Sunday, April 05, 2015

Worth a Look

Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

How the Tax Code Hurts Artists

NYTimes.com: WITH tax day looming, you can practically hear the cries of creative professionals across the country. That’s because the tax code hits many right where it hurts, by penalizing them for the distinctive way they make money.

The biggest offender is still the alternative minimum tax, despite the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, which brought long-overdue reform. Two provisions of the A.M.T. hit a disproportionate number of actors, screenwriters and directors: In calculating it, taxpayers can’t deduct employee business expenses, nor can they deduct state, local and property taxes.

Women’s Voices To Be Heard at More Than 50 D.C.-Area Theatres

AMERICAN THEATRE: The Women’s Voices Theater Festival has announced preliminary details of the programming for the two-month-long festival, which will unite more than 50 professional theatre companies in the D.C. metro area this coming fall. Each theatre will produce a world-premiere play from a female playwright. Highlights include new plays from Sheila Callaghan, Karin Coonrod, Jen Silverman, Jessica Dikcey, Martyna Majok and Caleen Sinnette Jennings.


The Most Successful Theater Kickstarter Ever

Vulture: NBC’s musical series Smash was widely panned and only lasted two seasons, but two years after its final episode, its small but devoted contingent of fans are just as invested in its future. Earlier this month, the Actors Fund announced it would put on a Broadway benefit concert performance of Bombshell, the Marilyn Monroe musical workshopped over the course of Smash’s season that gave stars Megan Hilty and Katharine McPhee space to catfight and belt to the rafters

Is small theater in Los Angeles getting the curtain call?

www.dailynews.com: When you hear “Hollywood,” you think movies, right? Or maybe TV.

What nobody thinks is theater. Theater is New York or some other place people moved here to escape.

When folks come west, they leave behind their snow shovels, mittens and “Regards to Broadway.” Yet every week in Los Angeles, thousands flock to world-class venues like the Ahmanson, Mark Taper Forum, Pantages and a handful of others for the live theater experience.

What isn’t so well known is many thousands more find that same joy in the less glamorous parts of town — the seedy stretches of Santa Monica and Melrose, the dark patches of Highland and even the nether regions of Lankershim.

Are Theatre Critics Critical? An Update

HowlRound: It wasn't exactly an ambush, but the first question actor Bernardo Cubria posed to me as a guest on his theatre podcast was about a complaint that actors have about critics. I was his sixtieth guest, and his first theatre critic.

Why do so many reviews, he asked, just summarize the plot and not give an opinion? Later he complained that a critic’s opinion in a review upset a friend of his who had spent “three months of her life” dedicated to her show.

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