Category: theatre

The latest jukebox musical to try to hit? The songs of Michael Jackson, about to take to London’s West End. “Thriller Live features more than 80 performers including a gospel choir, children’s ballet and West End singers and dancers to reinterpret the singer’s most memorable songs. Producer Adrian Grant has hailed the show a ‘musical celebration’ and says it will help to revive Jackson’s status as the King of Pop.”

“A Canadian comedian’s take on a debauched weekend away in Amsterdam has won this year’s £8,000 ‘if.commedies’ prize, the new name for the Perrier award, one of the most highly regarded accolades in comedy.”

Fringe festivals offer so many plays, how do you sort out the best and makes sure people get to see them? The New York Frings has an idea: “Ten of the audiences’ and critics’ favorites from the current festival will run in repertory at two downtown theaters through Sept. 24 in what the organizers, Britt Lafield and John Pinckard, say will become an annual showcase called FringeNYC Encores. For the Fringe, this provides another opportunity for its shows to be noticed by producers and earn a possible commercial transfer.”

There’s a new musical out being billed as the latest from John Kander and Fred Ebb. But Ebb died (of a heart attack) in 2004, so how can this be? The two had such a close partnership, it’s impossible to thibnk of one without the other. “If that relationship, which produced the scores to ‘Cabaret’ and ‘Chicago’ and ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman,’ was often misunderstood as romantic, it’s not hard to see why: the two men worked in the theater, neither had a wife, and over the course of their 42-year collaboration their last names had all but fused into one, a songwriting entity that Mr. Kander, now a vigorous 79, calls ‘Kandernebb’.”

As usual, there are all manner of productions at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival. But “the vein that runs through the festival this year is anger: anger at the state of the world in general, and anger at America in particular. Comedians need only display a picture of President Bush to provoke hollow laughter or indignant booing, depending on the context.”

Andrew Lloyd Webber has chosen his next project. It’s a musical adaptation of “Mikhail Bulgakov’s fantastical tale of the Devil, a talking cat, Christ and Pontius Pilate, a tormented writer named Master and a girlfriend named Margarita, who becomes a witch. A Faustian tale that satirizes the oppressive Stalin regime, the novel is considered a major work of 20th century Russian literature.”

“Goodness, a play by Canadian Michael Redhill, has won the Best of Edinburgh award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The prize means the play by the Toronto-based experimental theatre company Volcano will be produced in New York.”

New questions have been raised about the Victoria & Albert’s intentions for the Theatre Museum in London. “Serious doubts were raised by the Theatre Museum’s ruling committee over whether the Victoria and Albert Museum made a genuine attempt to consult the theatre industry over the institution’s future.”

The complaints have been flying in Edinburgh this summer about the inflated costs of performing in and attending Fringe venues. “But all across Edinburgh, just for August, in pubs from Bruntsfield to Leith, something really very exciting is happening. The Free Fringe is an inspirational example of what can be done with a dream, determination and a lot of wholehearted cooperation.”

Eli Broad is donating $186,000 to pay for cleaning, restoration, archiving and a permanent display of a collection of Yiddish theatre artifacts. “The cache includes programs, photographs, plays, costumes, mus of a trove of ic manuscripts, props and other material. The items were moldering in a dilapidated building at 31 East Seventh Street that housed the Hebrew Actors Union, now defunct. Champions of Yiddish theater had been trying to save the collection, and eventually placed it with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan.”