Category: theatre

The new Broadway season is almost upon us, so how are New York’s infamous theatre critics viewing the crop of hot new shows about to descend on the Big Apple? Well, as you might expect, they’re hot for Chita Rivera, tired of Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane, and just generally bitchy as all get-out…

We all have favorite artists, favorite composers, favorite writers. Some directors have favorite playwrights they delve into. What are the attractions?

A Hollywood reputation has become one of the quickest ways to land a place on the British stage. “Over the past five years, London, especially during the tourist-rich summer months, has become the home to a new kind of production which could very easily be perceived as a hipper, higher-priced form of dinner theatre. Here’s the formula for this commercial cocktail: Add a dash of reasonably high-profile celebrity in a smallish cast play for a limited run. Shake well to generate maximum publicity. Pray the critics don’t chill it too thoroughly. Serve to an eager public.”

Avenue Q is about to open in its permanent home in Las Vegas. “While the theater, stage and puppets will probably impress, the show’s success rests on the two Las Vegas casts that will perform twice a night, five days a week. Finding the right mix of actors who can dance, sing and work the puppets was an enormous challenge. It took a nationwide casting search more than a year to complete both companies.”

Sarah Ruhl’s play “The Clean House,” a comedy “about house cleaning and mortality,” hasn’t been seen yet in New York, but it’s already been “(ahem) sweeping the country. Companies from coast to coast and beyond are putting this 2005 Pulitzer finalist on the boards, with the play’s New York debut at Lincoln Center still a full year away.”

Broadway’s Jujamcyn theatre group says it will “change the name of the Virginia Theater, at 245 West 52nd Street, to the August Wilson Theater. The new marquee, with a giant neon sign bearing the writer’s signature, is to be unveiled on Oct. 17. Mr. Wilson, 60, will be the first African-American for whom a Broadway theater is named. He will take his place beside such theatrical figures as the playwright Eugene O’Neill, the composer George Gershwin and the actress Helen Hayes.”

Enough with the theories on Shakespeare’s life and motives. A new book “claiming Shakespeare for the Pope stirs up intense indignation among those who regard him as the most humanist of writers, notably thin on religious references, sentiments, ideas or ways of thought. Shakespeare scholars just sigh and consign the book to the great pantheon of ‘revelations’ about the real Shakespeare.”

“It’s been mortifying to go so long without a chief theater critic,” said Bret Israel, the Sunday Calendar editor, who supervises arts coverage, and hired Charles McNulty as the paper’s new critic after three years. “But as I’ve told many people who didn’t always believe me, the main reason for the delay was the very high standard the paper sets for its critics, who are the soul of our cultural pages.”

Everyone knows why Broadway producers covet the addition of Hollywood stars to their shows: fame = box office. But why are so many stars equally keen to abandon their pampered L.A. lifestyles and outrageous film salaries for the cutthroat and (comparatively) low-paying world of Broadway? The answer usually lies in the murky world of PR: put simply, an actor needing an image overhaul can do a lot worse than establishing himself in what continues to be known as the “legitimate theatre.”