Cara Joy David News

Rise and shine, BroadwayWorld! It is November 28, 2023 and it's time to catch up on all of the theatrical happenings you may have missed in the last 24 hours.

This week in the newsletter, we’ve got a look at how high schools can win a chance to be the first to produce Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Cara Joy David takes us through the recent ruling in the Hal Luftig Company bankruptcy, and the Wall Street Journal takes a look at how some regional theatres are thriving in a challenging environment.

As his Here Lies Love played its last week of performances on Broadway, producer Hal Luftig scored a significant victory in court. The Bankruptcy Court of the Southern District of New York recommended confirming the reorganization plan for Hal Luftig Company, Inc.

Rise and shine, BroadwayWorld! It is November 21, 2023 and it's time to catch up on all of the theatrical happenings you may have missed in the last 24 hours.

As we prepare for the parade (and we’ve got your guide on the Broadway performances below), we also get some good news out of the UK where Panto producers report that ticket sales are trending strongly in the right direction for the holiday tradition.

New York energy company Con Edison, a longtime local supporter of the arts, is the latest corporation to back away from funding them. Dwindling local corporate giving has been a problem across the country, as I’ve previously written. But this Con Ed move is surprising given that the company reinforced its dedication to the arts in recent years.

Rise and shine, BroadwayWorld! It is November 14, 2023 and it's time to catch up on all of the theatrical happenings you may have missed in the last 24 hours.

The funding models are changing - we’ve known this for more or less the whole time the industry has been re-emerging from the pandemic, and the struggles of regional theatres large and small as temporary government funding tied to the pandemic came to an end - but how are theatres in England doing one year after the reshuffle of national arts?

This week we learned the last Broadway performance of Here Lies Love would take place on November 26. To some, it seemed rather shocking that a show that took so long to get here would run for so short a time.

Rise and shine, BroadwayWorld! It is  November 07, 2023 and it's time to catch up on all of the theatrical happenings you may have missed in the last 24 hours.

More data out last week about the impact of the arts on the economies of the cities and small towns that many regional theatres call home - and the results show that theatre not only contributes to the cultural life of a community, but is contributing significantly to the economic life of many small towns.

It is a rare week when two topics related to set design interest me. But that is what happened last week. The first topic involves social media and AI. The weekend before last, people kept sending me a TikTok clip or related posts about The Wiz allegedly using AI to generate its “backdrops.” The second topic involves a terminology change.

Some of our more significant stories this week come from across the pond: the first being that a new survey indicates that the vast majority of women working in theatre don’t feel like they are seeing an increase in opportunities. While the data comes from the UK, I think we would find a lot of anecdotal agreement in the US industry as well.

Bill Kenwright, who passed away last week, was an old-school dedicated leader. He committed totally to his projects. He knew more about them than anyone. And he often knew more about other people’s projects than even the people involved with those projects.

With the National Theatre announcing experimenting with an earlier evening curtain time, Cara Joy David explores whether a similar experiment will be making its way to Broadway. New leadership at the Raven Theatre in Chicago, and New Rep in Boston has announced that they will be closing their doors after 40 years.

Last week, London’s National Theatre announced that starting in February 2024, select Tuesday and Thursday performances for new productions will begin at 6:30pm. Is it a good idea? Should the West End or Broadway adopt 6:30pm curtains? It’s hard to know, but it could pay off.

From the start of this newsletter in the pandemic, we’ve been covering the evolution of the performing arts industry, and the articles we’ve compiled this week underscore that evolution in a big way. The first of those articles being the very question on if the nonprofit model is still working for arts organizations anymore.

This week, I’m going to answer a couple of questions I received in the past few weeks. I wrote in my column a couple of weeks ago about the change in ticket buying habits. Post-pandemic Broadway research has shown people buying tickets later. The question posed to me was: 'Why?'

This week, we’re looking at a few different crises facing theatres across the globe - from Pittsburgh, a story on staff turnover causing many organizations to raise wages, causing a new kind of financial strain. Data from Colleen Dilenschnieder suggests that many patrons of arts organizations might not realize that the organization is a non-profit.

Last week the venue for the 77th Tony Awards was announced—The David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. For the second year in a row, we will have a new venue for theater’s biggest award show. And those I spoke to in the industry were split on the choice.