Category: theatre

Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” is coming to Broadway. “The memoir, which was published in October and has since sold more than 200,000 copies, is to be adapted for the stage by Ms. Didion herself, with an eye toward a spring 2007 opening on Broadway. The play, imagined as a one-woman show, will be produced by Scott Rudin, the Hollywood and Broadway producer, and directed by David Hare, the respected British playwright. No casting has been announced.”

John Lahr writes that “The Color Purple” fails on a number of levels. “Marsha Norman’s libretto is a kind of color-me-purple comic-book outline: it gives us the externals of the plot but not, in any meaningful sense, the internal life of the characters, who function more as anecdotes than as dramatic influences on Celie. As a result, what is earned sentiment in the novel becomes mere sentimentality in the musical. Everything is as literal as a street sign, and sometimes not as interesting.”

In Romania in the early 80s censorship in the theatre had stiffened and all plays had to be approved by the Councillor of Culture and Social Education. However, the suggestion of a play by Shakespeare went unchallenged: like Beethoven and Tolstoy, Shakespeare was a Universal Artist – to dispute this would be to expose the apparatchiks, always keen to defend their amour-propre, to charges of stupidity.They were enraptured. Line after line was greeted with the applause of recognition: this was their story. Hamlet’s oppression by Claudius mirrored theirs by Ceausescu, and if Hamlet vacillated, accused himself of cowardice, cursed himself for his inaction, it only reflected their own frailty and submissiveness. Allegory and metaphor are part of any theatre syntax but at that time in Romania they were its essential core.”

“Watching this beat-the-clock production summons the frustrations of riding through a picturesque stretch of country in a supertrain like the TGV. The landscape looks seductively lush and varied; the local populace seems lively and inviting, like people you might want to know; you can even hear tantalizing snatches of folks singing in an intriguing idiom as they go about their work. But it all passes by in a watercolor blur. This show isn’t stiff and anemic like its chief musical competition this season. But it never slows down long enough for you to embrace it.”

“Vastly improved from its pre-Broadway incarnation in Atlanta, Griffin’s ambitious production opened here Thursday night with its dignity intact and no cause whatsoever for embarrassment by any of the impassioned parties involved. This is an earnest, honest, intermittently engaging and competently directed attempt to wrestle the chronological sweep of Walker’s epic and intensely personal novel about the 40-year journey to self-worth of an abused rural Georgian named Celie into an accessible, middle-brow Broadway musical. It is an almost impossible task.”

“Earnest and eager to please, the $10 million Color Purple is the latest in a long series of cautious, pricey Broadway adaptations that paint by pallid numbers rather than in arresting new tones. It’s a thankless task, though, making the argument against this musical, which opened last night at the Broadway Theatre.”

Boston’s venerable Wilbur Theater may go dark next year after Clear Channel Entertainment declined to extend its lease beyond summer 2006. The venue was booked for only 15 weeks over the past year, and Clear Channel has had great difficulty selling tickets to events there.

“Moscow is experiencing a boom in theater construction, a testament both to the importance Russian leaders place on the nation’s capital as a cultural showcase and to the money from oil and other commodities flowing through the city’s coffers… The theater construction boom is part of a general real estate boom in Moscow fueled by the success of Russia’s raw materials and commodities market, which has allowed the city to lavish money on things like the Moscow International Performance Arts Center, a performing arts complex intended to be the city’s answer to Lincoln Center, and all the theaters sprouting up around town. There are more than a half-dozen other major construction or reconstruction projects slated for next year.”

“We are entering a golden age of children’s theatre. The impulse that has piled bookshops with brilliant novels for children, and packed cinemas with well-made, enticing movies, has swept across Britain’s stages, filling them with more varied and attractive shows for young people than I can ever remember seeing there before.”

Cleveland Public Theatre has tapped experimental theatre artist Raymond Bobgan to be its next artistic director, beginning next April. Bobgan is only 38, but has been the No. 2 administrator at the city’s leading alternative theatre troupe for several years. He succeeds Randy Rollison, who resigned earlier this month.