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

Paramount To Transform Hollywood With Warner Merger After AG Settlement That Clears Way For Warner Merger

www.forbes.com: An imminent settlement of the lawsuit by 12 states’ attorneys general blocking the $111 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery by much smaller rival Paramount Skydance removes one of the last barriers to a fundamental reshaping of Hollywood’s battered entertainment industry.

 

1776 Hair Plan-Related Lawsuit to Continue

BroadwayWorld: It has been over two-and-a-half years since Zuri Washington sued the 1776 tour producers for racial discrimination and retaliation, and finally a court has addressed the substance of her allegations. After a venue change and the filing of two amended complaints, a judge for the United States District Court for the District of Maryland dismissed Washington's claims for discrimination but allowed her claims for retaliation to continue.

 

AI and your intellectual property

www.thefabricator.com: In the 1980s, television stations across the U.S. picked up a tag line that originated in New York media for public service announcements that TV watchers from that decade will remember: “It’s 10:00 PM. Do you know where your children are?” Today, parents can track their children through their smartphones and tablets. They have a good handle on where they are most of the time. Can the same be said for manufacturing companies and their data? Do they know where that is?

 

George Lucas Reminds Hollywood Not to Listen to the Haters

gizmodo.com: Speaking to CBS Sunday Morning, Lucas was talking about the reaction to his tinkering with the Star Wars movies for the 1997 special editions when he dropped in this little gem. “It’s hard to explain to the studios that if you listen to the people who are unhappy, it’s not going to turn out well,” Lucas said. “It’s going to be sad. Because they’re not people who know how to make movies.”

 

Crisis at the Kennedy Center: Why Its Main Building Is Going Dark for Two Years

time.com: The Kennedy Center Board of Trustees on Tuesday voted to immediately close the lauded arts institution’s main building. President Donald Trump, who is its Chairman, announced the decision on Truth Social. Hours before the vote, a district court ruled against the Board’s latest effort to add Trump’s name back to the building—this time, in recognition of his purported role in the planned renovations. The closure decision also came one day after leadership claimed that the cultural center was on the brink of bankruptcy.

 

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Seeding the Chicago theater field with new productions and companies

Chicago Reader: In July, Oskar Eustis, the celebrated longtime artistic director of New York’s Public Theater (the venue where both A Chorus Line and Hamilton were birthed), announced he would be leaving his position in two years. In an interview with Michael Paulson of the New York Times, Eustis, while declaring the state of the Public itself “strong,” also said, “I think the American nonprofit theater movement is over. That doesn’t mean any individual theater is over. But every individual theater is having to make its own case and come up with its own business model. We’ve lost a lot of theaters, and we’re going to lose more.”

 

Kennedy Center could close as early as Tuesday, warns of bankruptcy, documents show

The Washington Post: Leaders of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, installed by President Donald Trump, say the center is on the brink of bankruptcy and argue that putting the president’s name on its facade — and thus ensuring his fundraising efforts — may be the only way to avoid imminent and “certain fiscal collapse,” according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

 

Songwriter Urges Supreme Court to Let Landmark Copyright Ruling Stand

www.billboard.com: The songwriter who won a landmark ruling on copyright termination is urging the U.S. Supreme Court to reject efforts by major music companies to overturn it, telling the justices there is no “emergency” and that publishers are “doing just fine.”

 

What Burning Man’s Gen Z problem says about the festival

Salon.com: The first time Samantha R. went to Burning Man, it was on a whim. She hadn’t read much about it and had no idea what to expect. She received a free ticket from someone she met at a Grateful Dead event and had little time to prepare. She didn’t bring goggles or even a big coat to survive the cold, dusty nights. Despite the spontaneity and haphazardness of it all, which contributed to a rough burn, the 22-year-old returned on two more occasions — including this year.

 

The art of producing

Chicago Reader: Before any performer twirls a tassel, drops into a split, or picks up a mike, there’s a producer writing emails, organizing spreadsheets, calling venues, crunching numbers, creating posters, tracking ticket sales, wrangling tech information, hiring talent—you get the idea. I haven’t been producing that long, but from just the handful of shows I’ve put on, I can tell you it’s a heavy task.

