TDF Stages Archive

Linda Hamilton is trying to engineer a wardrobe malfunction. “We’re having a little struggle with a scene at the end where the costume is ripped from my body,” confesses Hamilton, who has played her share of tough cookies in the Terminator films and in the TV series Beauty and the Beast and who is in […]

Acting is a form of interpretation, but interpretation is not acting. Such is one of the key lessons offered by the Interpreting for the Theatre institute, an annual summer intensive held by the Theatre Development Fund at Juilliard School, at which up to 20 interpreters for the deaf and hard-of-hearing from all over the United […]

“I would never use those words, but I don’t object to them,” says playwright Sarah Ruhl, referring to a pair of adjectives often applied, and not always admiringly, to her form-defying plays: “wacky” and “quirky.” Though she claims not to read reviews, she has certainly heard these words directed her way, but, she insists, “I’d […]

How many graduation ceremonies have you attended that consisted not of an endless parade of names and mortarboards but a series of original plays, penned by students and performed by professional actors? Or how about a series of insightful, inspiring speeches and discussions among hundreds of budding teenage theatre aficionados? Such were the elements of […]

“The landscape changes around every bend,” says Anne Stone Crow of the lovely, unpredictable highlands of Scotland, where you’re just as likely to find a well-preserved castle, a salmon preserve, a field full of contented sheep or a placid, sandy beach full of sunbathers. “That was beautiful, and a big surprise,” she says of the […]

How does an accomplished actor-singer play a composer who wasn’t a singer? Wait, there’s more: The character in question is German, and he’s singing English lyrics he didn’t write, in a stitched-together anthology show that tells the intertwined story of him and his famous muse. With Kurt Weill, one half of the complicated couple at […]

When London’s Old Vic imported Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten to Broadway in March, it brought with it more than great expectations and its star artistic director, Kevin Spacey, in the lead role. Packed in the steamer trunk alongside the acclaimed, recently Tony-nominated production were the Old Vic’s fresh, exciting education and outreach […]

Teen suicide and violence. Talk radio language wars. A White House coverup amid an unpopular foreign war. The dark side of unwanted pregnancy. Front-line soldiers gritting their teeth through a war of attrition. The rise of a charismatic black politician. A debate over teaching evolution. The stages of grief. Are these today’s headlines, or some […]

For anyone who’s toiled in the trenches of musical theatre, the characters in A Chorus Line aren’t just parts. The struggles of the show’s 17 dancers to get through a trying group audition under the prying gaze of a slightly tyrannical director resonate all too closely with their everyday lives. Of no one is this […]