I suppose we must be used to this by now. But 2022 appeared, much more than the earlier two years of pandemic and protest, to be a time by which each good factor (just like the return to reside efficiency, yay!) had a draw back (persevering with COVID-related postponement and cancellations). Or possibly you’d favor to show the snow globe the other way up, and see that for each little bit of unhealthy information on Broadway (brief runs for KPOP and Ain’t No Mo’), there have been additionally some heartening Broadway success tales (a Tony and a wholesome run for A Strange Loop, the well-reviewed Broadway debut of Cost of Living). Even one of many yr’s extra momentous milestones—the announcement that Long Wharf Theatre would go away its longtime residence to turn into an itinerant, community-based theatre for town of New Haven—appeared an equivocal, half-full/half-empty improvement. Or not less than divisive: When longtime Long Wharf observer Frank Rizzo wrote a circumspect piece about the place the theatre has been and the legacy its new transfer will go away behind, theatre chief Todd London penned a response praising the transfer as a visionary and lengthy overdue counter to the elitism, racism, and poisonous masculinity that has dominated the theatre subject for too lengthy.
The yr’s bifurcated character surfaced in a lot of our reporting, and might de discerned within the following checklist of our most-read posts, which lurch backwards and forwards between harrowing and hopeful, celebratory and exploratory. You also can see this Janus-faced side within the 10 tales we picked that deserve extra consideration. First, right here is the way you voted together with your clicks.
2022’s Most Popular Posts
- Fat Failure: Why So Much Rain on Beanie’s Parade? Our most learn piece of 2022 was Meg Masseron’s impassioned first-person editorial in regards to the demoralizing expertise of watching Beanie Feldstein’s efficiency in Broadway’s Funny Girl get not solely criticized on-line however viciously vituperated, in a method Masseron discovered upsettingly fatphobic.
- Disney Announces Plans for ‘Sweeney Todd’ Animated Series. This one hundred pc actual information merchandise, revealed on April 1, remorselessly murdered a lot of the competitors.
- What Happened at The Lark? Francisco Mendoza wrote a painstakingly thorough and measured post-mortem of this beloved play improvement hub, with laborious classes for each artists and directors about battle and expectations inside nonprofit institutional tradition.
- The Baker’s Wife: More Than a Moment within the Woods. Sondheim was well-liked this yr—we’re not shocked—and on this beautiful piece, Carey Purcell interviewed the three actors who’ve originated the function of the Baker’s Wife in Broadway’s three productions of Into the Woods (Joanna Gleason, Kerry O’Malley, and Sara Bareilles) and mirrored on the best way the function, and the present, have felt totally different in every successive period.
- ‘Clyde’s’ Is Most-Produced Play, and Lynn Nottage Most-Produced Playwright, of the 2022-23 Season. The full return of our annual season preview and Most-Produced Plays and Playwrights lists was trigger for some celebration, and never simply because each lists have been a fascinatingly numerous mixture of confrontation and luxury meals (extra of that 2022 bifurcation). Though our information confirmed that manufacturing at TCG member theatres was down general by not less than 1 / 4 from pre-pandemic occasions, what there’s of it thus far has given us some motive to hope.
- Ken-Matt Martin, Dismissed by Victory Gardens’ Board, Won’t Return. One of the yr’s most distressing tales was the ouster, after little greater than a yr within the job, of Victory Gardens inventive director Ken-Matt Martin by the theatre’s board, which spurred a mass exit by the theatre’s employees. This wasn’t only a Chicago story; just like the closure of the Lark, Victory Gardens’ implosion raised questions on board governance, inventive freedom, and lack of assist for leaders of colour that resonate all through the sphere.
- An Audition Power Shift: Princeton Tries on a New Approach. Not all tales of change in 2022 have been unhealthy information, as this report from Rachelle Legrand confirmed. She reported on “Try On Theater Days,” an initiative at Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts, that enables college students to interact in mutual audition/matchmaking classes to suss out what roles and items are proper for them whereas administrators do the identical.
- David Mamet and the Stupid F***ing Words. This interview by Leo Adam Biga was already within the works when the contrarian playwright went on Fox and tarred academics as predators, becoming a member of one of many right-wing’s extra odious trumped-up tradition wars. On the opposite hand, his 1975 basic American Buffalo was having a nice new revival on Broadway, so we went ahead with the piece, and located the outcomes as contentious and interesting as the person’s finest work (even when most of the clicks have been hate reads).
- Hath Not a Jew Roles? The Case for Authentic Jewish Casting. Controversy attracts consideration, no query, however hopefully many of us learn past the headline, and even the opening argument, of Edward Einhorn’s nuanced editorial, by which he each objected to a high-profile manufacturing of Merchant of Venice that forged a Black, non-Jewish actor as Shylock, and defended a non-dogmatic strategy to culturally particular casting in sure instances.
