2016 | Center Theatre Group

Center Theatre Group Carpenter Kate Harrow builds, loads in, repairs, and strikes scenery for shows at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Downtown Culver City. Watch her review plans, work with wood, and handle a pretty big saw in our latest Working in Theatre video. She also talks about her education at USC, her big break in summer stock, and what it’s...

The Carpenters who Set the Scene

Ask a Parisian what the greatest place on Earth is and you can be pretty sure of the answer you are likely to receive—and rightly so. Paris is special. Its boulevards and spirit have inspired artists of every cloth to create some of the world’s greatest works of art—including the creators of Amélie, A New Musical, which plays t...

Nine Times Paris Came to Broadway

Deborah Stein and Suli Holum are the artists behind Stein | Holum Projects and the new play The Wholehearted, which makes its World premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre December 2–11, 2016. The Center Theatre Group Podcast sat down to ask them about the origins of this unique work that utilizes live projections, film, and a thumping score to...

Deborah Stein and Suli Holum Discuss the Origins of ‘The Wholehearted’

“I believe that, right now, art can do something that is harder for the media to do,” Jon Robin Baitz has said of his new play Vicuña, which makes its World premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre through November 20, 2016. Baitz’s tale of a presidential candidate and his tailor is in excellent company this election season, which has galv...

Theatres and Theatre Artists Respond to Election 2016

It’s no secret that politicians spend a lot of time thinking about how they look. After all, as the saying goes, “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” In Vicuña by Jon Robin Baitz, political fashion (and the power of a well-tailored suit) take center stage at the Kirk Douglas Theatre October 23 &n...

Seven Key Fashion Moments in American Politics

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

There is nothing quite like a gifted storyteller, and Lucy Alibar—onstage now at the Kirk Douglas Theatre—is one of the best of America's newest generation. Whether she is penning an Oscar-nominated screenplay like Beasts of the Southern Wild or telling tales from her childhood in Throw Me On the Burnpile and Light Me Up (playing the Do...

Storytelling Podcasts for fans of ‘Throw Me On the Burnpile and Light Me Up’

We interrupted Throw Me On the Burnpile and Light Me Up writer and performer Lucy Alibar and director Neel Keller in the midst of rehearsals and asked them to explain what makes this play a totally unique piece of theatre for the Center Theatre Group Podcast. Listen in full or enjoy the edited excerpt below. Throw Me On the Burnpile and Light Me Up...

A Conversation with Lucy Alibar and Neel Keller

The blues is much more than a musical genre to the title character of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which plays the Mark Taper Forum through October 16, 2016. To the Ma Rainey of August Wilson’s imagination, the blues is “life’s way of talkin’.” She goes on to explain, “You don’t sing to feel better. You sing ’cause...

10 Blueswomen who Changed Music Forever

The video above is just a taste of a magical stew of stories that is Throw Me On the Burnpile and Light Me Up. Writer and performer Lucy Alibar, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of the hit film Beasts of the Southern Wild, has also been serving up a lecherous goat, a house full of dogs, cats and Febreze and Daddy's .38 special to audiences at the K...

Have a taste of ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ screenwriter Lucy Alibar’s magical stew of stories

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’