(Chris Wiegand’s article appeared in the Guardian, 4/24; Authentic and earnest … Óscar Jaenada in Noviembre. Photograph: Album/Alamy.)

Actors roam Madrid, springing provocative performances on passersby, in Achero Mañas’s vibrant faux-documentary

Can theatre change the world? Not, you suspect, if it’s a ticketed performance watched from a red velvet seat with a glossy programme and an ice-cream. The guerrilla theatre-makers in the 2003 Spanish film Noviembre, directed by Achero Mañas, have a 10-point manifesto for the revolution they’re staging on the streets. All their performances are free and available to all, they accept no private or public subsidies, and only original material is presented. If you’ve acted for TV or film then forget it – you’re banned from Noviembre.

The group is led by Alfredo (Óscar Jaenada), who arrives in Madrid from Murcia in the late 90s to attend drama school. Alfredo auditions with a piece he has created for a homemade marionette but comes to believe it is his fellow actors who are treated like puppets by their tutor, Yuta (played by veteran Argentinian theatre legend Héctor Alterio). He resents Yuta’s expectation that actors will divulge their most personal secrets in service of a performance. Damning that approach as group therapy, he drops out to seek a more spontaneous relationship with the audience, who he believes should interact with the performance, not sit in the stalls like statues.

Mañas presents the film as if it is a documentary, with older versions of the main characters appearing as talking heads, reflecting on the ups and downs of the company who live together in a squat that they aim to turn into a cultural centre. This is not a mockumentary – we are never invited to laugh at their exploits. If anything, the tone is earnest and the company’s performances are named, dated and shown in lengthy episodes with the older actors’ reflections alongside. The documentary format invites us to seriously appraise the art of their street theatre and implicitly suggests that the company has left a legacy.

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(Chris Jones’s article appeared in the Chicago Tribune, 4/22; Photo:  Aaron Tveit and Karen Olivo during a shutdown. Olivo has since left the cast. (Matthew Murphy via AP/AP)

The anti-capitalists are gunning for Broadway.

In a recent article in American Theatre, the editor Rob Weinert-Kendt opined that regional theaters had “fallen short in a lot of ways by following a similar, Broadway-focused industrial model.” In the same online magazine, Brandon Ivie, the associate artistic director of the Village Theatre of Issaquah, Wash., wrote: “I’m looking ahead with an understanding that capitalism is the real enemy.”

And in a recent Instagram video announcing her departure from the show “Moulin Rouge!,” the Broadway artist Karen Olivo advocated for actors dropping their affiliation with Actors Equity, the traditional labor union for theater workers, as part of a decommissioning of what she sees as a corrupt system.

 “The dream of making art?,” Olivo said, referencing Broadway. “The moment we stepped into this capitalistic structure, that went away.”

Did it, though?

Consider, for example, the moment when the first Black president of the United States, Barack Obama, attended the Broadway revival of “A Raisin in the Sun,” with the lead role performed by Denzel Washington, the leading Black actor of his generation. For anyone there that night, it was a stunning example of the capitalist sector of the American theater heralding racial progress and become part of a transformation that the author of the play, Lorraine Hansberry, surely could not even have imagined. Nothing quite like that ever has happened in the nonprofit sector.

Or consider the night at “Hamilton” when an entire cast of supremely talented, diverse actors summoned up the courage to directly address Vice President-elect Mike Pence, their guts and the size of their capitalistic platform immediately making headlines around the world and infuriating Pence’s boss, Donald J. Trump, who was just learning the power of Twitter. For anyone interested in progressive reforms or the activism of people of color, this was a night to remember. And it was capitalist down to the tips of its toes.

Or think about the remarkable artist David Byrne telling a rapt Broadway audience to “say their name,” a reference to all the Black lives lost to police shootings. And many hearing that for the first time.

What about the cast of “Dear Evan Hansen?” Were they not making art when they dramatized the pain of being a teenager struggling with the micro-aggressions of everyday life? What about the cast of “Hadestown,” when they found the political potency in Anais Mitchell’s lyrics to “Why We Build the Wall?” What about the artists behind “Moulin Rouge!,” anticipating the losses we were all about to share in the pandemic?

