News And Blogs

If you’re doing something new, there is always a sense of fear or foreboding, but you’re in new ground and you have to get out your machete and cut a new path, superstar composer Jeanine Tesori explained in an interview a few years ago....

Five Reasons Jeanine Tesori Inspires us to Go for our Dreams

As the self-described only even nominally Chinese person who’s ever written a Broadway show, Chinese American playwright David Henry Hwang has gone on quite a few meetings with Chinese entertainment producers who want to create a Broadway show of their own. Why are they interested? Two words that also happen to be the title of Hwang and Jeanine T...

‘Soft Power’: The Show, The Theory, The Inspiration

Theatre makers around the country are grappling with cultural appropriation and nontraditional casting right now. But the Asian American speakers at a recent Community Conversation are also coming to terms with their own “internal crisis” about beloved (but problematic) classics like Miss Saigon and The King and I....

Orientalism and the Portrayal of Asian Americans in Musicals

How does a new (play with a) musical get made? To quote Soft Power, It Just Takes Time. In this case, that’s four years, 13 readings and workshops, and the partnership of a crackerjack creative team of American theatre all-stars. But before all that, there was breakfast, as Center Theatre Group Artistic Director Michael Ritchie and playwright Dav...

Four Years, Two Breakfasts, and One Big Commission

Why don’t we see more Asian Americans onscreen and onstage with accents that aren’t played for laughs? Is it OK for a Japanese actress to play Korean or Taiwanese? And why, if they live in New York City, don’t the characters on Friends have any friends who aren’t white?

The Politics of Casting

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