NYCPlaywrights March 29, 2025

[NYCPlaywrights]

Greetings NYCPlaywrights


*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***

Neighborhood Theatre Production Presents: VOICES
Join Prospect Park Alliance, Professor Eugene Pursoo and the Neighborhood Theatre Production for Voices, a series of monologues that tell the story of slavery drawn from oral histories collected in the 1930s. Bring loved ones and a Memorial Day picnic for this important performance at Lefferts Historic House in Prospect Park.

Saturday, May 24 · 6 - 9pm EDT
Lefferts Historic House
452 Flatbush Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11225

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/neighborhood-theatre-production-presents-voices-tickets-1261657083299?aff=ebdssbdestsearch


*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

CLIMATE ACTION NEW PLAY COLLECTION
New plays centering around climate change that are 2-15 minutes long and can be performed with a cast of 1-6 actors.
As the climate emergency and its uncomfortable effects escalate, it is imperative to become comfortable talking about the changing climate and to seek ways to advocate for action.
We’re looking for play submissions to inspire, educate, and activate.
12 submissions will be selected and chosen playwrights will be compensated with a $300 honorarium.

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The Eliza Moore Fellowship for Artistic Excellence is awarded annually to one outstanding, early-career artist who is developing new works that address plants, gardens, or landscapes in the broad sense. This award is open to visual artists, literary artists, dancers, and musicians. The award includes a $10,000 individual grant and requires a 2 - 5 week stay at Oak Spring. While at OSGF, the Fellow will be able to meet with staff, explore our 700-acre landscape and our efforts in sustainable land management, and visit our rare book library that holds over 19,000 objects, including many examples of botanical art.

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It’s the second season of Readers’ Theater: From the Script to the Stand, at Surfside Playhouse. This season shows are the second Saturday during the run of a mainstage show and will take place @ 8pm in the main auditorium.
Performance date: May 3rd, 2025.
• Scripts should be no longer than 10-20 minutes in length.
• Scripts can be straight plays of any genre inclusive of musicals (which are highly encouraged).

*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***


*** THE PRODUCERS ***

Scott Rudin, the powerful producer who was exiled from Broadway and Hollywood four years ago after allegations of bullying led to widespread denunciations and even protesters in the streets, has been quietly preparing to return to show business.

After what he called “a decent amount of therapy,” apologies to many people and a period of reading and reflection holed up on Long Island, Rudin said that he had decided he wanted to make theater again. He is at peace, he said, with the reality that not everyone is likely to welcome him back.

He called his previous behavior, particularly toward subordinates, “bone-headed” and “narcissistic.” He acknowledged that he had long yelled at his assistants (“Yes, of course”) and that he had on occasion thrown things at people (“Very, very rarely”).

“I was just too rough on people,” he said.

More...
https://archive.ph/QXeNi

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In a vivid illustration of a rapidly changing real estate landscape for theaters in New York, the commercial production company that has brought Kit Connor, Rachel Zegler and George Clooney to Broadway is taking over a centrally located Off Broadway theater vacated by the nonprofit that long produced work there.

Seaview Productions, an increasingly prolific producer of shows on Broadway, has begun leasing the former bank building on the edge of New York’s theater district that for the last 25 years has been a home to one of the city’s leading nonprofits, Second Stage Theater.

The building was previously known as the Tony Kiser Theater, after a Second Stage trustee, and will be renamed Studio Seaview.

Second Stage, citing high costs, moved out at the end of last year. Seaview plans to begin presenting Off Broadway shows there this spring.

The change comes as nonprofits, still struggling to rebound from the coronavirus pandemic, are giving up spaces or taking on tenants as they seek to cut costs. At the same time, commercial producers, daunted by the high costs of working on Broadway, are hungrily seeking less expensive places to mount for-profit shows.

More...
https://archive.ph/u5azh

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The Connelly Theater in New York’s East Village has for years been a shabby but warm haven for adventurous performing arts: the play “Job,” which is now wrapping up a Broadway run; Kate Berlant’s “Kate,” a one-woman show that went on to London and California after selling out downtown; and the satire “Circle Jerk,” a Pulitzer finalist in 2021.

But over the past few weeks, the building’s landlord — the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York — began more intensely scrutinizing the content of shows whose producers were seeking to rent the space. At least three planned productions had to relocate.

