TDF Stages Archive

Welcome to Building Character, our ongoing look at performers and how they create their roles Nick Bright, the American investment banker who’s kidnapped and held for ransom in Ayad Akhtar’s The Invisible Hand, certainly evokes some sympathy. In the play, which is now at New York Theatre Workshop, he has to raise his own ransom […]

By ELIZA BENT In the case of the new musical War Lesbian, the title came first. Once that evocative name was in place, playwright and performer Kristine Haruna Lee, who wrote the show with composer Kathryn Hathaway, began researching female driven, queer-centered myths. “Myths are always a really big part of my creative process,” she […]

Inside Joseph Silovsky’s gadget theatre

Welcome to Building Character, our ongoing look at performers and how they create their roles Make no mistake: the new Broadway musical Honeymoon in Vegas is supposed to be a lark. Based on the 1992 film, it’s a fizzy romance about Jack Singer, a guy who won’t propose to his girlfriend Betsy because his mother […]

How TDF’s Costume Collection works with out-of-state designers — Earlier this year, designer Joe Kucharski had to costume a production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia in a hurry. “I was to just show up for a week, do fittings, immediately go into tech, and leave,” he recalls, and since the show was being produced at Maryland’s […]

The Rockettes may be synonymous with the holiday season, but the high-kicking dancers stay busy throughout the year. “I start training for Christmas probably about two or three weeks after we close the [previous year’s Christmas] show,” says seventh-year Rockette Mary Cavett. “You get yourself back in dance class; you maintain and take care of […]

At Keen Company, sincerity is a rebellious stance.

Whether protesting climate change, racial injustice, or overconsumption, Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping do it in glorious song — It’s going to be a very busy Thanksgiving weekend for the Talen family. For the holiday, Bill Talen, better known as political performance artivist Reverend Billy; his partner and longtime director, Savitri D; […]

“When you look at YouTube and the culture of social media, you see how the rest of society is now a ‘creator.’ We expect to take professional level photos on our phones, so why not empower the audience to create a musical on the spot?” So says improv artist Mike Descoteaux. That’s why his show Blank! The Musical allows the audience to create every single element of the full-fledged musical they se