Posts from — April 2011

In this exclusive new video, the students in Black Girls Rock! tell us what they thought of a recent trip to see Memphis on Broadway.

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This Sunday, the 26th Annual Lucille Lortel Awards will honor excellence in the Off-Broadway theatre. The Off-Broadway League partners with the Lucille Lortel Foundation and TDF to present the awards, and the ceremony is always a star-studded good time. In the spirit of the weekend, we asked TDF’s members for their favorite moments from this season Off Broadway.

We got an enormous response, with members extolling their favorites on Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail. Here’s what some of our members told us. Do you see your favorites on the list? Is there another artist or production that you’d add? Let us know in the comments section.

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Welcome to Building Character, TDF Stages’ ongoing series about actors and how they create their roles.

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How’s this for a paradox? The puppets in War Horse ground Seth Numrich in reality.

Numrich stars in this Broadway fable, now at Lincoln Center, as Albert Narracott, a young British boy whose life changes when his beloved horse Joey is sold as an officer’s mount in World War I. Albert joins the army to look for his animal friend, and we see both of them maneuver the horror of French battlefields.

The play, which is based on a young adult novel by Michael Morpurgo, can’t work unless Joey and several other animals feel like flesh-and-blood characters. To bring them to life, the creative team has devised remarkable, life-size puppets. Operated by small teams of puppeteers, the creatures seem strikingly real. They don’t just walk around: They breathe and sigh and occasionally shake their heads, just like actual horses.

Numrich loves those tiny gestures. “For us human actors in the play, breathing is not a conscious activity; it just happens,” he says. “But if you’re aware of your breathing, it can bring you into the present moment, which is what we’re always striving to do. And because [the puppeteers] always have to be thinking about breathing and physically making that animal breathe, there’s a presence they attain in their performance that’s awe-inspiring.

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Lisa Gajda and the hard-working ensemble of Catch Me If You Can

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Lisa Gajda is constantly changing costumes. In the new Broadway musical Catch Me if You Can, she plays everything from a Pan Am flight attendant to a high school student to a nurse, and every new outfit brings another dance number or song.

That might be chaotic, but for a performer in a Broadway ensemble, that’s life.

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A new musical brings a Hollywood choreographer back to Broadway

The intertwined tango-ing limbs of Brangelina in Mr. and Mrs. Smith. The alternately jaw-dropping (in an awful way) and jaw-dropping (in a great way) pageant dances at the end of Little Miss Sunshine. The shagadelic gyrations in the Austin Powers movies. The retina-searing sight of Tom Cruise shaking his padded rump to Ludacris at the end of Tropic Thunder.

Marguerite Derricks has choreographed these and dozens of other dances for film as well as television, winning three Emmy Awards along the way. In nearly each case, she had a few months at the most—and often as little as 10 days—to create them.

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