Theatre Development Fund News

Theatre Development Fund's (TDF) fun and informative online theatre dictionary, at www.theatredictionary.org, is celebrating the year anniversary of its launch. During this first year the number of theatre terms more than doubled - from 20 to 43, all featuring unique videos as well as written definitions. To mark the occasion, TDF is premiering a new video defining the term 'Commedia dell'arte' starring RuPaul's Drag Race 5th Season winner JINKX MONSOON and MAJOR SCALES, her co-star in the hit NYC Stage production The Vaudevillians (currently at the Laurie Beechman Theatre through November 11).

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts announces its 13th New Visions/New Voices workshop from May 16 to May 18, 2014. A biennial showcase dedicated to developing new plays and musicals written for young people and their families, New Visions/New Voices 2014 will present eight new works including six selected from theater companies based in Chicago, IL; Minneapolis, MN; Bethesda, MD; Atlanta, GA; Cork, Ireland; and Belfast, Northern Ireland; one musical commissioned by the Kennedy Center; and one play from Vincennes, France as part of the showcase'sTranslation Project. Additionally, New Visions/New Voices 2014 will again host international playwright observers. While each play has a specific intended age range, over the course of the showcase, attendees will experience work geared towards young people from infancy through high school-the broadest range in New Visions/New Voices history.

Theatre Development Fund (TDF) announced that it will reopen its South Street Seaport TKTS Discount Booth at its permanent location at the corner of Front and John Streets on Tuesday, October 1 at 11am. TDF will be closing their temporary Seaport TKTS booth at Fulton and South Streets, (which opened on July 5 as part of the Seaport's SEE/CHANGE Program) on Monday, September 30 in order to move back to the TKTS location which was severely damaged by Hurricane Sandy last October. To accommodate downtown theatre goers on Monday, September 30, TDF will open its booth in Downtown Brooklyn (which is usually closed on Mondays) from 11am to 6pm.

Organisers of the Autism & Theatre - Inspiration Day 2013 on Monday 2 September at the Lyceum Theatre, London, attended by over 170 delegates from theatres and arts organisations across the UK, have reported the event to be a huge success.

Berkeley Repertory Theatre has announced The Pianist of Willesden Lane, a one-woman play starring internationally acclaimed pianist and storyteller Mona Golabek. Based on the book The Children of Willesden Lane by Golabek and Lee Cohen, the play is set in Vienna in 1938 and in London during the Blitzkrieg and tells the true story of Golabek's mother, Lisa Jura, a young Jewish musician whose dreams are interrupted by the Nazi regime. In this poignant show, Golabek performs some of the world's most beautiful music live as she relates the real-life legacy of her mother's quest to survive.

Kicking off its 26th Season, Lookingglass Theatre Company presents the World Premiere of Marguerite Duras' The North China Lover, adapted and directed by Ensemble Member Heidi Stillman. The North China Lover runs tonight, September 25 - October 4, 2013 at Lookingglass Theatre Company, located inside Chicago's historic Water Tower Water Works, 821 N. Michigan Ave. at Pearson. The Press Opening is Saturday, October 5, 2013 at 7:30 p.m.

For the fifth year in a row Horse Trade Theater Group will present The Fire This Time Festival (TFTT), providing a platform for talented early-career playwrights of African and African-American descent to explore new voices, styles, and challenging new directions for 21st century performing arts in order to move beyond common misconceptions of what's possible in 'black theater.'

As Berkeley Repertory Theatre prepares to open a new season of exhilarating plays, the Theatre today announces that it will partner with Theatre Development Fund (TDF), a New York-based nonprofit organization, to offer open-captioned performances during its 2013-14 season. This state-of-the-art technology will allow Berkeley Rep to open its doors to a wider community by making performances accessible to patrons with hearing loss. Open captioning will be available for one performance of every show. For Nina Raine's off-Broadway sensation Tribes - about a young deaf man finding his place in a cacophonous family and a bewildering world - Berkeley Rep will offer three open-captioned performances.

Lookingglass Theatre Company presents the World Premiere stage adaptation of Marguerite Duras' The North China Lover, translated by Leigh Hafrey and adapted and directed by Ensemble Member Heidi Stillman. The North China Lover runs September 25 - November 10, 2013.

The first professional producing theatre in Tennessee to offer this service, the Clarence Brown Theatre has partnered with the Theatre Development Fund's National Open Captioning Initiative to provide open captioning free of charge for the deaf and hard-of-hearing at select CBT performances during the 2013-2014 season.

As the political races throughout New York City reach their peak, candidates, thought leaders, businesses, organizations, and prominent New Yorkers are showing their support for the One Percent for Culture campaign that seeks to increase funding to the city's 1,300-plus non-profit cultural organizations.

Theatre Development Fund (TDF) and Theatre Bay Area (TBA) are pleased to announce that they have received a grant in the amount of $78,750 from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation's Fund for National Projects to support a consortium project, Triple Play. Triple Play will explore the crucial relationship between playwrights and other generative artists, theatres and audiences. This exploration aspires to create a paradigm shift in the way the field thinks about audiences and the way audiences experience new work, and in so doing will help to restore theatre's relevance as a national art form.

Kicking off its 26th Season, Lookingglass Theatre Company presents the World Premiere of Marguerite Duras' The North China Lover, adapted and directed by Ensemble Member Heidi Stillman. The North China Lover runs September 25 - October 4, 2013 at Lookingglass Theatre Company, located inside Chicago's historic Water Tower Water Works, 821 N. Michigan Ave. at Pearson. The Press Opening is Saturday, October 5, 2013 at 7:30 p.m.

From July 29-August 21 in New York City, StudentsLive, the premier Broadway Education Company, has brought 48 South Korean students ages 8-14 to NYC (and the United States) for the very first time as they participate in the StudentsLive 'Passport to Broadway' Program (first started in 2009, www.PassportoBroadway.com). This unique cultural experience aims to expose the students (who at the start speak little or no English) to American history, theater and music as they rehearse and put together a special final performance, a musical titled 'Journey to America' which will take place on Tuesday, August 20 at 8pm at Manhattan Movement & Arts Center (248 West 60th Street). This is the 10th South Korean group to participate in the program and other countries have included China, Brazil, Guatemala and Japan.

TDF's Autism Theater Initiative (ATI) announces a slate of autism-friendly performances on Broadway for the 2013-14 theatre season. The Initiative, which operates under the auspices of Theatre Development Fund's Accessibility Programs (TAP), will present autism-friendly performances of three blockbuster Broadway musicals. They are: Disney's THE LION KING on Sunday, September 29, 2013, at 1pm at the Minskoff Theatre; SPIDER-MAN Turn Off The Darkon Saturday, November 16, 2013, at 2pm at the Foxwoods Theatre; and WICKED on Sunday, March 2, 2014, at 1pm at the Gershwin Theatre.

Just last week, TKTS in Times Square, the same-day discount theatre outlet for Broadway and Off Broadway shows celebrated 40 years in Times Square. Beginning at 11am, there was a special celebration in honor of TKTS' 40th Anniversary behind the TKTS Booth on Broadway and 47th Street. Tony Award-winner Harvey Fierstein and Broadway star Julie Halston made special appearances to help with the festivities. Check out highlights from the festivities below!