The playwright makes her Broadway debut with “The Mountaintop”

Note: TDF members can purchase discount tickets to The Mountaintop through December 24.

Playwright Katori Hall has the best kind of laugh—a loud explosion that almost forces you to laugh along. During a recent phone interview, she was so buoyant and effusive, laughing at herself and her own good fortune, that it was easy to imagine her slapping five with passers-by.

She’s got plenty of reasons to be in a good mood. The Signature Theatre just announced she’s one of five playwrights to receive a five-year residency award, meaning Signature will produce three of her plays in the next five years while offering health insurance and other support.

More immediately, Hall’s debuting on Broadway with The Mountaintop, now playing at the Bernard Jacobs. The play imagines a meeting between Martin Luther King, Jr. (Samuel L. Jackson) and a mysterious hotel maid (Angela Bassett), and when it premiered on London’s West End, it won the 2010 Olivier Award for Best Play—the equivalent of a Tony.

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How projection designers create their increasingly prominent art

Call it the revenge of the A/V club. As theatre becomes more and more expensive, freestanding sets are increasingly giving way to projections, and projection designers are becoming increasingly indispensable artists. From Rock of Ages to Wicked, their work is a constant Broadway presence, and it’s equally prominent in theatres throughout the world.

Theatrical projections—sometimes still photos, sometimes filmed footage—have helped expand the possibility of what can be depicted on stage while reducing the cost. A glimpse at the two Broadway productions of Sunday in the Park With George is instructive: Tony Straiges took components of the Georges Seurat painting at the musical’s center and converted them into an array of painted simulacra for the 1984 premiere, while Timothy Bird and the Knifedge Creative Network used elaborate computer animation to create similar pictures and more in 2008.

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2011 Tony Nominee Derek McLane’s approach to set design

What you notice first in Derek McLane’s studio are not the scale models of his theatrical sets—he has designed almost two dozen Broadway shows since 1994—but an entire wall covered floor to ceiling with books.

“Every show is an excuse to buy a new book,” he says.

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How Mackenzie Crook Mastered His Tony-Nominated Role

When award season comes around, playing giants among men (and women) is often good for one’s mantelpiece. Hamlet, Medea, Max Bialystock, Mama Rose, Miss Jean Brodie, Roy Cohn: These are the sorts of roles that traditionally win Tonys.

But playing a man among giants has also paid off, at least in the supporting categories. The three Billy Eliot kids won the Tony Award, but so did Gregory Jbara, for playing their dad; same with Boyd Gaines alongside Patti LuPone’s formidable Rose in Gypsy. An especially pronounced case came last year, when Eddie Redmayne won for his supporting turn opposite Alfred Molina’s Mark Rothko in Red.

Now another sallow Englishman has been nominated for his work alongside another unstoppable force.

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

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Just this morning, Patina Miller was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her starring role in Sister Act, the Broadway musical adaptation of the 1992 film about Deloris Von Cartier, an aspiring nightclub singer who goes into hiding in a convent after she sees her mob-boss boyfriend murder an informant. Hijinks and high notes ensue when Deloris brings her showbiz savvy to the church’s struggling choir.

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