Category: theatre

“Which, if any, current playwrights might become household names in years to come. Alongside Harold Pinter, the 1950s and 1960s brought a plethora of acclaimed playwrights, including a trio of Sirs – David Hare, Tom Stoppard and Alan Ayckbourn. But as television and film gained increasing prominence, new playwrights have struggled to enter our national consciousness.”

“There is a land for playwrights called Workshop Hell. It resides in the rehearsal halls and the mostly empty auditoriums of this nation’s theaters. In Workshop Hell, new scripts are pushed to their feet in readings and semistaged productions. They’re critiqued and commented upon and massaged. Those workshops most frequently lead to… another workshop. And another. And sometimes, another. For writers caught in Workshop Hell, seeing their script under the full illumination of stage lights can be a distant dream.”

“For the Royal Shakespeare Company, revivified under the directorship of Michael Boyd, restoring the link between Shakespeare and contemporary writing is becoming something of a mission…”

Washington DC’s Kennedy Center has signed a new contract with its musicians that says the Center will not use a virtual orchestra for any of its shows. “The debate over virtual orchestras was part of a four-day strike in 2003 by Broadway musicians. Theatrical producers had proposed reducing the number of players, to save money, and bring in a virtual orchestra. That attempt failed but has been tried elsewhere.”

Broadway’s Virginia Theatre was renamed the August Wilson Theatre. In a ceremony, Wilson’s daughter read the late playwright’s words on hearing the theatre was to be named for him: “I have a robust imagination and I have imagined for myself many things,” wrote Wilson, author of such plays as “Fences,” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and “The Piano Lesson.” I have imagined a wife and two beautiful daughters, and I have imagined a sustained career for myself in the theater. But not in my wildest imagination could I have ever imagined this.”

Playwrights have difficulty getting attention”The Manchester Royal Exchange theatre is hoping to redress that balance with the Bruntwood Playwriting Competition, a national contest to discover and celebrate Britain’s best writers for the theatre. Launching next month, the competition has a prize fund of £45,000 and offers the winner a fully staged production in the Royal Exchange’s 750-capacity main house theatre. A runner-up play will be staged at the theatre’s smaller, 120-seat studio.”

“While classical musical organizations increasingly struggle to draw people into the concert hall, and Broadway has more or less resigned itself to being a purveyor of ‘products’ that happen to be musicals, Hershey Felder has developed a hybrid form. He is one of those rare performers who can hold an audience in rapt silence while playing the most intimate Chopin nocturne or prelude, and then bring that same audience together to sing ‘I’m Always Chasing Rainbows,’ the 1940s standard whose melody is based on Chopin’s Fantasie Impromptu in C# Minor.”

“The quality of the so-called ‘fringe’ — the ever-changing circle of independent Seattle troupes with large creative aspirations and modest means — is a cyclical thing. Today (knock wood), it’s on the upswing. Is it the wildly imaginative, thrillingly relevant fringe scene of my dreams? No. Curiously, there is a dearth here of provocative, topical fare that ignites discussion and makes theater part of the public debate about burning issues of war, peace, class, race, et al. But there are compensations.”

It was only eight months ago that Chicago’s new $9 million Drury Lane Theatre at the Watertower Place opened in a blaze of publicity. Now the theatre is quitting making original theatre, admitting its mistakes and failure. “It’s an astonishingly rapid turnaround and indicative of eight months on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile that have not gone well at all. There are no current plans for the theater to produce its own shows again.”

After a two-year gestation involving several much-discussed readings and workshops, ‘In My Life’ is widely expected to be one of the weirdest productions to reach Broadway in years. There was, for one thing, the plot involving a singer-songwriter with Tourette’s syndrome, a song about a tumor and a swishy dead accountant who dances with God. There was the dare-the-critics poster art featuring large, Magritte-like lemons. And then there was the creative team, in particular the composer, lyricist, book writer and director, none of whom had worked on Broadway before and all of whom were in fact the same man: a 67-year-old former jingle writer and Hollywood anomaly named Joe Brooks.”