Author Archives: Courtney Long

Upon graduation, current first-years at the Yale School of Drama will have $10,000 less debt than last year’s graduates, thanks to an expansion of the school’s financial aid program. While total aid packages remained largely the same, the Drama School transformed many of its loans into scholarships for the current academic year. Students said they »

While most drama groups on campus are lucky to get four or five shows off each year, the Yale Cabaret has regularly produced a staggering number of productions — for 40 years running. The Yale Cabaret is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, focusing on themes of “irreverence, relevance and rebellion” for this season’s shows. »

After the lights dimmed, Ron Van Lieu, an acting professor at the Yale School of Drama, took the stage last Sunday evening at the Tisch School of Arts at New York University. He introduced 16 actors to the packed audience, and the energized students ran on stage as a group. In the next hour, each »

Applications to the Yale School of Music dropped this year, following a spike in the number of applicants the previous year that was attributed to the school’s elimination of tuition. For the 2007-’08 academic year, the music school admitted 114 students from its pool of 1,180 applicants, giving the school a 9.6 percent acceptance rate, »

In the wake of Monday’s massacre at Virginia Tech in which a student killed 32 people, Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg has limited the use of stage weapons in theatrical productions. Students involved in this weekend’s production of “Red Noses” said they first learned of the new rules on Thursday morning, the same day »

Despite recent improvements to financial aid at the School of Drama, many students say that worries about cost remain prevalent. In recent years, Yale School of Drama Dean James Bundy has made financial aid one of his main priorities. Five years ago, the average Drama student had to borrow $38,000 for a three-year education, but »

Following an addition to the Sudler funding application guidelines this semester clarifying that productions may only apply to one college for support, some theater students have experienced increased difficulties with getting the funds. Last year, several students were found to have misled the Council of Masters when applying for Sudler funds by applying for the »

Theater studies professor Joseph Roach will take the stage in an April production of “Our Town,” a casting decision that has drawn fire from some in the undergraduate theater community. Fellow professor Toni Dorfman, who is directing the show for the Dramat, cast Roach in a major role for the Yale Dramatic Association’s spring mainstage, »

Imagine working in a building with a NASCAR car in its main atrium and aquariums filled with clownfish throughout its offices. For Rob Cook, vice president of advanced technology at Pixar Animation Studios, this is reality, not fantasy. Cook spoke to a standing-room-only crowd about his experiences working with Pixar and in computer animation in »

Yale School of Drama Dean James Bundy DRA ’95 signed on for another five-year term as Drama School dean and artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater on Wednesday. Bundy said the combination of teaching and creative opportunities available at the Yale School of Drama and the Yale Repertory Theater originally drew him to the »

Yale’s dance community may be faced with the choice of whether to dance under dangerous conditions or not dance at all, after the recent closure of several campus studio and performance spaces due to safety concerns. In January, the University decided to close the Off-Broadway Performance Space and dance studios in Davenport and Berkeley Colleges »

Broadway success may have inched closer for one Yale playwrighting student when he won the first-ever Paula Vogel Playwrighting Award last month. Tarell McCraney DRA ’07 received the award from the Vineyard Theater, which grants the winner a staged reading of his play in addition to a meeting with Vogel and a cash prize, the »