the week(s) of december 15, 2023 - january 4, 2024
die hard is a christmas movie
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scheduling notes
This is the last Friday round-up of the year! Nothing for the Group is taking its usual two-week hiatus. I’m also taking off the week between Christmas and New Year’s from my day job, which I haven’t done since I worked at a theater that produced A Christmas Carol. Amateurs assume that DC’s best micro-season is cherry blossom peak bloom, but real ones know it’s holiday ghost town week.
Here’s what you can expect content-wise in the coming weeks:
Paid subscribers will receive my annual year-in-review post on Friday, December 22nd. (2023 Categories include Worst Crisis PR, Best and Worst Moves in the Regional Theatre Game of Thrones, and The Reigning Champs of the American Theatre Super Bowl of Chaos and Lies.)
Next month’s Bills, Bills, Bills will hit your inbox on Wednesday, January 3rd.
The weekly round-up will return on Friday, January 5th.
productions
Rorschach Theatre’s season-long immersive experience Eldritch Investigations: A Psychogeographies Project launched on December 5th. The multi-chapter adventure directs participants to obscure spots around DC as a story unfolds through letters, artifacts, and objects mailed in monthly chapters, culminating in a live, in-person production next July. (This installment was created by Steve Yockey, Kylos Brannon, Jenny McConnell Frederick, Luke Hartwood, and Jonelle Walker.)
Yasmina Reza’s Art starts previews December 16th at The Guthrie in Minneapolis. Kimberly Senior directs Christopher Hampton’s translation of Reza’s satire “contemplating existential questions about life, friendship and what happens when the opinions and worldviews of people we love clash with our own.”
Charlotte Purser’s The War Letters runs December 15-21 at WP Theater. Ana Margineanu directs the new work based on a collection of over a thousand love letters exchanged between Purser’s grandparents during World War II.
Ryan Patrick Welsh’s Sex, Camp, Rock N' Roll runs December 18 & 19 at Shotgun Players in San Francisco. The exceedingly fantastical musical cabaret fantasy “weaves an unforgettable night of story, song, and sensuality.”
Angela Di Carlo’s The Jo-Lynn Butterfly Country Hour Of Sunshine Christmas Special runs December 13-17 at The Wild Project in NYC. Carlton Stovall directs the campy, corn-fed original musical comedy about a “semi-famous honky-tonk country music sensation fresh out of the sanitorium with a new self-help doctrine that’s suspiciously ‘cult-ish’.”
Jenny Connell Davis’ The Messenger is now playing through December 24th at Palm Beach DramaWorks in Florida. The NNPN rolling world premiere inspired by the life of Hungarian Holocaust survivor Georgia Gabor is directed by William Hayes.
Richard Marsh’s Yippee Ki Yay runs December 27-31 at The Huntington in Boston. Hal Chambers directs the Edinburgh hit retelling of Die Hard, an “uplifting action romp (and unauthorized parody) [that] pays affectionate tribute to the iconic 80s festive fan favorite.”
readings & workshops
the blackening’s we come to collect (a flirtation, with capitalism) will have a free workshop presentation from Woolly Mammoth on December 22nd at Eaton House in DC. The new devised work is “an anti-capitalist ritual comedy with original music in which performers and audience together explore value, labor, and currency.”
Mahira Kakkar’s 18 Nights/A Mahabharata Project will have a closed workshop presentation on December 18th at Rattlestick Theater in NYC. Danilo Gambini directs and Amrita Ramanan dramaturgs; email Danilo for more information.
streaming
Lane Michael Stanley and Tova Katz’s Jack & Aiden streams live December 15th from Ground Floor Theatre in Austin, TX. Trace Turner directs the world premiere musical about a no-strings encounter on a gay hookup app that gradually “get complicated [as the two] must navigate their grief, recovery and trauma and find out if they can hold one another’s human messiness.”
John J. Caswell Jr.’s Scene Partners will be livestreamed December 15-17 from The Vineyard. The “wildly theatrical, hilarious and genre-twisting gallop through the experience of a woman reborn” stars Dianne Wiest and is directed by Rachel Chavkin.
Anna Ouyang Moench’s Your Local Theater Presents: A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, Again is available to stream on demand December 25-31 from the Playwrights’ Center. The new work follows an actor returning to the Dickens classic year after year in “a love letter to actors, artists, and dreamers of all professions who make sacrifices large and small in service of their work…and ultimately wonder whether it was worth it.”
Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics is now streaming on demand through December 31st from Miami New Drama. Cruz directs his Pulitzer-winning play about a family of cigar makers whose loves and lives are played out against the backdrop of Great Depression-era America.
Leonie Bell and LOCAL GRANDMA’s SchmidtSmithSchmidt livestreams December 17th at 2pm from The Brick Theater. Performed in German, English and Denglish, the new work explores “the lonesome and forgotten search for new connective tissue, mundane chaos + ancient desires reign, and the trees await a return.”
Lloyd Suh’s The Heart Sellers is now available to stream on demand through January 6th from The Huntington. May Adrales directs the 1973-set work about two recent Asian immigrants finding commonality as they “dream of disco dancing, learning to drive, and even a visit to Disneyland, and share their hopes and challenges for making a new home in a new land with grace and dignity.”
the regional theatre game of thrones
Michael Barakiva is the new artistic director of Cleveland Play House. The director succeeds Mark Cuddy, who has served as interim artistic director since June 2022. (You may recall Cleveland Play House’s very public nesting doll of institutional failures earlier this year, which I’ll be recapping in my year-in-review post.)
2024 season updates
Company One in Boston announced its 2024 season. The line-up includes Eliana Pipes’ Hoops (directed by Tonasia Jones), and two world premieres: M Sloth Levine’s The Interrobangers (directed by Josh Glenn-Kayden) and Kirsten Greenidge’s Morning, Noon, and Night (directed by Summer L. Williams). Company One also announced that all shows will be 100% free to attend, thanks to funding from the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture and other producing partners.
To what do you attribute the resurgence of streaming options?
In 2021 we saw tons of streaming because of Covid and social distancing. In 2022 we saw it largely disappear, but now in 2023 the ‘streaming’ section of your newsletter is full again. Is it just the ‘holiday bump’ with theaters desperate for any revenue at year’s end? Or will we be seeing it as a part of normal programming? I hope it’s the latter. While it’s not my favorite way to watch a play, I do enjoy seeing what’s playing in different parts of the country. And it allows people to support theaters they don’t have physical access to.