Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there will be limited theatre news for the foreseeable future. I will continue to search for anything meaningful and/or fun to report. Stay safe and healthy.
In addition, with national protests in full swing, I don’t know when more theatre news will be available, so newsletters may be even shorter…
Today’s Highlights:
* London’s National Theatre’s Coriolanus (2013), directed by Josie Rourke, featuring Tom Hiddleston, Alfred Enoch, Deborah Findlay, and Mark Gatiss, FREE livestream at 2 PM ET here (and available for 7 days).
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Video: “Stars in the House,” offering a Free Speech platform for some of Broadway’s finest. (1:01:05)
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Marc Shaiman & Scott Wittman have announced a change that will affect the way Hairspray will be performed in the future.
The change in question has to do with a casting loophole that allows theatres around the world to produce the musical with non-black actors playing black characters… until today.
Shaiman said in a statement: “While it always seemed like common sense to us that people would choose to put on Hairspray with the knowledge that they could perform the show as written, we were naive. But, to state what I would hope to be the obvious, we never ENCOURAGED an all-white production. But this situation has ALWAYS troubled us (it has certainly gnawed at me for years) and so, we are grateful to say that Music Theatre International (which represents and licenses Hairspray) WILL be requiring groups to cast the show so as to accurately reflect the characters as we wrote them. A show that specifically addresses one aspect of the black experience during the civil rights battles of the early 1960s deserves to have its characters accurately and appropriately portrayed on stage.”
Click here to read Shaiman’s full statement.
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Show of Shows: Broadway.com Salutes the Tonys — since posting this yesterday, which was scheduled to replace the Tony Awards on June 7, this event has been postponed.
If/when the event is re-scheduled, I will announce it here.
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Video: NaTasha Yvette Williams performs “Hope” from Waitress. Stunning.
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Actors Theatre of Louisville has announced its updated 2020-21 online season:
* Fix It, Black Girl free reading (June 12), by Hannah L. Drake, featuring Erica Denise, Hannah L. Drake, Janelle Renee Dunn, Robin G, Sujotta Pace, and Kala Ross. 
An original curation of spoken word poetry, essay and song.
* The Keep Going Song (Fall 2020). An evening of storytelling and song with The Bengsons.
* COVID-Classics: a collection of one-act plays for the age of quarantine (Fall 2020), newly adapted by Hannah Rae Montgomery & Jenni Page-White, directed by Robert Barry Fleming
* Where Did We Sit on the Bus (Fall 2020), by Brian Quijada. A riveting, beat-driven solo show about the experience of growing up in an immigrant family, searching for a place in American history and finding identity in making art.
* Dracula: A Radio Play (Fall 2020), newly adapted by Hannah Rae Montgomery & Jenni Page-White, directed by Robert Barry Fleming.
* Erma Bombeck: At Wit’s End (Winter 2021), starring Jessica Wortham. Erma Bombeck aimed to define herself beyond the roles of wife and mother — while still embracing how these “ordinary” things can bring ordinary joy.
* Romeo and Juliet (Winter 2021), directed by Robert Barry Fleming, featuring a featuring young non-binary, racially and ethnically diverse cast.
* 45th Humana Festival of New American Plays (Spring 2021)
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Michael R. Jackson has won the Lamda Literary Award for LGBTO Drama for his musical A Strange Loop.
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RIP: Chris Trousdale, a member of the 1999-2002 boy band Dream Street, passed away June 2 at the age of 34.
Chris’ credits include the national tour of Les Miz (Gavroche), and the 1998 Broadway’s revival of The Sound of Music (Friedrich)
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Video: Trailer for MCC Theater‘s Miscast2020, to be livestreamed on Sat. June 20 at 8 PM ET.
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The Episcopal Actors’ Guild will present a one-night-only online benefit reading of Richard Alleman’s Adrift on Thurs. June 11 at 7 PM ET, directed by Anthony Newfield. 
here.
Alison Fraser, Glauco Araujo, Karen Archer, and Anthony Newfield.
A day in the life of a wealthy WASP couple trying to escape the horrors of a dystopian world by living full-time aboard an ultra-luxurious cruise ship-turned-condo colony.
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& Nancy LaMott is the most healing singer I know. Hope this helps…
Audio: “We Live on Borrowed Time”
Video: “Time After Time”
Video: “The Secret of Life”
Audio: “Autumn Leaves” and “When October Goes”
Audio: “Two for the Road”
Audio: “Moon River”
Audio: “We Can Be Kind”
Audio: “Good Thing Going and “Not a Day Goes By”
Audio: “I Have Dreamed”
Audio: “Ask Me Again”
Audio: “What’s Good About Goodbye”
Audio: “Help is on the Way”
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Ventura’s Rubicon Theatre has announced its Summer Youth Programs:
Brian Stokes Mitchell, Casey Nicholaw, Stephen Schwartz, Lauren Patten, Faith Prince, Andrew Lippa, Norm Lewis, and Andrew Samonsky.
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The “Freestyle Love Supreme” documentary has postponed its release on Hulu (originally scheduled for June 5). A new release date will be announced soon.
The creators statement (Lin-Manuel Miranda, Thomas Kail & Anthony Veneziale): “Our show does not exist without the generations of brilliant Black artists that created two of our most beloved American art forms: jazz and hip-hop,” the statement read. “Today our country, our world struggles to reach an end to this systemic racial injustice, intolerance, police brutality and hate. We add our voices to that fight, to that struggle. We are Freestyle Love Supreme. We are for love.” The post also included a link to Black Lives Matter.
Video: Trailer
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London’s Royal Court Theatre has made the script of Debbie Tucker Green’s Ear for Eye available to read for free through Sept. 3.
Click here to read.
The play follows 16 characters and explores how patience is running out and times haven’t changed for the Black British and African-American communities.
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Video: Syndee Winters’ one-woman show Lena: A Moment With the Lady (13:32)
The show also features Kyle Taylor Parker and Dana Watkins, with direction by Logan Vaughn and music by Andromeda Turre.
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Mykal Kilgore added his voice to those of the Black theatre community in demanding more from Broadway and theatrical institutions and for White theatremakeres to “change your mind” and alter racist behavior in the theatre.
“Broadway, she’s racist,” Kilgore says in his Facebook Live video. “And it’s little things, it’s big things, it’s a lot of things and right now Broadway is closed down. Great equalizer. There is no Broadway right now. Black folx, are we running back when this is over? What do we want? Protests are happening everywhere, change is in the air. It’s palpable. What do we want?”
“I don’t have the answers but I do know there are a few things I’m not comfortable doing anymore and I hope that I’m not alone in that feeling,” he says. “I feel like we have got to get to a place where we feel comfortable with saying no to the things that hurt our community with the depictions of ourselves that are one dimensional. Because there is good and bad and high and low within the community, but I’ll be damned if I spend my whole life standing in the back row on 12 because as a director you haven’t found a creative way to include Black people into the world of the show and you’re trying your best to hide us and you’re trying your best to not have us steal focus.
Video: Watch Mykal’s full statement on Facebook.