She gives the kind of performance — suffering, awakening, and then roaring with life — that can happen only in a musical.

[blackonbroadway]

Cynthia Erivo and Jennifer Hudson onstage during The Color Purple Musical

[grant-me-grace]

[workin9to5]

Waitress the Musical in rehearsal.

[blacktheatrix]

The cast of Eclipsed, the first show on Broadway with an all black female cast, grace of cover of Uptown Magazine.

[thefederalistfreestyle]

[S]he knows more random facts about Alexander Hamilton than any 12-year-old should. Heck, I have a graduate degree in political science - which I’m still paying for, by the way - and she has more Hamiltonian and revolutionary facts stored in her young brain then I was ever exposed to in all of college, and I had a whole grad-level class on Alexander Hamilton and the constitutional convention, taught by a renowned expert on Hamilton. This play’s soundtrack has taught her more about the founding of our country than I learned in grad school. Sure, that was a while ago. But I didn’t recall that Hamilton wrote 50 of the 85 Federalist Papers. [Daughter chimes in]: “Actually, he wrote 51, dad.” What? “The plan was to write 25. John Jay got sick after writing 5. James Madison wrote 29. Hamilton wrote the other … 51.” Oh. Thanks. “He also wrote an 80 page essay to a supporter of King George III named Sam Seabury about how colonial England was a tyrannical government.” See what I mean. It’s not that I have anything against Hamilton, though truthfully I always considered myself more of a Jefferson guy. It’s just kind of weird to have my days filled with all these random facts from American history. You know, I mean, political philosophy and the fundamental questions about democratic principles have their place. But do we really have to talk about Hamilton’s design of our national financial system at the dinner table. Can’t we just talk about how school went today?

How Did a Broadway Hit Teach My Kid More About U.S. History Than I Learned In College? (HuffPost Parents)