What about playing Jasmine in “Aladdin” and making a young person smile? Can you not produce an artistic act while working for the huge publicly held company known as Disney?

Sure you can. It is one thing to call for reforms in an industry, which, in all fairness, was certainly Olivo’s intention given that she was responding to the allegations against the producer Scott Rudin, whom an article in the Hollywood Reporter alleged had been a harsh and injurious boss. But it’s another to decry the one sector of the American theater that truly can support its artists so that they may live the kind of middle-class life that come so much easier to others.

The antipathy for the commercial sector of the theater, especially from the inside and often fueled by envy or elitism, is far from new. It was common in the 1990s for academics to look down on great commercial playwrights like Wendy Wasserstein, arguing without much evidence that working in a marketplace blunted their potential radicalism. And artists from the nonprofit sector long have railed against what they saw as compromises for popularity: Joseph Papp of the New York Public Theater famously hated the soppy Marvin Hamlisch song “What I Did For Love” in “A Chorus Line” and wanted it cut. Had that happened, far fewer people would have better understood the struggles of the dancer’s life. It was an entry point. It put a lot of dancers’ kids through college.

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(Aaron Couch’s article appeared in the Hollywood Reporter, 4/25; Photo: Twentieth Century Fox.)

The first trailer for West Side Story danced its way to the Oscars on Sunday night.

Steven Spielberg’s remake of the 1961 classic stars Ansel Elgort as Tony and Rachel Zegler as Maria.

Spielberg directed from a script by his Lincoln and Munich writer Tony Kushner. West Side Story, which draws inspiration from Romeo and Juliet, originated as a 1957 Broadway musical written by Arthur Laurents with music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and concept, direction and choreography by Jerome Robbins. It tells the story of star-crossed lovers torn between two gangs, the Jets and the Sharks.

The 20th Century film wrapped in October 2019 and has been awaiting release after being delayed a year by COVID-19. It is now due out Dec. 10.

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(Deirdre Falvey’s article appeared in the Irish Times, 4/20; One of Frances Kelly’s paintings, a portrait of her daughter Eavan Boland as a young girl. It features in the poster for Druid’s Boland: Journey of a Poet.)

Performance piece edited by Colm Tóibín will livestream one year after the poet’s death

It’s morning in California for Colm Tóibín, with sun streaming in the window; Garry Hynes is in Dublin as the dullish day ends. Technology enabling the conversation will also allow streaming of Druid Theatre’s latest project, Boland: Journey of a Poet, a new theatrical production about poet Eavan Boland, edited by Tóibín and directed by Hynes, towards the end of April, one year after Boland’s death.

Their locations are serendipitously appropriate, as Boland’s life and work had one foot in Stanford and one in suburban Dublin. The production explores the mind and imagination of one of Ireland’s great poets, melds her life and her work, as she did herself, “in the large, uncharted space between the lyrical and the political” as Tóibín describes.

Hynes and Druid were “looking at poetry, at a time where I think there’s a great need for the people to connect” and asked Tóibín to curate a series of poems over the 20th century. What started as one production – Coole Park Poetry Series of 10 actors reading 10 poems, from Austin Clark to Paula Meehan, broadcast during St Patrick’s Festival and more outings to come – grew into a second project.

Tóibín talks about “the two volumes of autobiographical essays, which are remarkable, which throw extraordinary light on the poetry, and on the life”.

“Slowly it emerged that, actually you could make a piece from that, using the poems and using the prose, and that they could throw light on each other, and you could make a narrative.” You could do that, said Colm. Could you do that, asked Garry. They both laugh now.

He came at it from a point of knowing Boland, having spent two periods at Stanford (in 2006 and 2008), where she led the writing programme, as well as return visits and many events and festivals, including Kilkenny, together. In Stanford, “she would call my office and say Colm, can I come up for a minute. We just talked poetry. She had an astonishing knowledge of what was happening in American poetry, and in Irish poetry too”.

She knew the poets personally, knew each poem: “I got an education from her. Hearing the voice I knew from the radio, in different contexts. I really found her tremendously good company as well. Very, very funny. She ran the programme and had an astonishing amount of power, which she used judiciously and kindly.”

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