How does the theatre look when TDF presents an autism-friendly performance of a Broadway show? What’s added to the lobby? What’s different on stage?

To find out, watch this behind-the-scenes video from an autism-friendly performance of Mary Poppins, sponsored by TDF’s Autism Theatre Initiative.

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Inside the company’s ambitious spring season

For a year and a half, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet has performed almost everywhere but New York City. But from May 15-27 they are back at the Joyce Theater with two programs. They’ll feature six pieces by six different choreographers, five NYC premieres, and one world premiere.

Ana-Maria Lucaciu, one of Cedar Lake’s sixteen dancers says, “Finally we can show the city what we have been working on.”

Program A shows “Violet Kid” by London-based Hofesh Schecter, “Annonciation” by French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj, and “Grace Engine” by Canadian Crystal Pite. “[Violet Kid] has a lot of sustained aggression. It is under this constant boiling lid and is never allowed to come out.” Lucaciu says. Schecter works with images of being scolded as a child and the feeling of repressed anger, and the dancers, who are on stage for the duration, must use restraint and power simultaneously in their movement.

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“Die” Relies on Fate to Tell a Story

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The thrill of live theatre is that anything can happen on a given night, and that concept is pushed to the extreme by Die: Roll to Proceed, a comedy running on Friday nights at the East Village’s Red Room.

Written by Joe Kurtz and developed and directed by Christian De Gré, Die follows a man named George during an event-filled night when he decides to abandon free will and put his fate in the hands of a six-sided die.

What George is actually doing, though, is placing his fate in the hands of the audience. At three pivotal moments, an emcee invites a volunteer to step down to the front of the stage and roll the die. Each number corresponds to a distinctly different path that the rest of the show can take.

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How He Changed the Soul of “An Early History of Fire”

The play swerved. It veered into a different path. Once the New Group greenlit David Rabe’s script for production, seven years of slow, dedicated work went out the window.

In fact, if you consider the stop-and-go motion by which Rabe typically crafts his plays, then decades of preparation were tossed aside—a shocking blink of an eye.

“My way is to leave something and then come back,” Rabe once revealed. The Tony-winning playwright, screenwriter, and novelist was referring to the process of writing his Vietnam trilogy—The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones and Streamers—which grounds his reputation as one of the country’s greatest living dramatists.

Rabe’s newest offering, An Early History of Fire—presently running at the Acorn Theatre in Theatre Row—was created in a similarly drawn-out fashion. While jotting down bits and fragments, Rabe toyed with assorted titles. “For a long time, the play was only literally about a hill fire,” he says. “When I began to focus on it, the fire image became metaphorical. I began to think about the idea of a Zen reference to the spirit. The idea that life itself is fire. It burns us up.”

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Designer Natasha Katz explains her work for “Once” and “Follies”

Natasha Katz tells stories with light. When she makes a shadow strike an actor’s face, or when she beams color across a wall, she changes our understanding of what’s happening on stage.

Katz’s colleagues clearly like her storytelling. She’s won two Tony Awards, and this year, she received two additional nominations for Best Lighting Design of a Musical—one for Follies and the other for Once.

Both shows offer meaty challenges for a lighting designer, and they pushed Katz is different ways.

Follies, the Sondheim revival that’s currently at L.A.’s Ahmanson Theatre after a Broadway run last fall, demands an elaborate, haunted world. As retired showgirls gather for a reunion, their younger selves weave around them, stepping from the past to relive old routines, fights, and love affairs.

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