Category: theatre

“The new interventionism seems to have begun around 1979 as part of a proliferation of new ideas – devised theatre, documentary, attempts at new forms, physical theatre – that had their roots in the 60s. The emphasis on top-down thinking, rather than anything created writer-up, meant that a new form of censorship began to impose itself. This has led to young writers delivering drafts instead of plays, knowing the humiliation that lies in store.”

Twyla Tharp’s latest project, a jukebox musical featuring the songs of Bob Dylan, is coming to Broadway. “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” a musical conceived, directed and choreographed by the Tony Award-winning Tharp, opens this fall.

“Word of mouth has always been the ideal. But the Internet has provided a new and, some say, vastly improved set of tools to generate it: not just e-mail blasts but also Web sites, banner ads, search-engine pop-ups and blog coverage. In the last few years these tools have reshaped the way the theater reaches its audience.”

Often lost in our continued marveling at the words of William Shakespeare is the fact that the Bard’s plays are often shockingly violent. A handful of new British productions embrace the bloody brutality, and Ben Brantley says that it’s impossible to miss the wider significance of the interpretation. “Besides demonstrating that there’s more than one way to skin a corpse, these contrasting takes on Titus anatomize the impact of a world where slaughter and torture are everyday occurrences, and especially on those whose job is to kill… The current investigations into the alleged rape and murder of civilians by American soldiers in Iraq have made such presentations tremble with inescapable timeliness.”

Washington DC’s Studio Theatre is getting into the real estate business. The company is buying housing to put up artists who work with it. “At one time, the out-of-town artists could stay in the little hotels and we could rent small apartments. But now the hotels are $200 a night. This problem led us to impose on people. Actors were staying with people in the neighborhood and with board members. There was no end of the difficulty.”

The Pittsburgh theatre community has lately been focusing on how to increase and promote racial diversity within the local scene. Ideas are wide-ranging, but most in the city agree that just producing more “black theatre” isn’t enough. Indeed, the larger issue may be not just how to involve more African-Americans in theatre, but how to encourage the creation of shows with truly integrated casts.

“While we will never see a return to the time when people dined at the halfway mark of a four-act play, the more traditional midway break is time for any technical busywork (such as scene changes) and to heighten a sense of suspense, expectation or time having passed. Time to make sense of the staged world before returning to a possible changed set of circumstances.”

Berkeley Repertory Theatre is embarking on an ambitious project, says artistic director Tony Taccone. “The lion’s share, he says, ‘is an artistic endowment’ to fund a program for creating work, modeled, on a smaller scale, on the extensive program at England’s National Theatre. The project is designed to commission 30 to 70 plays in the next 10 years, not all of which would end up being produced by the Rep. Each would receive at least a staged reading or workshop. Some would become part of future Rep seasons, if not on one of its current stages, then in a new, 150-seat house to be developed under the endowment.”

“Rising at the edge of the Mississippi, its confident forms are rooted in a vision of a muscular industrial America, and its structural bravura will certainly please the techno-fetishists. As a thoughtful response to the American city’s evolving role as a haven for cultural tourism, it also coaxes new meaning out of a haggard landscape.”

Here’s a novel way of picking the star for your new production opening in London’s West End. “More than 3,000 women have aspired to the same dream: to star, at the London Palladium, in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s £3m production of The Sound of Music. The nation is swarming with wannabe Marias. But BBC1’s eight-part reality talent show How do You Solve a Problem like Maria (which starts 29 July), must eventually settle on one woman – a new, unknown Maria. After auditions in Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast, Manchester and London, 56 contestants have been selected to train at ‘Maria School’ (imagine the yodelling classes).”