News And Blogs

From ancient Greek tragedies to the Japanese Noh and Kabuki styles that developed in the 14th and 17th centuries to the English Renaissance traditions we know best from Shakespeare (see: Twelfth Night, a man playing a woman playing a man), gender-swapping has been integral to the history of theatre. Way back when, the reason why was simple: women w...

Roles of a Different Bent

Los Angeles has a long and storied history of LGBTQ rights activism. The city was the site of some of the earliest mass demonstrations against police persecution and the birthplace of the nation’s first widely distributed gay and lesbian publications, including The Advocate. As activism paved the way for acceptance in the second half of the 20th...

LGBTQ History Worth Celebrating

Zakiya Young was a New York stage veteran when she moved to Los Angeles last year to focus on her television and film career. I got out here and saw it’s just about who you know and getting in the door, she recalled. Yet the opposite proved to be true in how she landed her part in Spamilton at the Kirk Douglas Theatre thanks to Equity Principal A...

From an Open Casting Call to the Douglas Stage

If you think the only show Spamilton spoofs is the famous You-Know-What, guess again! Creator Gerard Alesandrini, who is also the writer/director behind Forbidden Broadway, has created a gut-busting show that is bursting with an incredible range of musical references.

Songs to Get You Pumped for 'Spamilton'

Late June. Sunset. Silver Lake. A group of writers chat about living in Los Angeles and their upcoming projects. Among them are Hollywood showrunners, nationally produced playwrights, and award winning screenwriters. What do they all have in common? They’ve all participated in the L.A. Writers’ Workshop, a Center Theatre Group program devoted t...

Inside the Writers Room

In Spring of 2017, the bar Eastside Luv was transformed into a theatre. Inside the tiny Boyle Heights venue young crowds danced to 1980s pop, drank sangria, and gossiped in English and Spanish. It was quintessentially Los Angeles. It was Chisme y Queso.

Chisme y Queso

In a recent conversation with Goodman Theatre's Director of New Play Development Tanya Palmer, Lauren talks about what inspired her play, and what it’s like to write herself into a story that is, as she describes, only kind of true—just like the stories your father once told you as a child.

Meet Playwright Lauren Yee

In Classroom Connections, Center Theatre Group invites groups of educators to enjoy a night out at the theatre—followed by a discussion of the show and where they found inspiration over food and drinks. The goal is to talk about the bridges we can build between the craft of theatre and the craft of classroom teaching.

'Archduke' Offers Students Lessons in Collaboration and History

Look, I’d do anything for a sandwich because I know what a sandwich is, one poor, hungry man tells another in Rajiv Joseph's Archduke (onstage at the Mark Taper Forum through June 4, 2017). In Joseph's darkly comic take on the origins of World War I, global history hinges in part on three young Serbs' desire for sandwiches. Will they assassinate...

Five Serbian Sandwiches Worth Going to War For

Archduke, which plays the Mark Taper Forum through June 4, 2017, takes place in the days and hours before the event that is widely regarded as the beginning of World War I—the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. Playwright Rajiv Joseph hopes that the play will get audiences thinking about World War I as not so distant or forei...

Wonder Woman, Uncle Sam, and ‘Archduke’

Rajiv Joseph’s World premiere Archduke, onstage at the Mark Taper Forum through June 4, 2017, is based on the event credited for launching World War I—the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. While The Great War has been endlessly studied and written about, the young Serbian men behind the assassination are largely a mystery. Archduke fic...

Who Killed Franz Ferdinand?