This week was a little light on news due to Thanksgiving celebrations in the United States, but here’s a few items that appeared in my Google Alerts! 

AWARDS

Broadway World has opened voting for regional theatre awards across the country – my Google Alert caught a dozen just on November 25. Here in Southeastern Pennsylvania, community theaters and non-professional actors compete against professional and even Equity productions. So Walnut Street Theater’s production of Legally Blonde is up against The Pines Dinner Theatre’s Clue The Musical and Mamma Mia from the Players’ Club of Swarthmore.

PRODUCTIONS

In Mississippi, Death By Design: The Secret Holocaust of Wrightsville, Arkansas, debuts at Meridian High School on December 4.The play is based on a tragic fire at the Negro Industrial School for Boys in 1959.
Lethbridge High School in Alberta, Canada presents Munsch at Play, a series of children’s plays based on Robert Munsch’s books, including The Paper Bag Princess.
The East Bay Times features lots of intergenerational productions happening in the San Francisco Bay area this December!

CAUTIONARY TALES

Careful with your fog machines! Fire alarms interrupted Walt Whitman High School’s production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame on its opening night. Turns out that the crew pumped up the intensity of the haze for the first performance in front of an audience, instead of keeping it at dress rehearsal levels.
Administrators, take note: a high school student was suspended for wearing makeup to school. His classmates wore “heavy” makeup to protest the his suspension. The connection to theatre education? They’re students at Robert Gravel High School, “the only school in Quebec entirely dedicated an art/studies program in drama.” (That’s Google translating the website, which was in French.) One of the students in the article comments, “…we were literally taught how to be clowns in our first year. We have a makeup exam in our second year.”
Operating Theatre Live is LITERALLY a live surgical experience (though NOT performed on live people); don’t go if you’re not ready for actual organ dissections.

FOR YOUR CLASSES

American Theatre has published its annual “Theatre Facts” report. Students can get a picture of the business of regional theatres around the United States as well as audience trends.

MISCELLANY

Wetumpka High School in Alabama has a pretty good involvement percentage for their theatre guild – close to 10% of the student body participates. Teacher-director Jeff Glass says that 5 graduating seniors earned over $160,000 in scholarships for the performing arts last year. Check out the cute set for Second Samuel!

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s “Theater Beat” column showed up in my Google Alert because of Lauren Gunderson’s Natural Shocks, but there’s a very cool anecdote about a theatre artist’s childhood realization later on in the items.