Category: theatre

“Broadway has had a record-breaking year for attendance and box office earnings, thanks to the success of plays such as Julia Roberts’ Three Days of Rain. Theatregoers on Broadway topped the 12 million mark for the first time, with a strong attendance by tourists. Ticket sales increased 12 per cent to $861.6m during the 2005-2006 season, according to the League of American Theatres and Producers.” Strangely, though, there was no increase in the percentage of Broadway shows that turn a profit.

Just a few weeks after delaying its opening performance of the 2006-07 season, Chicago Jewish Theatre has canceled the entire season, and may be closing its doors permanently in the near future. The company is not offering refunds on season subscriptions (but says it will honor them if it can raise the funds for a 2007-08 season,) a decision which has the theatre’s few supporters up in arms.

“This year the Tony Awards Administration Committee adopted a new rule about campaigning for the awards that forbids producers of nominated shows to send any campaign or promotional materials to voters, other than a souvenir book, a script or an audio cast recording.”

Playwright Peter Shaffer, best known for dramatizing the life of Mozart in Amadeus, is taking another crack at the classical music world, with another famously tragic composer as his subject. The as yet untitled play, which Shaffer has spent a decade writing, focuses on the life and (mostly) death of Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and the New York producer that first brought Amadeus to the stage is already licking its chops at the prospect of a sequel.

Adriano Shaplin is an unconventional choice as writer-in-residence for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “These essentially conservative institutions, the National and the RSC, are now under new leadership and are looking around for the people who are making real ensemble theatre. It’s great that they’re turning to companies like the Riot Group and Shunt. The RSC has used the phrase ‘blood transfusion’. It’s so exciting.”

More than 2000 people submitted plays to be considered for a UK reality TV show that would reward the winning entry with a West End production. “The contestants – including call-centre workers, chefs and supermarket shelf-stackers – were whittled down to 30, where the programme takes up the story. At the next stage, the remaining 10 writers were hot-housed by a team of theatre experts and had to produce their full-length play. Then it was down to the final three, one of whom would have his play staged in the West End.”

Monday night a group of 60 anti-poverty protesters gathered outside the opening of the Stratford Festival. “The protesting groups referred to the opening night crowd in their advance publicity as ‘a who’s who of the rich and vile’ and condemned the festival as ‘a playpen for the rich.’ Despite vows by the groups to shut down the production, the show went on last night.”

Critics have been clucking about celebrity casting. But so what? “If it takes a boldface name to bring out the crowds, so be it. Theatergoers aren’t chumps. They know Denzel Washington, who played Brutus last spring in the Broadway revival of “Julius Caesar,” is one of the best actors around, while Julia Roberts, who made her Broadway debut in Richard Greenberg’s “Three Days of Rain” this season, is a bona fide icon who has more depth than her film roles have typically shown. The Tony nominating committee may have snubbed them both, but these stars’ legions of fans couldn’t care less about such geeky honors.”

“While Broadway is celebrating the most bullish season in history — both in attendance and box-office grosses — the gulf between the artistic and the commercial seems wider than ever, the former solely as the province of the not-for-profit theaters, the latter as so much fodder for Broadway. Yet as bleak as some critics may paint the musical’s future — and they’ve been doing so for decades — there appears to be little hand-wringing these days among Broadway’s cognoscenti…”

Tim Crouch has an interesting approach to writing a play. “Instead of simply dictating a script, Crouch offers lines and directions to an actor over headphones and also performs himself in a moving story of a man who has lost control after killing a child in a road accident and then meets the father of his victim. Taking a different actor for each show, he ‘rehearses’ by chatting with them for an hour. He doesn’t tell them the story, but prepares them with other practicalities. This lack of knowledge enables the headphoned performer to give a particularly open, pure response.”