Before we meet up at New World Stages on Tuesday, February 27 for TEDxBroadway (get your tickets here!), we wanted to take you beyond the bio to meet this year’s speakers. Meet Ron Simons: He's a four-time Sundance Film Festival selected producer and actor of stage, film and television. He’s the founder and CEO of SimonSays Entertainment. We asked Ron … Q: Do you sing in the shower? What’s your go-to song? A: “You mean there are people who don’t sing in the shower? On...

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This afternoon at TEDxBroadway 2014, Freestyle Love Supreme treated everyone to a taste of their popular hip-hop improv stage show, where five performers invite audience suggestions and then drum up instantaneous riffs and fully realized musical numbers. The New York Times called the group, “Masters in the art of freestyle rhyme.” Anthony Veneziale conceived of this extremely talented collective of improvisers, composers, lyricists, actors, musicians, a beatboxer, tech nerd and singer-songwriter -- and Lin-Manuel Miranda and Thomas Kail, the composer-lyricist and...

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Last Valentine's Day, Eve Ensler, Tony Award-winning playwright of The Vagina Monologues, asked people everywhere to put on their dancing shoes and boogie to show solidarity and draw attention to the injustices that affect women and girls around the world. This year -- today -- "thousands of events will take place in hundreds of countries and on six continents," according to this Huffington Post article. It's all part of Ensler's One Billion Rising Live (which will livestream these events),...

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Songwriter Robert Lopez has a gift for amusing both kids and adults. Since the day he wrote his first song at age 7, he’s picked up three Tony Awards (Avenue Q, The Book of Mormon), two Daytime Emmys (Nickelodeon’s Wonder Pets) and a Grammy. What may have started as an impressive talent for creating songs for puppets and cartoons launched Lopez into the spotlight as one of the collaborators of the mega-successful Broadway phenomenon, The Book of Mormon. Lopez found...

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Diane Paulus likes to take theatrical risks. Like with The Donkey Show, a disco adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream she co-produced off-Broadway, which ran from 1999-2005, or her very first production, a rock 'n' roll version of The Tempest. And she’s done it again, this time scoring a Tony Award for Best Director for the current Broadway revival of Pippin, which features a woman in the part of Leading Player (a role originated by Ben Vereen) and the...

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