Good storytelling is timeless and transformative. For me, nothing beats just sitting down and hearing a damn good story. True, sometimes it’s cool to see random stuff blown up while mutants battle it out on a big movie screen. And sometimes it’s cool to play with fancy electronic gadgets that simulate reality while I avoid my own reality. And sometimes it’s cool to use those fancy electronic gadgets to blow up virtual mutants of my very own. But if you tell me an engaging story with fascinating characters, if you pull me into lives that help me forget (and better understand) my own, and if you get me emotionally invested in the outcome…I am putty in your hands. But is the art of old-fashioned, sitting-around-a-campfire storytelling dead? Can individuals with interesting stories sit on a stage and engage an entire bitter, jaded, New York City audience? Oh hells yeah. I witnessed such a feat when I attended Visible Theatre’s True Story Project: Faith last weekend. So afterwards I did a little digging to try to find out how they managed to keep me entertained without blowing up a single mutant. Read more »

It’s coming. We thought it couldn’t happen. We said, “But Twitter doesn’t have sound!” But somehow, we were wrong. Starting today, the Broadway musical Next To Normal leaps from the stage to the Internet for its Twitter debut.

Holy crap. Read more »

Is the theater world imploding? In a recent West End performance of A View From the Bridge, actor Ken Stott stopped the show to demand that a group of rowdy teenagers be removed from the audience. And Patrick Stewart apparently went ballistic on a fan waiting outside the stage door of Waiting for Godot, all because Stewart noticed the fan was trying to take a photo of the megastar during curtain call. Read more »

This is the kind of thing I’m afraid I’ll accidentally do. Or else it’s the kind of thing I’ve secretly always wanted to do. I’m actually not so sure. From The New York Times‘ ArtsBeat:

A spokesman for the Broadway production of Neil LaBute’s “reasons to be pretty” said Sunday that the show’s producers had beefed up the security detail at the Lyceum Theater following an incident at the Saturday evening performance. During the first act, the character played by Marin Ireland (“Blasted”) lights into her ex-boyfriend, played by Thomas Sadoski (“Becky Shaw”), with a litany of all the things she believes are wrong with him. A male audience member must have felt something a bit too personal in the verbal assault because he stood, called her a bitch twice, said a few other things that cannot be printed, and stormed out of the theater. For those in attendance: No, it was not part of the show. Read more »