Category: theatre

Now that Strunk & White’s Elements of Style has been reborn as a song cycle, and Broadway appears to have finally run out of all original ideas (see Movin’ Out), Dominic Papatola says that it may just be time for the theatre world to embrace the great English language reference books as inspiration. “The three-volume Columbia Gazetteer of the World sits on my bookshelf at home, and, I’m telling you, you can’t beat it for sheer drama. If Richard Wagner could make a 15-hour opera out of the story of some doofus dwarf and a ring, I see no reason the epic tale of the Encyclopaedia Britannica couldn’t be made into an heroic-scale grand opera.”

Michael Feingold has written about theatre for the Village Voice for 34 years. “That so many Voice critics have been, openly, practitioners has often given uptown journalists pause. But it had to do less with the long-standing tradition of the critic-playwright than with the communal nature of what had evolved, by the early 1960s, into the Off-Off-Broadway movement. While Off-Broadway itself became more upscale and commercial minded, the Downtown theater had burgeoned into a large, loose pool of extraordinary talents that was a community in itself. Not to participate actively would have marked one as hardly more than a tourist in an audience where, it sometimes seemed, everyone was a practitioner, and usually a multitasker at that.”

Playwright John Mighton has won Canada’s richest theatre prize for his entire body of work, which includes this year’s breakout hit, Half Life. The Elinore & Lou Siminovitch Prize, which pays CAN$100,000 to the winner, recognizes “a body of work by an artist in mid-career,” but there’s no question that the popularity of Mighton’s latest play was a factor in his win. “Last week, it was short-listed for the Governor-General’s Literary Awards, for English drama. Audiences have also embraced Mighton’s play, set in a nursing home and exploring memory loss as a natural and necessary part of human evolution.”

Forget about family-friendly pricing. The price of the top Broadway theatre tickets, which shot past the $100 threshold four years ago when Producers mania was in full swing, has risen again, to a top price of $110 for popular shows like Spamalot and Wicked. The average ticket price on Broadway now sits somewhere north of $60.

Few Latinos attend Broadway shows. “Despite many mainstream companies’ frantic attempts to cater to the booming Latino market, Broadway remains overwhelmingly non-Hispanic. Though the number of Broadway-going Hispanics during the 2004-5 season was the highest since the League of American Theaters and Producers began such surveys, they still made up just 5.7 percent of the total. They account for 12.5 percent of the United States population, according to the latest report of the United States Bureau of the Census.” Now some producers are trying some unorthodox marketing to build that audience.

Peter Hinton is the new director of Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Theatre. “A new artistic director should be an opportunity for a theatre to look at itself, to re-examine what it’s doing. My appointment to the place begged a lot of questions about what kind of future there would be.” Since it opened in 1969, the NAC has never done an all-Canadian season, notes Hinton. “That’s really interesting to me. It speaks to the brevity of our history and the way new-play development has grown and reached its own ceiling.”

“The West End doesn’t allow you to try because tickets are £55. Then you have to take a taxi and pay the baby-sitter, and there is no change out of £200. ‘If we charge £10, or on our public dress rehearsals, £1 – you might not like it, but at least you can afford to come back next week. Nonetheless, theatre attendance is on the increase.”

Musicians of the Louisiana Philharmonic were excited at prospects of a 10-week gig playing at radio City Music Hall in New York for $1,600 a week. Since the musicians are out of work, it seems like a dream opportunity. But then the players discovered they would be replacing striking colleagues…

“Three of New York’s most popular musicals boosted their top everyday ticket price 10% this month — exceeding the $100 ceiling that had held steady for more than four years. The increase was the first since “The Producers” spurred a wave of $100 tickets in April 2001. The latest move comes at a time of rising production costs for ever-more-elaborate shows. It helps that attendance is finally back to pre-Sept. 11, 2001, levels. Twenty weeks into the season, overall box-office receipts are up 11% from last year, and attendance has increased 6.6% in the same period.”

A New York producer bringing a show to Chicago bars Sun-Times theatre critic Hedy Weiss from attending a press conference announcing the show, then tortures the press he does allow inside by ambushing them with a game. Dumb move. Both the Sun-Times and Tribune protested…