 

Worth a Look

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The Creators of Come From Away Recall Living in NYC During 9/11, and How That Influenced Their Musical

Playbill: Irene Sankoff and David Hein have always considered their musical Come From Away as a show, not about 9/11, but about what happened on 9/12 and after. Notes Hein, "In times of tragedy, we often focus on the horrible things that happen. And in the days after, it's the wave of support and the wave of people who are doing good that doesn't get highlighted enough."

 

Laika Officially Doubles Down on Stop-Motion in the AI Era

collider.com: This past weekend, on Sunday during the Telluride Film Festival, Laika President and CEO Travis Knight sat down for a discussion with cinematographer and six-time Oscar nominee Caleb Deschanel and film expert Dave Karger to talk about Wildwood, the next stop-motion animated film from Laika.

 

Can More Pro-Shots Help Broadway’s Money Issues? Maybe, Says the Hadestown Film Team

Playbill: The Hadestown live stage film has successfully completed its run in movie theatres, taking home a very handsome $20.7 million over four weeks and making it the highest-grossing live stage film of all time (surpassing Hamilton)—and that's before you start counting on demand sales and rentals.

 

Pittsburgh CLO and Pittsburgh Public to Merge as Confluence Theater

AMERICAN THEATRE: In the latest news from a historic if bumpy theatre merger between Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera (CLO) and Pittsburgh Public Theater (PPT), a new name for the combined theatre has been announced: Confluence Theater of Pittsburgh. Confluence’s name was reportedly chosen by Pittsburgh residents themselves. According to release from the new company, it will combine the musicals that Pittsburgh CLO is known for with the classic and contemporary plays typically produced by Pittsburgh Public Theater.

 

Maybe Paramount-Warner Should Leave L.A.: Joseph Kahn Opinion Column

www.hollywoodreporter.com: However, for L.A., it’d be a death blow. The infrastructure is already suffering with vendors going out of business and crewmembers quitting. If Paramount-Warners leaves, the built-in advantage of being a mecca for filmmakers with access to top talent, props and equipment disintegrates overnight. Studio stockpiles of props, wardrobe, cranes and cameras can truck over to Nashville or Austin. Crews can suddenly live in lower-cost states and afford homes and schools for their kids. They may have to pray to Baby Jesus a little more, but a little Holy Ghost Power never hurt nobody.

 

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Merged groups announce Confluence Theater of Pittsburgh as new name

90.5 WESA: Confluence Theater of Pittsburgh is the name of Pittsburgh’s newest theater company — the result of the merger of two of its oldest troupes. The group announced the name Monday, about a month after the formal merger of Pittsburgh Public Theater and the Pittsburgh CLO.

 

The Federal Film and TV Tax Incentive Gets a Name as Momentum Builds

www.hollywoodreporter.com: Amid a precipitous drop in domestic film and television production in recent years, Hollywood has coalesced around support for a federal tax credit. It’ll almost always be cheaper to shoot in other countries, but the thinking is that government support could make it palatable to shoot more big-budget projects in the United States.

 

EFF to Courts: Don’t Rewrite Copyright Over AI Hype

Electronic Frontier Foundation: The history of technology is rife with copyright panics. In the 1980s, major rightsholders ran to Congress and the courts, claiming that videotape recorders (VTR) were “to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” Then, the Supreme Court declined to embrace the hype, noting that the VTR was capable of all kinds of non-infringing uses, like time-shifting and cautioning courts to avoid rewriting copyright law in response to new technologies. We believe that courts now should be similarly wary about the hype surrounding AI.

 

8 things Gen Z sees as burnout that Boomers & Gen X just call having a job

stylegirlfriend.com: A 24-year-old and a 56-year-old describe the same Wednesday. The younger one says it was brutal. Back-to-back calls, a manager who wanted a revision, a Slack message at 6:40 that she answered from the couch. She uses the word burnout twice before she gets to what happened after work. The older one says it was Wednesday.

