Posts from — March 2010

Why a high school English teacher petitioned to bring TDF’s Stage Doors program to her school

When she moved to Middle College High School in Queens, ninth grade English teacher Rachel Wolff brought Stage Doors with her.

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How emo rock became the soundtrack for a musical about our seventh president

You can learn so much from a musical’s first line. For instance, in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, now playing at the Public Theater, it only takes a phrase to realize the show will not be a stately heir to starchy, birth-of-our-nation works like 1776. Instead, the opening number, a rocking little anthem called “Populism Yea Yea,” begins with a cowboy singing, “Why wouldn’t you ever go out with me in school?”

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Playwright Michi Barall puts a modern spin on an ancient tragedy

When you think about the script for an ancient Greek tragedy, you probably don’t imagine a stage direction that says, “Sandra takes a Diet Coke to the goddess.” But in Rescue Me, Michi Barall’s adaptation of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, goddesses drink soda all the time. They watch television, too, while the daughters of Trojan heroes take migraine medication. Really, Barall’s characters behave more like everyday schlubs than classical heroes

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You’d think that Lend Me a Tenor couldn’t surprise Ken Ludwig anymore. After all, he wrote the play, a zany farce set in the opera world, over twenty years ago, and it’s been produced thousands of times since. However, during a rehearsal for the show’s current Broadway revival, he saw something new

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