Gemma Wilson
Gemma Wilson is a senior editor at City Arts magazine. She holds a BFA in Theatre from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts (Atlantic Theatre School/CAP 21) and an MA in Arts Journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School at Syracuse University. She’s a Seattle native who spent over a decade in New York, including several years working for legendary Broadway director/producer Hal Prince. She later worked as a reporter for Broadway.com before returning West to focus on covering the arts in her hometown.
Recent Articles
Artwork
Follow the Signs
“Hands have always interested me as a subject, considering what they’re capable of,” says Seattle artist Zach Rockstad, whose A Day of Driving (Honk) earned top honors at City Arts’ spring Art Walk Awards. The mixed-media piece began as a...
News
Shedding Sunlight on the Classics
Nothing blows the stuffiness out of Shakespeare like a summer breeze.
Lounging on a worn, plaid blanket in Brooklyn’s Carroll Park on a warm night last summer, I picked at cheeses and drank from some technically-verboten-but-totally-ubiquitous...
News
So You Think You Can Dance This
On a blindingly bright Sunday afternoon, several dozen young women gather inside a dim dance studio near Northgate Mall. Bunheads, they aren’t. Dressed in everything from cheetah-print harem pants and retro sneakers to skinny jeans and Converse, the...
Review
The Financial Lives of the Poets: Book-It Theatre Finds The Funny
On a bullet point level, there is probably nothing in The Financial Lives of the Poets that you haven’t heard before. The Book-It Theatre production, adapted from the 2009 novel by Jess Walter, is set in the height of the financial crisis. An...
Review
Other Desert Cities: Fear, Family And Loathing In Palm Springs
It’s been six years since Brooke Wyeth (Marya Sea Kaminski) has visited her parents’ oppressively sunny, oppressively beige and oppressively right-wing Palm Springs home. When she finally makes the long trip west from Sag Harbor, the Christmas...
Feature
Stu: the Musical
The wholesome, unlikely folktale of a small town in Oregon and America’s first transgender mayor.
Andrew Russell was biking on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in 2009, listening to the podcast Radiolab when he heard something that nearly stopped...
Review
Ready Or Not, Here Comes Momma!
Today’s stage mothers exist in our collective conscious as the Kate Gosselin-haired tyrants of Toddlers & Tiaras and Dance Moms, but these backseat career drivers are amateurs compared to Momma Rose.
Momma Rose, who will do anything to get her...
Q&A
‘Black Watch’ Director John Tiffany
John Tiffany doesn’t really do traditional storytelling. The British theatre director began his rise to international prominence when Black Watch, which he created with writer Gregory Burke, burned a path from the 2006 Edinburgh Fringe Festival to...
Review
Balagan’s August: Osage County
And you thought your family reunion was bad.
As the lights go up on August: Osage County, the oppressive, still heat of late summer in Oklahoma hangs in a rambling home free of air conditioning, the fug compounded by black trash bags taped over the...
