Category: theatre

A prominent French theatre company has cancelled a production of a play by Peter Handke after learning that the playwright, who has long been known for his support of the Serbian government, attended the funeral of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, known as The Butcher of the Balkans. The company is being accused of censorship by some, but its chief executive equates Handke’s support of Milosevic, who led a brutal campaign against Bosnia in the 1990s, to support for Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.

“What is billed as the world’s first live commercial will be performed on stage in Dublin next week, promoting London’s West End to international theatre-going audiences. Six actors, including Pauline McLynn, who appeared as the housekeeper, Mrs Doyle, in the comedy TV series Father Ted, will enact the advert. Their three minute slot will be at the Gaiety Theatre on May 16 before the evening production of Saturday Night Fever. The advert will later be staged during plays in Hamburg, New York and Pittsburgh.”

The Edinburgh Festival is apparently hoping that a dose of controversy will boost ticket sales, announcing that it will stage an adaptation of Michel Houellebecq’s controversial and explicit novel, Platform, directed by Calixto Bieito, who was last seen inserting an oral sex scene into Hamlet. Kate Bevan isn’t impressed: “Doubtless Bieito’s Platform will sell many tickets, and critics are surely already practising their choicest phrases of outrage… Yet somewhere along the line the consumer (and the critic and the commentator) will have been taken for a fool… To assume that we need grotesquerie to make us take notice of what they say is to assume that we can’t hear and understand for ourselves.”

For 25 years, Cheek by Jowl has been one of Europe’s most innovative and challenging theatre troupes, and has become a mainstay at festivals across the continent. Now, as the company prepares to settle down for a three-year residency at London’s Barbican Centre, its founders are reflecting on what has kept the group’s work fresh over the years. “Togetherness is this company’s calling card, an intense yet informal rapport between actor and actor, actor and audience, and ultimately the symbiotic relationship between Declan Donnellan the director and Nick Ormerod the designer, British theatre’s savviest couple.”

It’s hard to know where to place a story like this. Is it Theatre? Visual Art? Just an Idea? Well, whatever the category, it involves London’s Covent Garden, a French theatre company, Jules Verne, several 40-foot puppets, and a giant wooden elephant. Oh, and according to one London critic, the extravaganza “is to street art what a glacier is to ice cubes.”

“So far this season, Broadway attendance is up 4 percent from the same period last year. Total box-office receipts for the season are up 12 percent. You will notice a discrepancy here… There are several reasons of course, like a few hit musicals and a movie star or two on exhibition. But a large part of the answer can be attributed to one factor: premium tickets.”

This weekend marks the final performances at Minneapolis’s famous Guthrie Theater, as the company prepares to move to a gigantic new complex on the city’s riverfront. The old theater, which was built in 1962 and quickly became the centerpiece of the Twin Cities’ cultural scene, will be demolished as soon as this summer, making Sunday’s final performance as much a wake as a celebration.

The Broadway vampire music “Lestat” is on life support. “A week after opening to some of the worst reviews for any show this season, Elton John’s $10 million vampire fiasco finds itself on the critical list. Ticket sales are averaging about $50,000 a day, which simply is not enough to keep the show going for long. (Rule of thumb on Broadway: To stay in the black, a $10 million show has to take in about $90,000 a day.)”

The mega-expensive musical Lord of the Rings has not exactly been a hit with critics. But Andrew Lloyd Webber — “the undisputed king of mega-musicals as well as one of the wealthiest men in the world — made a 24-hour flying visit to Toronto last weekend just to catch the show. The upshot: Insiders say LOTR’s next gig is likely to be at London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane, owned by Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group.”

“After years of surviving, and surviving handsomely, as a strictly commercial operation, the theatre is now one of the most generously subsidised regional theatres in the country, with an Arts Council grant of some £1.5 million this year. What’s more, over the past three few years, the theatre, built by the public subscription of local citizens in the early 1960s, and so often derided by some of my colleagues as being irredeemably safe and middle-class, has been winning golden critical opinions.” But the box office went wrong, the theatre’s leadership resigned, and now there’s someone new to try to fix things…