Category: theatre

The Royal Opera House in London is putting together a rescue plan for the Theatre Museum. “The museum, which is part of the capital’s Victoria and Albert Museum, is under threat because it had a £2.5m lottery grant bid turned down.”

No question audience members are getting ruder and ruder in the theatre. On Broadway recently there has been a rash of vigilante actions against the transgressions of annoying audience members. One psychologist describes the situation as “an epidemic breakdown of boundaries. People have completely lost sight of what personal boundaries are.”

For 87 years, Veronica’s Veil Players have annually staged “America’s Passion Play.” “That long run was nearly broken this weekend, with the gas supply to the group’s ancient furnace cut off because of nearly $40,000 in unpaid bills. Friday’s performance went on using space heaters, but about two dozen audience members left early. The Players’ board decided to cancel the remaining four performances, through next weekend, and to re-mount June 2-11, when any remaining cold in the building will function, Szemanski joked, “like free air conditioning.”

“During the 2004/5 season, 1,302,590 international visitors attended a Broadway show. That total is on a par with figures for 1999-2000 of 1,320,617. It marks a significant improvement on figures from 2000/1 to 2003/4, which were 1,106,284, 525,834, 651,093 and 1,241,786, respectively. Additionally, internet purchases of theatre tickets have drastically increased over the last five years, with 29% of those surveyed mentioned that as the preferred method of purchase, up from 7% in 1999-2000.”

So David Hare is bringing his new work to America first, rather than to London and the National. “The bitter irony is that for years American dramatists have been looking to Britain – and specifically the National Theatre – to showcase their work. Now the boot seems to be on the other foot. Although Hare cites pragmatic reasons for staging his new play in New York, he is not exactly gruntled – as another British exile, PG Wodehouse, said – by his treatment by the National. And in this he is not alone.”

Seattle Repertory Theatre will be the first big American company to produce the controversial “My Name is Rachel Corrie.” “The fact that Rachel Corrie was from Olympia, and went to college at Evergreen, is a big part of why we want to do this. This is about someone local, who could have been any of us. And it’s about what happens when your passion and activism reaches the level that hers did.”

The new “Lord of the Rings” musical got generally beat up by critics last week. “Most reviewers said the show, which runs to almost four hours, did not live up to expectations. The Toronto Star described it as ‘dull’, while the Toronto Sun said it ‘falls victim to its own hype’. But the granddaughter of author JRR Tolkien praised it for staying true to his classic tale.

“The Lord of the Rings is the most inventively staged show in history — as, indeed, it needed to be. The production’s pyrotechnics make all those gasp-inducing moments from blockbuster shows past seem primitive. That chandelier dropping in Phantom of the Opera? Pshaw. That helicopter landing in Miss Saigon? Ho hum. That revolving stage in Les Misérables? Puh-lease. More than that, these greatest hits of stagecraft seem gimmicky in hindsight. They don’t flow from a coherent vision of the source material in question or bear witness to a singular, original aesthetic — as LOTR’s gobsmacking special effects do.”

“More comic books, more sex. More nonbooks, more gossip. Plenty of facts but no meaning. Sounds like an average day at a 2006 magazine rack, or in cyberspace, or on the couch with television remote in hand. The danger was never really that we would lose access to information; it was that we would lose the ability, or the desire, to make intellectually rigorous use of it.”

Minneapolis’ Theatre de la Jeune Lune announced last week that it was abandoning its longtime collective leadership model. “It’s a long-overdue move. Though Jeune Lune pulled down the 2005 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theater, it has been stuck in a morass that has hamstrung the company aesthetically and crippled it programmatically.”