Do strong female roles in theatre make audiences feel uncomfortable?
By Mark Shenton and Liz Hoggard via The Guardian
“…female playwrights aren’t being produced with as much frequency as male playwrights: it took over 30 years before a female playwright had an original play debut at the Olivier – Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Her Naked Skin in 2008. The situation is even more striking in musical theatre: of 21 musicals playing in New York, only three are composed or have books written by women. Only two are directed by women. So women are still, for whatever reason, being denied artistic opportunities….”
The economy according to the theatre business
By Mark Shenton via The Stage
“There’s a lot of love and not a lot of money in the arts – it has ever been thus. (You can’t make a living, but you can make a killing, is one of my favourite mantras about working in the theatre; a rare few hit the jackpot with a long-running West End or Broadway show, but for the most part, there’s a lot more money lost in those arenas than made.)”
Rose McGowan Is Starting A Revolution
by Kate Arthur via Buzzfeed
“The difficulties women have had navigating Hollywood permeate every part of the business, from writers rooms to directors’ chairs to below-the-line production jobs — and, of course, to acting, which can be rife with the most corrosively age-obsessed, looks-conscious, and sexualized aspects of film and television.”
Here’s what happened when we asked audiences to set their own ticket prices
by Annabel Turpin via The Guardian
“This immediately made our theatre programme more accessible to those who couldn’t afford to come, but we believed it would also encourage people to come who could afford to, but chose not to because the risk seemed too high.”
Cameron Mackintosh pledges £25k to London fringe theatres
by Matthew Hemley via The Stage
“Smaller theatres of London provide an irreplaceable training ground for creative talent both on and off the stage. They are a major reason why British theatre is the envy of the world and the West End stage delivers so many brilliant productions.”
[read article]
“My novel wasn’t the problem, it was me, Catherine.” Author receives eight times more offers with male pseudonym
by Catherine Nichol via Stylist
“If we had to stack the number of books in history where female authors, from Louisa May Alcott to the Brontë sisters, adopted male names to combat sexism and prejudice at the time, they’d be collapsing over us, which is what makes Nichol’s findings even more dispiriting. Has really nothing changed in the last two hundred years?”