Josh Luxenberg, who has been the theater’s general manager for the past decade, submitted his resignation late Friday. And early Tuesday, the Catholic school that is the intermediary between the theater and the archdiocese said it was “suspending all operations of its theater.”

Producers who have rented from the Connelly say they were aware that it was owned by the archdiocese, and that there was always a clause in their contract allowing the Roman Catholic Church to bar anything it deemed obscene, pornographic or detrimental to the church’s reputation. But only recently, they said, did the archdiocese seek to rigorously scrutinize scripts before approving rentals.

More...
https://archive.ph/yQujZ

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Sonia Friedman may just be the most prolific and powerful theater producer working today.

Over the past 30 years, she has become a peerless figure in the West End, where last year she had a record-setting seven shows running simultaneously, and on Broadway, where she has produced five of the past six Tony Award winners for best play. She has been entrusted both with prestige work by celebrated writers like Tom Stoppard and Stephen Sondheim and with stage adaptations of hugely valuable intellectual property like “Harry Potter,” “Stranger Things” and “Paddington.”

But she’s endlessly restless. Taking for granted neither the sustainability of the business nor the security of her own place in it, she has become ever more worried about the industry’s future.

More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/theater/sonia-friedman-broadway-stranger-things.html

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HOW TO BECOME A BROADWAY PRODUCER
5 Tips from Tony Award Nominee Morgan Steward, Co-Producer of Suffs

We caught up with Steward at legendary Broadway hotspot Sardi’s. She shed some light on her path and shared some tips for students who want to find their own way to a career on Broadway. But first, we asked …

What does a Broadway producer do?
Steward called that “the million-dollar question.” She said there’s no such thing as a typical day when you work in theater, especially as a producer. She likened a Broadway show to a startup and the producer to the CEO. “It’s the producer’s job to hire for every aspect, and once you put the team together that’s going to shepherd your show into the future, you are working with each team to make sure that the overall vision is cohesive in creating a good show.”

Now, her tips …

1. See as Much Theater as You Can
It doesn’t all have to be on Broadway. After all, Suffs got its start as an off-Broadway production, as did Hamilton. The goal, Steward said, is not just to take it all in but to be able to think and “speak smartly, eloquently, and critically about the art that you see.”

More...
https://www.fordham.edu/fordham-stories/arts-and-creativity/how-to-become-a-broadway-producer/

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Carlee Briglia, along with her producing partner, Mike Lavoie, are responsible for bringing some of the funniest commercial off-Broadway productions to life.  She’s not the kind of producer who just brings in the funding and hopes for the best, she is involved with every aspect of the productions from choosing the venue, the promotional plans, deciding what projects to take on, and assembling the funding too.

After presenting shows by Mike Birbiglia, Alex Edelman, Rachel Bloom, Kate Berlant, Colin Quinn, and John Mulaney and Nick Kroll, Briglia’s latest show, Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary!, was a runaway off-Broadway hit just transferred to Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre. Here’s how she got started in show biz, and where she wants to go from here.

More...
https://www.theatermania.com/news/interview-producer-carlee-briglia-brings-comedy-to-broadway_1744551/

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While investors are already loath to expect to break even from the shows they put money toward—only about one in five shows make good on their investments—a combination of fewer theater patrons and higher costs of production have created a tricky storm for stakeholders to weather.

But for Thomas Laub and Alyah Chanelle Scott, the executive producers of the Tony-award winning company Runyonland Productions, the story is different. Seven of their shows have recouped their investments, with another two on track to do the same.

Laub founded Runyonland in 2018 shortly after he and Scott graduated from the University of Michigan. Scott, who has starred in television shows including The Sex Lives of College Girls and Reboot, jumped onboard a year and a half ago. The duo has helped produce an array of projects ranging from the Tony-award winner Parade to Dylan Mulvaney’s Day 365 Live!, a live streamed show that celebrated the transgender content creator’s one-year anniversary of chronicling her gender transition online.

Fueled by their love of theater and an understanding of what it takes from a business standpoint to ensure the art form’s success, both pay constant and close attention to the ins and outs of financing Broadway shows. Laub says Runyonland recently formed a joint venture with Blue Fox Financing, the largest financier of film credits in the U.S., to fund the New York Broadway Tax Credit, an initiative that reimburses productions with up to $3 million.

More...
https://www.fastcompany.com/91146373/how-this-tony-award-winning-production-company-is-recouping-its-investments-in-an-industry-where-its-rare-to-break-even