Category: theatre

“The Producers has a litany of things that are wrong with it as long as Elton John’s wedding guest list. But the faults are instructive in the ways that they demonstrate why theatre has survived the onslaught of cinema and TV and why movies can be turned into great musicals, but seldom the other way round. The flaws flap around the film like munchkins in the Wizard of Oz.”

“In the face of a national shortage of skilled technical staff, one leading regional [UK] theatre has launched a more traditional apprenticeship scheme to train the wig makers and lighting designers of the future. The Birmingham Repertory Theatre is giving six people, aged 16 to 21, training for 18 months in many departments including sound, lighting, make-up, wardrobe and stage management.”

“Ticket sales were $825m in 2005, up from $749m the previous year, reported the League of American Theatres and Producers. Although ticket prices did rise in 2005, an extra 650,000 visited Broadway theatres this year. Of the total audience increase of 650,000 over 2004, according to the League’s data, it’s important to realise that ticket sales for plays alone were up by 530,000.”

“Stephen Sondheim has always been ready for his close-up. There’s a reason his songs are picked up so quickly by cabaret performers who keep their hearts parked in their throats. But because he writes for Broadway, the original incarnations of his shows have tended to be big in ways that brought out the glitter in his intricate lyrics and scores but often kept audiences at an amused, admiring remove. Now a new generation of Sondheim interpreters are revealing just how directly this composer speaks to them.”

Charles Spencer says West End theatre has had a great year: “During 25 years of covering London theatre, I can’t remember a stronger season for drama in the West End. The producers have really raised their game this year, offering big stars in numerous quality productions of first-rate plays.”

More than 600 years after Chaucer’s pilgrims rode together through Kent a performance artist has set off on the same route.

“In three chaotic days, the Transit Workers Union inflicted a lot of pain in Gotham. The realm of off-Broadway theater — which operates on razor-thin margins — felt more than its share.”

Several off-Broadway theatres are keeping ticket prices low and the theatre experimental. It’s working. “These spaces measure success less by commercial cachet than by how well they keep up with exciting new work. All of them keep an eye on not only submissions and recommendations but also on offerings at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and one another’s work. While each has a different economic model and aesthetic emphasis, all have infrastructure in place to market and offer technical support for everything on their stages, which means they have the prerogative, and the incentive, to choose only work they want to see there, whether or not their name is above the title as producer.”

The Los Angeles City Council has voted to award the Latino Theater Company a 20-year lease to manage the Los Angeles Theatre Center, the municipally owned complex on Spring Street in downtown L.A.

Scottish theatre has had a busy year. “There’s a curious sense, this year, of a theatre culture moving towards the extremes: either towards small, intimate and often site-specific micro-events like The Devil’s Larder, or back towards the luxurious Rolls Royce of a theatre experience, towards mainstream productions.”