 

From Bacon to Bananas: Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2026 in 24 Shows

The Theatre Times: With more than 4,200 shows making up this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, twenty-four performances can hardly stand in for the whole thing. What follows is a subjective itinerary through a week shaped by my own tastes and curiosities, even if several stops were among the Festival’s conspicuous talking points. Across theater, comedy, clowning, and magic, certain motifs kept surfacing in parallel: the stories we tell about ourselves, the selves we perform for others, the seductions of visibility (both online and off), and the strange uses of laughter as camouflage, release, resistance, or simply a way of survival.

 

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Dolly Parton Turned Down Elvis. That May Have Been Her Smartest Move

www.hollywoodreporter.com: There’s a famous story in industry lore about how, back in the ‘70s, Elvis Presley’s team had come to Parton with an offer for The King to cover “I Will Always Love You.” It was a potentially life-changing offer, even for an already famous Parton, to have one of the world’s most beloved artists turn a song she’d written into a likely smash hit. But it came with strings attached: While Elvis didn’t write a word of the song, his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, demanded he get 50 percent of the publishing credit.

 

Artists Built A Site To Escape AI. Scrapers Are Coming For It Anyway

www.forbes.com: Cara, an image sharing social network built specifically for artists who do not consent to have their work used to train generative AI models, suffered a third scraping attack in the past ten days, with copyrighted images and metadata taken from the site without permission appearing on the open source data network Academic Torrents on August 22. This follows previous scrapes of the dataset posted on Reddit (since taken down by the original poster) and the AI model clearinghouse Hugging Face.

 

Why AI Filmmaking Will Fail: James Gray on Film's 'Vinyl' Retro Moment

www.indiewire.com: When it comes to AI, director James Gray doesn’t mince words. The auteur called the current push for AI-driven filmmaking “obscene,” but he told IndieWire in a recent interview he has increasingly come to believe that it is a movement that will ultimately fail.

 

TV’s Neurodivergent Casting Reckoning

www.hollywoodreporter.com: Television’s portrayal of neurodivergence has long suffered from a persistent blind spot. By casting neurotypical actors to play stereotypical — and often heavily coded yet undiagnosed — white male savant archetypes, Hollywood built a rigid standard that has largely erased women, people of color and the broader diversity of real-world neurodivergent experiences.

 

Disney patent could let attractions adapt to what guests want — or want to avoid

Attractions Magazine: A newly published patent application from Disney Enterprises describes a system that could learn what guests enjoy — or find uncomfortable — and use those preferences to recommend attractions, provide real-time warnings and, on compatible experiences, adjust elements including sound, lighting and motion. Disney even envisions giving thrill-seekers more of certain effects, such as increased G-forces on an individual simulator, within predetermined safety limits.

 

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Former Kennedy Center Arts Curator Details 'Cronyism, Incompetence, and Bizarre Moves' Amidst Trump Takeover

www.broadwayworld.com: The Kennedy Center has been a hot topic for the past year after the Trump administration took over leadership. Beginning with the removal of board members and Donald Trump assuming the role of chairman in 2025, the institution has faced ongoing restructuring, artist withdrawals, leadership departures, and programming shifts. It was also recently announced that the institution will shut down operations for two years to undergo renovations.

 

15 Chicago Theaters Cut Ties With Jeff Awards

www.broadwayworld.com: At least 15 Chicago theater companies have publicly cut ties with the Joseph Jefferson Awards after the organization named Invictus Theatre Artistic Director Charles Askenaizer "Best Director" at its Non-Equity ceremony on March 23, 2026. Askenaizer is the subject of an ongoing independent investigation into allegations of emotional abuse and harassment. He has denied the allegations.

 

Los Angeles City Film Czar Interview: 'Baywatch' and Cutting Red Tape

www.hollywoodreporter.com: Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, aware of the city’s deepening production crisis — now a flashpoint in her reelection bid — appointed a filming czar to act as a liaison between entertainment productions and city departments. Steve Kang, a seasoned community affairs executive, started last year, running the Board of Public Works.

