Category: theatre

The play that won an English reality show about creating a play is closing early. “The show, has been playing to half-empty houses since its high-profile premiere on June 15, and yesterday the producers revealed that the curtain will come down for the last time on July 29 – a full month earlier than planned.”

In British theatre now, there are warnings for everything. “As yet, theatre warnings haven’t become sufficiently detailed to confuse the actual with the represented. Apart from quantifiable matters such as nudity, theatres tend to use euphemistic phrases like ‘adult content’ or ‘scenes of an explicit nature’. But behind all warnings – whether about content or sensation – lie presumptions that go beyond health and safety into more contestable areas of consumer protection.”

“The oddity of the general intransigence of the posthumous representatives of Brecht and Beckett has always been that both dramatists were radicals who overturned theatrical convention. Yet subsequently their executors have sought to seal these free-thinking pieces in an artistic formaldehyde at least as strong as the conservatism that the authors originally stripped away.”

“Most regional theaters would have hesitated to produce a single one of the works in the current Steppenwolf season (which can now be viewed as a whole). Steppenwolf willingly took seven doses of box office poison in the name of its art. Back to back. Especially because it took an inevitable and fiscally sobering toll on subscription levels, it’s an accomplishment worthy of note and admiration. But the anniversary season also reveals something about how much this theater has changed under artistic director Martha Lavey.”

On London Stages this summer the interior side of acting is on show. “In a season rich with A-list actors giving bright external life to the shadows of the human mind, it is often — more than anything that is actually done or even said — the thought that counts.”

The Milwaukee Public Theatre is “a theater company without a theater for performances. The company sends its groups all over town bringing puppetry, drumming, improvisation, music, dance, theater, storytelling and more to as diverse an audience as they can reach, focusing on pieces with social relevance. Part of the focus on social relevance includes healing arts programming.”

The League of Chicago Theatres has undergone twin shifts in recent weeks, shutting down production of its four-year-old program book, Chicagoplays. Then, at the end of June, the League’s CEO quit after less than a year on the job, saying that with the demise of the program book, “an executive with technical and marketing expertise would better serve the organization as it refocuses on its longtime primary missions of selling tickets and marketing.”

John Heilpern has seen a new musical he believes will change Broadway. “If we’re very lucky, once in a generation an unexpected new musical comes along and changes everything. That is the thrilling achievement of ‘Spring Awakening’, which has been brilliantly directed by Michael Mayer, at the Atlantic Theater Company.”

“The $1.25m (£679,000) show places the story of his life and times in 17th-century Holland against a backdrop of digital images of his masterpieces, projected on to 30ft (9 metre) screens. The resolution is so high that from the back of a 900-seat theatre the audience can see the veins in the hands of an old woman.”