Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...
New CAA study says diverse casting increases box office potential across all budgets
LA Times: There’s been little debate over the moral arguments behind increasing diversity on- and off-screen in Hollywood, but the economic arguments haven’t always been so clear.
While women, people of color, LGBTQ folk and other historically marginalized communities in Hollywood continue to insist “diversity pays,” the box office success of films with diverse casts such as “Hidden Figures” ($230.1 million worldwide) and “Get Out” ($251.2 million worldwide) is inevitably deemed a “surprise.”
Theaters that perform Shakespeare are getting death threats
The Boston Globe: The messages started pouring in earlier this week.
“Your play depicting the murder of our President is nothing but pure hatred,” read one of the tamer ones.
“[H]ope you all who did this play about Trump are the first do [sic] die when ISIS COMES TO YOU [expletive] sumbags [sic],” read another.
The senders were outraged over the Public Theater’s controversial staging of “Julius Caesar,” a production in New York’s Central Park that has become a national flashpoint for its depiction of the stabbing assassination of its Trump-like title character.
Should There Be All-White Productions of "Hairspray"?
OnStage Blog: Imagine that Hairspray is being produced in a local theatre near you. And after the auditions were completed, you notice that the show has an all-white cast. How would you react? Would you be angered? Insulted? Confused?
While it might be questionable that Hairspray would be cast this way, it's something that happens fairly regularly and the reason is that in large part, it's actually endorsed by the creators of the show.
Home Depot, Menards Customers Cry False Advertising When They Learn “4x4s” Aren’t Actually 4×4
Consumerist: Talk to any contractor or carpenter — or most people who are reasonably familiar with home construction and repair — and they’ll tell you that a “4×4” piece of lumber is not actually four inches by four inches, and that it hasn’t been that way in any of our lifetimes. Yet some Home Depot and Menards customers are — literally — making a federal case out of this discrepancy, accusing the retailers of false advertising.
In its defense of a theater critic, the Tribune sidesteps the real issues
Chicago Tribune: I am disappointed by your misleading, glib editorial on the Chicago theater community's response to Hedy Weiss' pattern of, at best, racially tone-deaf criticism.
You cite the length of Weiss' tenure at the Sun-Times and describe the critic-artist relationship in lieu of offering a substantive defense of the specific critique of racial animus that the community has raised.
