Category: theatre

The actress’s Broadway debut sold out in its first week of previews, earning almost $1 million at the box office. “The eight performances, which began March 28, played to 101 percent of capacity (which includes standing room) at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, the league said. The Richard Greenberg play — Roberts’ Broadway debut — opens April 19.”

Julia Roberts is the latest in a long line of movie stars to try a spin on Broadway. “Broadway is dependent on movie, TV and pop-music stars to generate interest in theater, and the announcement that the toothy, $20-million-a-picture leading lady would headline the generational family drama by Richard Greenberg (“Take Me Out”) was no exception.”

“The cliché runs that England was a theatrical desert in the early 1950s. It was certainly true that London was far from the theatre capital of the world. Serious drama was served up with lashings of heavy sauce from Paris, where the long-winded works of Anouilh debuted, and where a little-known Irish modernist was premiering En attendant Godot. Entertainment breezed in from New York, where the American musical was responding to the brash energies of the booming 1950s with all the relish of Oh! What a Beautiful Morning. There were stirrings in London drama, however.”

The Royal Shakespeare Company is preparing to mount every play the Bard ever wrote, all within a single calendar year. “A new 1,000-seat Stratford venue, the thrust-staged Courtyard, opens in July and will be used alongside the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and the Swan. Not that matters are confined to conventional spaces; Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare is buried, will host the politics and pageantry of Henry VIII.”

Sometimes, it must seem to South Koreans that their primary goal in life is to avoid offending, annoying, or otherwise poking at the repressive (and unbelievably sensitive) North Korean government. After all, when a neighboring country makes a habit of threatening to turn your capital city into a “sea of fire,” you tend to make special efforts to placate them. So one can only imagine the consternation in Seoul when officials heard of plans to mount “a new musical about love, torture, and survival in a North Korean prison camp.”

“A rare book of Shakespeare’s plays, considered to be one of the most important in British literature, is to be auctioned at Sotheby’s in London. The complete first folio of the playwright’s work had a print run of approximately 750 in 1623. However, only a third of these survive and most of them are incomplete. The book is being sold by Dr Williams’s Theological Library in London, which hopes the proceeds – expected to be more than £3m – will secure its future.”

A British theatre has been fined after its stage collapsed while people were on it. “Thirty people were hurt during Sing-Along-A-Sound-of-Music at Birmingham’s Alexandra Theatre. Audience members, many dressed as nuns, had climbed onto the stage to join in a song before they fell 20ft into the orchestra pit in September 2003.”

A Minnesota dinner theatre lands the rights to produce the world premiere of “Easter Parade,” a stage version of the classic 1948 movie with music by Irving Berlin. “Though new musicals frequently begin life outside New York, it’s unusual for a theater — particularly a dinner theater in the suburbs — to earn the right to develop a high-profile title on its own. The Chanhassen production, scheduled to open in February, will be the template for amateur and professional productions. It could have a life on the road and has an outside shot at advancing to Broadway.”

London is poised to be awash in musicals on an order no one can remember.

Shakespeare wasn’t just a great playwright, he was a skilled politician who worked hard to make his acting company the most successful in London.