Mondays are Dark

AS the rain has been pounding South Florida the last few days, it's a perfect opportunity to pursue indoor activities - like, well, theatre.  And don't forget to keep those ticket stubs to qualify for A Taste of Theatre, Theatre League's promotion tied into SummerFest.

Here's your Monday reading list.

City Theatre Still Going
Summer Shorts are packed away for the year, and Standing on Ceremony has come and gone, but you can still catch The Brand New Kid, City Theatre's co-production with Orlando Rep.  The Examiner tells us about the show's upcoming date at Fort Lauderdale Children's Theatre's space in the Galleria Mall.

Speaking of FLCT
Fort Lauderdale Children's Theatre is getting ready to mount its production of Hairspray at The Broward Center for the Performing Arts, and The Examiner has a slideshow.

Stuff in the City
New York City, that is.  Florida Theater On Stage reports that Michael McKeever's STUFF, winner of the 2011 Carbonel for Best New Work, will be getting a staged reading in The Big Apple. Playbill also has the story.

Why We Burn Out
Butts In Seats discusses the problems with overloading a job description.

Core job responsibilities are ones to which you should expect to devote a large portion of your day/week. If you have 25 core duties and even assuming you work at 10 hour day, you will only be able to devote 24 minutes each day to a duty. If indeed they are all core responsibilities.

If you give one person too many jobs, their ability to maintain quality drops because they must divide their attention to oversee the additional load.

Too Cool For School
The Huffington Post has the transcript to Robert Brustein's remarks to the Theatre Communications Group panel on Theater And The University.  Brustein is the founder of Yale Repertory Company, which is partnered with Yale University.

...America's continuing adolescence in regard to support for the arts helps explain why the so-called not-for-profit theater is now sometimes serving not as an alternative to the Broadway system, but rather as a tryout house for commercial interests. I'm certainly not suggesting that these two systems shouldn't have relations with each other, or even intermarry at times. Rather, I am criticizing a process in which commercial interest is aroused before the opening of a not-for-profit production and thereby has a hand in raising the baby...

Try to imagine how an institution of higher learning would react to a chemistry department whose professors develop new pharmaceuticals in return for enhancement money from Pfizer.

South Florida Center Stage - in Movies
LA Weekly explains why the film adaptation of the musical Rock of Ages was shot in South Florida, even though it's set in Los Angeles.

For Shankman, however, L.A. was never an option. "The second I said yes to this, I knew there was no version that we were going to be able to shoot in Los Angeles, because [the Sunset Strip] is one of the busiest intersections in the world," he says in an interview with Miami New Times. "I couldn't close it down for six weeks, which is what I really needed. So I looked all over the world, and [Miami] ended up being really the only game in town."

But it was Fort Lauderdale that sealed the deal.

Shankman says he had very specific needs for that space -- a rock club that looked intimate but had enough space and balconies for cameras and cranes. "I walked in [to Revolution] and it was exactly... what I saw in my head," Shankman recalls. "I didn't want [anything] to move in case the illusion was destroyed."

Shankman likes the idea of building soundstages in Homestead, but Miami Today reports that the state needs to do more to help attract the film industry to the Sunshine State.

Meanwhile...
... in Miami, the Coconut Grove Playhouse is still closed.  And The Examiner reports that Miami City Commissioner Marc Sarnoff has said that it should be replaced with retail space.  I guess The Grove doesn't have enough empty storefronts.  And there's nothing new to be reported on the other two playhouse sitting empty across South Florida.