The Conference Hat: To embarrass the conference chair (this year, Chris Rawson), on the final day he’s made to wear a hat laden with memorabilia from previous conferences, presented by the previous conference chair (Jay Handelman, right, who chaired Sarasota). The chief recompense is that...
NEW LONDON and WATERFORD, Conn., Thursday, 7:30 a.m. — I arrived here Monday and the rest of the executive committee Tuesday, with the bulk of the participating ATCA members swarming in yesterday (and more to come today). But this is the first moment I’ve had to sit down...
Michael Phillips, film critic for the Chicago Tribune, most recently shared TV’s “On the Movies” with A.O. Scott as joint successors to Siskel & Ebert. Before that he had a record cross-country tour as theater critic, moving briskly from the Dallas Times-Herald to the San Diego Union-Tribune...
A trio of promising works resulted in a stimulating Festival of New Plays for the Southern Writers’ Project the weekend of May 16. Showing patience, Alabama Shakespeare Festival officials offered revised readings of the latest versions of two plays unveiled in 2009. Both Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder’s “The Flagmaker of Market Street”...
Tony Award given to Alliance Theater, 2007 By recommendation of the American Theatre Critics Association, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford Conn., now in its 46th year, will be awarded the 2010 Regional Theater Tony Award at the ceremony on June 13. The announcement was made...
Following are some thoughts on the controversy, mainly from our New Plays Committee, with some reference to our Steinberg/ATCA and Osborn awards. If you want to chime in, email Chris Rawson....
In the dustup over the Pulitzer Committee’s decision to bypass the recommendations of its Drama Panel and give the drama award to (gasp!) a musical, Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey’s searing look at the impact of bipolar disorder on one American family, “Next To Normal,”...
Some are wondering if Charles McNulty and other Pulitzer drama panelists should resign in protest. There is precedent. But actually, the jury is reappointed afresh each year — which is not to say that certain critics haven’t reappeared on it often, especially back in the...
Mr. McNulty seems to have assessed the situation all too accurately. I am an unapologetic admirer of “Next to Normal,” but I certainly have to endorse the so-called coronation factor. I read “Chad Deity” as a recommended entry in the ATCA/Steinberg award process. While I wholeheartedly...
Actually, the foolish choices for Pulitzer for Drama go back further and are more embarrassing than Leonard suggests. In the 1931-32 season, the Pulitzer went to Of Thee I Sing over O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra. By the sixties several unlikely musicals had won over significant plays (e.g., Fiorello over A Raisin...