Paul Birchall’s Got It Covered

The Wallis Annenberg, which certainly must be pleased about the success of Deaf West Theater’s Spring Awakening, as it played there a few months ago in its intermediate phase from 99seat stage to mid-size, has named its first artistic director and his resume sounds really intriguing. American Theatre Magazine reports that the new AD, Paul Crewes, has been the artistic and creative director of Kneehigh Productions in the UK, which produces compelling and imaginative touring productions, some of which have played the Wallis in previous seasons.

Brian Kite, producing artistic director of La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts, is stepping down to take over the Department Chair at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Still quite a young artist, Kite has already had an illustrious career, with credits from the Actors Co-op to the French Woods Festival in New York (where he served as director of theater programs for more than seven years) to the Geffen, and he has certainly had played a strong leadership role at La Mirada – not to mention is position of board chair at Los Angeles Stage Alliance.

Odets’s play is a bit of a standard amongst theater folks of a vintage lefty sensibility — and there have been many productions of it between these two Odyssey stagings — but given the current economic iniquities, as well as the sentimental reasons for honoring a theater company that has been able to make a go of it for so many decades, this should be a show well worth coming out for.

Dakin Matthews, an Equity actor of indisputable professional renown and whose career spans both Equity productions like The Audience on Broadway and 99-seat shows with The Antaeus Company, is perhaps the first union member to step up and take a pin to the bloated shallowness of the “ask if it’s Equity” campaign. In a letter posted to the Pro99 Facebook page, and already widely circulated through the net, Matthews interprets the “Ask if it’s Equity” campaign as the cynical catch-up PR operation it is.

This period of quiet is, in fact, an AEA tactic: Even the most casual observer instantly recognizes that the Union is hoping to run out the clock for when their new minimum wage policy starts next year, and it is to their advantage to just stay quiet, do nothing, and wait for their new regulations to take place