 

PGA Sustainability Toolkit Launches With Focus on Bottom Line

www.hollywoodreporter.com: The Producers Guild of America has unveiled a new sustainability initiative that is aimed at helping producers make the business case for eco-friendly decisions on film and television sets.

 

Why Two River Theatre Is Shifting to 7:30 PM Curtains

www.broadwayworld.com: Not long ago, I found myself doing that familiar pre-theater math: watching the clock at the end of the workday, checking train times, wondering if there was time to grab a quick dinner, and thinking, “Can I actually make this curtain without it feeling rushed?” It is a small thing, but it can make the difference between a great night out and a stressful one.

 

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SAG-AFTRA and Studios to Resume Negotiations on April 27

www.hollywoodreporter.com: After the writers’ union wrapped a surprise deal with studios and streamers over the weekend, SAG-AFTRA announced that it will return to the bargaining table by the end of the month. The performers’ union and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers resume negotiations on April 27

 

Intimacy coordinators' next chapter

NPR: Almost a decade after the height of the #MeToo movement, intimacy coordinators are a fixture on film sets. As of this year, the job is now covered by SAG-AFTRA, the labor union that represents actors.

 

Inside Chicago's innovative Steppenwolf Theatre Company as it marks 50 years

PBS News: Steppenwolf Theatre Company has long been one of the nation’s most influential ensemble companies. It's known for the actors it has launched and the groundbreaking work it has produced. It’s marking its 50th season at a moment of real uncertainty for theaters.

 

The V&A catalogue row shows China’s censorship now travels through cultural supply chains

theconversation.com: When people think about censorship, they often imagine an obvious ban: a book prohibited, an exhibition closed, or a speaker silenced. But the recent revelation that London’s Victoria and Albert Museum changed exhibition catalogues at the request of its Chinese printer points to something subtler.

 

How to Embrace the Dramaturgy of Creative Caption Design

HowlRound Theatre Commons: Captions play an important role in the accessibility of theatrical productions for all audience members, particularly those who are d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHOH), neurodivergent, and/or living with sensory processing disorders. Secondary to their use as an accessibility tool, captions are an important visual element of a theatrical production and should be approached with the same thought, artistry, and attention as design elements like lighting and projections. This is where the concept of creative captions come in.

 

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Step Up This Season: Behind the Scenes Spring & Summer Mental Health Trainings

Live Design Online: This spring and beyond, the Behind the Scenes Mental Health Initiative is offering a fresh schedule of virtual trainings, giving industry professionals renewed opportunities to build skills that support safer, healthier workplaces. These virtual sessions equip participants to recognize and respond when colleagues are facing mental health or substance use challenges or experiencing bullying and harassment.

 

Pittsburgh theater tries mergers, camps to weather change

www.publicsource.org: Pittsburgh actor Tim Hartman has watched those changes closely during more than four decades performing with companies including Pittsburgh Public Theater, City Theatre Company and Pittsburgh CLO. Since his professional debut at the 1983 Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival he said, the theater community has had to adapt to shifting audiences, rising production costs and a more uncertain economic landscape.

 

Seats Left Empty on Smithsonian Board as Strain With White House Persists

The New York Times: A month after the terms of two Smithsonian trustees ended, their replacements have yet to be named as the traditional process of filling its governing Board of Regents has slowed in the wake of President Trump’s efforts to gain control of the institution. John Fahey and the board’s chairwoman, Risa J. Lavizzo-Mourey, left the 17-member panel on March 2,

 

Chicago Theaters Cut Ties With Jeff Awards After Director Accused Of Abuse Honored

blockclubchicago.org: More than a dozen Chicago theaters are cutting ties with a prestigious group that has recognized local productions with recommendations and awards since the 1960s, after it honored an artistic director accused of emotionally abusing and harassing an actor during rehearsals years ago.

