Emily Moneymaker

Let’s Do the Black Bottom

The uptight etiquette of ballroom dancing ruled American dance floors at the beginning of the 20th century. This came to an end in the decade during which Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom takes place: the Roaring Twenties and the Prohibition Era. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously documented the social freedom of these years in The Great Gatsby: “The parties...

Let’s Do the Black Bottom

A 1950s Immigration Story in 21st-Century Los Angeles

In Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge, two young men, Marco and Rodolpho, attempt to make their mark in the land of the free. Originally from Sicily, Italy, these two dreamers trade orange groves and piazzas to spend nights sleeping on the floor of a cousin’s house and days working on the docks. What drove them to leave their homeland for a...

A 1950s Immigration Story in 21st-Century Los Angeles

The Story of the ‘Mother of the Blues’

In a 1999 interview with The Paris Review, playwright August Wilson stated that his work was most heavily influenced by “my four Bs”: poet Jorge Luis Borges, playwright Amiri Baraka, painter Romare Bearden, and most importantly, the blues. At the center of Wilson’s first hit play and Broadway debut, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (at the Mark Tap...

The Story of the ‘Mother of the Blues’

Lucy Alibar & Co.—Badass Women Writers of the South

Lucy Alibar has made a name for herself for her distinctive and magical depictions of the American South through the eyes of young, female characters. First there was her Oscar-nominated screenplay for Beasts of the Southern Wild (co-written with Benh Zeitlin and based on Alibar’s play Juicy and Delicious). Now it’s Throw Me On the Burnpile and...

Lucy Alibar & Co.—Badass Women Writers of the South

‘Grey Gardens’ Melds Stage and Movie Magic

Projection designer Jason H. Thompson saw and admired director Michael Wilson’s production of Grey Gardens last summer at Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theater. But when Wilson asked him to come onboard for Center Theatre Group’s Grey Gardens (onstage at the Ahmanson Theatre through August 14, 2016), Thompson hesitates. “I wasn’t quite sure how...

‘Grey Gardens’ Melds Stage and Movie Magic

5 Musicals Showcasing ‘Stage Moms’

Set against the backdrop of a crumbling home in East Hampton, New York, Grey Gardens focuses upon the mother-daughter relationship between the reclusive Edith Ewing “Big Edie” Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Little Edie. Big Edie is the opposite of a stage mom—at least according to Little Edie, she dashed her daughter’s showbiz dreams—but...

5 Musicals Showcasing ‘Stage Moms’