- The Dance Call That Went Viral on TikTok. Trevor Boffone unpacked the story of how a casting name for a task in Legally Blonde at St. Louis’s Muny spawned a TikTok explosion. One of the perfect issues about Boffone’s piece: It illustrates its factors with copious embedded movies. It’s actually one thing to see.
We thank on your readership on all these items! But what are some we want extra of you had learn? Here are 10 that deserve a re-examination.
‘The Chinese Lady’ and the Long Road Home. This deep dive by affiliate editor Alexandra Pierson into the 2021-22 season’s most-produced play (we didn’t do a complete Top 10 checklist that season, however our listings information confirmed that Lloyd Suh’s two-hander would have been the clear winner of such an inventory) examined the play’s historic origins, its personal improvement and manufacturing historical past, and the chilling resonance of its themes in a time of rising anti-Asian hate.
In Louisville There Once Was a Festival and Robert Barry Fleming’s Sense of Scale. These two must be learn in tandem, as they deal with the top of the Humana Festival of New American Plays as we knew it, and the brand new fashions may that take its place (that 2022 duality once more).
For Better or Worse, We Still Live in Joe Papp’s World. When PBS lastly aired this long-in-gestation documentary in regards to the founding father of the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater, I took the chance to mirror on the methods his legacy has had as a lot affect on the nonprofit theatre motion outdoors New York because it did on Gotham.
Digging Deep With Native Theatre Icon Muriel Miguel. We knew that this assembly of two generations of Native theatre expertise (Rhiana Yazzie did the interview) can be worthwhile, however we had no concept what number of vivid tales, and the way a lot frank knowledge and perception, might be packed into one Q&A.
How to Bring Together a Small Town Divided by Murder: Put on a Show. One of the extra unexpectedly transferring tales of the yr got here courtesy of author Wendy Smith, who wrote in regards to the small city of Beatrice, Neb., the main focus of the HBO documentary sequence Mind Over Murder, the place director Nanfu Wang actually dramatized the city’s divisions on an area stage.
Theatre Heaven: A Place a Lot Like Festival d’Avignon. The finest theatre reporting makes you’re feeling such as you have been there, and this dispatch from Torange Yeghiazarian in regards to the worldwide choices on the world-beating French competition took us via a spread of feelings: awe, admiration, thrills, and at last profound gratitude.
What Role Can Theatre Play within the Fight for Abortion Rights? The earth-shattering if not solely surprising finish of Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs determination convulsed the nation, and theatre artists have been no exception. In this piece, Diep Tran puzzled whether or not any play might have salience in a struggle often waged in clinics and courts. But the stage, she discovered, generally is a discussion board too.
Exuberant and Wild: The Long, Evolving Ride of Sylvan Oswald’s ‘Pony’. The critic Miriam Felton-Dansky had been following the progress of this long-gestating play about trans males and butch lesbians, and initially reached out to us to see if we’d think about publishing it. As the journal is on-line solely in the intervening time, not in print, we needed to regretfully cross on—as a substitute we received this considerate, finely etched piece from Felton-Dansky in regards to the play’s journey to a revival at Maine’s Portland Theatre Festival.
Jewish Joy, Jewish Trauma: Why They Feel Different Onstage Now. One of our favourite finds this yr was the author Gabrielle Hoyt, who first wrote for us in regards to the Jewishness of Stephen Sondheim, then did a pair of dialogues about Jewish and antisemitism with director-activist Emma Jude Harris. She was the plain host, then, for a sobering but scintillating dialog amongst theatremakers (Joel Grey, Tovah Feldshuh, Michael Arden, Caissie Levy, and Bess Wohl) about how portrayals of Jewishness and antisemitism onstage really feel freshly fraught within the proto-quasi-fascist, more and more hate-speech-hospitable surroundings of late 2022. She hosted it each for a podcast and an edited transcript.
Conversation Starters: How Robert Egan Put Ojai Playwrights on the Map. We’d been listening to in regards to the distinctive magic of the Ojai Playwrights Conference and its New Plays Festival for years, but it surely took the announcement of longtime inventive director Robert Egan’s departure for us to lastly see what the fuss was about. Margaret Gray’s on-the-scene function is a mannequin of the shape, capturing the character and essence of an ephemeral gathering with wit and acuity.
Which, come to consider it, is a reasonably good abstract what we endeavor to do with every thing we publish. Till subsequent yr, keep secure, and we’ll see you at theatre!
Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is the editor-in-chief of American Theatre journal. rwkendt@tcg.org
Related