TDF

Collecting is an art unto itself, and the best collectors have an artistic sensibility. They follow a muse, look for serendipitous connections and seek out moments of epiphanous inspiration between the inevitable hours of perspiration involved in any serious endeavor. Take Robert L.B. Tobin, for example. Over nearly five decades of collecting theatrical scenic designs […]

Just how true to life is the new Broadway sensation In the Heights? “The singing, the dancing, the scenery–it was like you were actually there,” raves Cinelli Mangal, a 10th-grader at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, who recently saw the show in a large group of teens participating in TDF’s Stage Doors program. […]

Did we hear right? It sounds like the Devil just invoked a Christian sacrament. “It’s like everyone having Communion at the same time,” says Ciarán Hinds, who plays the red-tied gentleman with an underworld address in the Broadway run of The Seafarer, which closes on Mar. 30. “There are moments where you’re aware of a […]

It might have been called “Roaring Hands,” or “Talking Paws.” At a recent matinee performance of Disney’s unstoppable The Lion King, young audiences with hearing loss could follow the tale without missing a beat, thanks to a trio of seasoned sign interpreters and open captioning. It’s part of TDF’s Talking Hands program, its broadest effort […]

Who’s afraid of Edward Albee? Not as many people as perhaps once was the case, when the playwright of such acerbic contemporary classics as A Delicate Balance, Zoo Story, Three Tall Women and, of course, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was planting fresh landmines in the American theatrical field. He hasn’t necessarily mellowed in recent […]

“It really is an awful business. Until you have had a success in the theatre, the entire attitude is that you cannot possibly know what you are doing. And that a good play should be just like the last play that was good or like portions of several other plays that were quite good. Since […]

There’s a kind of rough music in Harold Pinter’s writing, so it makes a kind of sense that Michael McKean, the versatile actor/musician who has graced the world with such indelible creations as Spinal Tap‘s David St. Hubbins and Laverne and Shirley‘s Lenny Kosnowski, fits so snugly into Daniel Sullivan’s crackling new Broadway revival of […]

It’s fairly common to hear concerned theatre folks talk in worried tones about the next generation of theatregoers–whether young folks raised on Wii and YouTube can become an engaged audience for live theatre, whether high ticket prices are a barrier, and so on. Indeed, among the mandates of Theatre Development Fund’s education programs is to […]

On Law & Order, S. Epatha Merkerson plays a no-nonsense police detective. In her Tony-nominated performance in The Piano Lesson, she played a fierce protector of the title instrument. In Suzan Lori-Parks’ F***ing A, she played an adversity-hardened abortionist. In short, she’s not the first actor you’d think of to play Lola Delaney, the painfully […]