Category: theatre

“Troubled” does not begin to describe the history of the Chicago theatre recently known as the Shubert (now renamed for a corporate sponsor.) “Producers coveted it for its scale, which is similar to Broadway houses, but many theatergoers groaned at the thought of an evening at the 100-year-old Shubert, with its drab colors, its paucity of bathrooms and its congested, claustrophobic bottleneck of a lobby.” But a $14 million renovation has not only opened the theatre up, it has revealed some striking architectural details not seen since the building’s earliest days.

A prominent Hungarian director who is dying is staging previews of his own funeral. “Peter Halasz, who is also an actor, writer and satirist, is in the final stages of liver cancer, and will begin lying in an open coffin at an art museum in the Hungarian capital Budapest later this week. ‘I’m curious how a funeral looks from the other side’.”

It’s easy to “think of globalisation as sneakers made in sweatshops in Malaysia, McDonalds’s golden arches in Turkestan or call centres in Delhi.” But globalism is a potent force in the theatre too, and maybe not a good one…

It’s a disappearing art. “In the old days you had to prompt, you really had to follow with your finger and mouth it with them. You marked up your script very precisely. You helped them through it. But what became of the prompt? Is it now an extinct species?”

A musical based on the movie “The Wedding Singer” debuts in Seattle. “It’s notable as the most recent in an accelerating wave of commercial Broadway tuners devised by writers and composers who came of age in the ’80s. This new breed is giving American musical comedy its own slant, and inspiring backers to stake millions on fresh shows — especially those, like ‘Wedding Singer,’ with a hit movie title on the marquee.”

Chicago theatres are opening their stages to anxiety this season. “Audiences seeking to exorcise the demons that plague us in the midnight hours can face down their fears a little earlier, in the collective warmth of a theater, and emerge cleansed of anxiety when the lights come up and the world rearranges itself around us, still intact for the time being.”

John Heilpern returns from writing a biography to writing about theatre. Biographies are about getting th facts right. But theatre? “As I see it, it’s my job as a biographer to see behind the mythomania and print the truth. But as a drama critic, give me beautiful lies every time. As I return to the theater beat, I am for those who believe feelings are real and facts are secondary. I am for all those in theater with open hearts.”

A production of Titus Andronicus at the Berlin theatre was so violent, the audience protested and tried to storm the stage. “You’re getting off on it [the violence],” members of the audience shouted at the actors in protest at the graphic rape scene in which Titus’s daughter, Lavinia, also has her hands chopped off and tongue ripped out.

“Box offices have never been busier, figures for 2005 show. From Billy Elliot to Guys and Dolls they have been packing them in: during 2005 a record 12.1 million customers, compared with 10.1 million in 1986, spent a total of £375,163,339 on London theatre tickets.”

“Signs of a West End slump are beginning to worry its leading lights. Cameron Mackintosh, the millionaire impresario, has admitted that business is slow, and curtains have come down early on some West End productions.”