 

The house that streaming built: Inside Netflix House Dallas

www.creativereview.co.uk: In the newly opened Netflix House Dallas, the passive engagement of streaming is replaced by active participation. There’s no algorithm at work here; no autoplay or second-screen scrolling. Instead, this live experience represents an expansion into relatively new territory for the brand: specifically, a free-to-enter, 100,000-square-foot experiment in immersive, IRL storytelling.

 

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Are Chicago’s theater awards broken? The Jeffs face growing backlash

WBEZ Chicago: A week after “boos” rained down in a ceremony honoring some of Chicago’s top storefront theater companies, the Joseph Jefferson Awards — known conversationally as “the Jeffs” and akin to the local Tonys — are facing backlash.

 

Kennedy Center begins layoffs, rocking institution ahead of two-year closure

The Washington Post: The Kennedy Center began layoffs on Thursday, initiating the first wave of anticipated cuts tied to President Donald Trump’s plan to shut down the institution for two years. Multiple departments were affected — including programming, development, advertising, marketing and the office of the president — according to multiple people at the center who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss personnel matters.

 

This Piece May Not Be Fed Into Any LLM or Other AI Software for Any Reason Whatsoever

HowlRound Theatre Commons: I recently heard that a large theatre organization screened plays for a competition by feeding them into a large language model (LLM). Then, I read two more accounts on a playwriting forum about other theatres that did this for marketing or public relations purposes. A couple of months ago, this happened to me firsthand. I learned that a theatre put a draft of my new play into an LLM to generate marketing materials. I expressed my concern to the theatre immediately, and I corresponded with a lawyer at the Dramatists Guild of America who gave me language that I could incorporate into my plays moving forward.

 

South Africa's Market Theatre hits 50

NPR: When it first started in the 1970s, South Africa's Market Theatre staged plays considered to be so subversive that it became a regular target of the apartheid government's zealous censors. Even the fact that its audiences were made up of Black and white South Africans mingling together was unheard of in a city where the law separated areas and people by race.

 

‘The Book of Mormon’ Is Sorry if You Were Offended for 15 Years

The New York Times: No one involved knew what to expect as the musical with the bizarre title prepared for its arrival on Broadway in 2011. There had been no tryout. Two of its authors, Trey Parker and Matt Stone of “South Park” fame, were newcomers to the theater, except that, as teenagers, Parker played Sammy Fong in “Flower Drum Song” and Stone played Danny Zuko in “Grease.”

 

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Pondering the Pittsburgh Public-CLO merger

wesa.fm: In February 1946, Pittsburgh’s Civic Light Opera Association announced its very first season, which began with an outdoor show at old Pitt Stadium. The group — created with help from department store heir Edgar J. Kaufmann, and staging fare like “Brigadoon” and “On The Town” — proved popular enough that the Civic Arena was originally built to house its shows. The CLO moved Downtown to the Benedum Center in 1988, and has been there since.

 

UK Theatremakers Petition for New Video Design Category at the Olivier Awards

www.broadwayworld.com: UK desigers have come together to call for a new category at the Olivier Awards acknowledging Video Design. A petition has been signed by over 100 artsist in the UK theatre community.

 

Nominations announced for the first-ever Broadway Ensemble Awards

www.broadwaynews.com: The Broadway Ensemble Awards are presented by the musical theater education nonprofit Stage Door Miracles Inc. The nonprofit is headed by Stepp Stewart, a choreographer, Emmy-nominated producer and ensemble member from the 1994 original Broadway production of “Jelly’s Last Jam,” the 1996 revival of “Applause” and the 1997 revival of “Dreamgirls.”

 

World’s fair update – March 2026

InPark Magazine: For over 150 years, world’s fairs were where the future made its debut. The Eiffel Tower rose for Paris 1889. The television age began at New York 1939. Touchscreens appeared at Knoxville 1982. These events were once the world’s most ambitious stage for national identity, technological optimism, and architectural spectacle.

 

Why Are We Obsessed With Antigone?

The New York Times: Antigone, an ancient Greek play, is being adapted in several theaters across New York City. Our critic Helen Shaw explains why Sophocles’s anti-heroine is such a relevant figure today.