Category: theatre

“The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” becomes the first show of the 2004-05 season on Broadway to become profitable. The show’s producer said on Friday that he had returned his show’s $3.5 million capitalization 18 weeks after opening on Broadway, a remarkably quick return for a new musical. For David Stone, who is also a producer of the hit musical “Wicked,” the success of “Spelling Bee” is a testament to the power of word of mouth.”

“The preview of Two Thousand Years, Leigh’s first foray into theatre for 12 years, was enthusiastically received at the National Theatre on Saturday night. With all 16,000 tickets for the entire 20-week run of the mystery play sold out, queues formed at 6am for 30 extra tickets. The play zipped across the political terrain of Israel, Iraq, withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and even the floods in New Orleans, as Leigh, 62, perhaps proved why the first performance was suddenly postponed last Thursday: it was clear the author of Abigail’s Party and Secrets & Lies was still writing it.”

Steve Wynn is out to make Las Vegas a theatre capital. He says he can envision a not-too-distant future in which Broadway-type musicals are nurtured in Vegas. “I see money and creativity gravitating here because of our importance and the possibility of a payoff. For a show to open here and then go to Broadway will someday seem like the most natural thing in the world.”

The glut of shows looking for homes on Broadway has gotten so bad that an $8 million revival of one of the Great White Way’s biggest smash hits ever has been reduced to begging for performance space. A Chorus Line, which ran on Broadway for 15 years, is slated to open in fall 2006, but it hasn’t even been able to get signed as a backup booking. In addition to the booking jam, “there is also the question of just how well A Chorus Line has held up over the years and whether audiences will flock to see a revival of a show that hasn’t been gone all that long (it closed in 1990).”

Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor Lost is being performed in Kabul. “The William Shakespeare play is one of the first to be staged in the country since the fall of the Taleban in 2001. Theatre is much more popular than television. But during the Taleban’s time it wasn’t allowed.”

Film director Robert Altman is making his London directing debut. “Altman, who turned 80 this year, will tackle one of the last plays written by Arthur Miller, Resurrection Blues, which he was rewriting in the months before his death in February. The director of Gosford Park and Short Cuts knew Miller as a friend and wanted to bring the production to London, a wish expressed by the late playwright himself.”

“Hollywood actors come over to the West End all the time, of course, attracted by a relatively short run, all-expenses-paid accommodation in a top hotel or apartment, bags of prestige – and they’ve often got a good deal of theatre experience to draw upon anyway. But will a Hollywood director find it quite the same congenial experience?”

A Stockholm theatre is preparing to raise the curtain on a long-forgotten play by Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The patron of the Nobel Institute and its world-renowned prizes, Nobel was also an amateur poet, and penned his only dramatic work, Nemesis, in 1896, shortly before his death. Everyone involved in the production seems to agree that it is far from a good play (it mainly deals with torture, rape, incest, and Satan, and was condemned as blasphemous by the Swedish clergy shortly after its publication,) but the staging is being presented as a historical curiosity showing a different side of a revered figure in Sweden’s history.

“Tonight should see the unveiling of perhaps the most breathlessly awaited – and mysterious – theatrical event of the year. But, it turns out, audiences are going to have to wait another two nights to see the new play by Mike Leigh at [London’s] National Theatre – because the dramatist and film-maker has yet to finish it.” The show’s initial run has been sold out for weeks, even though virtually nothing is known about the plot. (Even the title was only unveiled late last week.) “The play will be Leigh’s first since 1993, and his first creative outing since the success of the film Vera Drake, which won the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice film festival. His best-loved drama is 1977’s Abigail’s Party.”