Category: theatre

Three years after theatre critic Michael Phillips left the Los Angeles Times for the Chicago Tribune, the paper has hired a theatre critic. He’s Charles McNulty, a senior editor at the Village Voice, who used to work for Variety.

Orange County has a huge Hispanic population. For 25 years, South Coast Repertort Theatre’s Hispanic Playwrights Project nurtured writers such as Jose Rivera, Octavio Solis and Pulitzer Prize winner Nilo Cruz. “Then last year, after nearly two decades, the program was cut. A second blow came last spring when the Center Theater Group of Los Angeles dropped several development programs, including the Latino Theatre Initiative. Since HPP’s demise, South Coast Rep has programmed nothing by Latino authors other than its long-running Christmas show, La Posada Magíca.”

Lindsay Posner nominates David Mamet. “His plays are challenging and uncompromising, all the more moving for their lack of sentiment. He has an uncanny knack of catching the zeitgeist.”

Clare Asquith claims in a new book that Shakespeare embedded “dangerous political messages” in his work. “She argues that the plays and poems are a network of crossword puzzle-like clues to his strong Catholic beliefs and his fears for England’s future. Aside from being the first to spot this daring Shakespearean code, Asquith also claims to be the first to have cracked it.”

For the first time in 25 years, a woman has won the Perrier Prize for Comedy. “Laura Solon, 26, won the £7,500 prize for her show Kopfrapers Syndrome, in which she plays eight different characters. She was one of five acts shortlisted.”

Now that “Lennon” has been critically thrashed after its Broadway opening, what’s next? “The producers of the critically battered jukebox musical — which, around Shubert Alley, is known as “Yoko’s Folly” — are desperately trying to keep the doors open for at least another two months. At that point, according to production sources, they will acquire the international rights to the show, which may be the only hope they have of getting back some of the $10 million they’ve sunk into the production.”

Avenue Q opens this week in Las Vegas, the first of several big-nman eBroadway shows to take up home in the gambling mecca. “In investing heavily in Broadway theater, Vegas hoteliers such as Steve Wynn, whose deal bars Avenue Q from touring in North America, are banking on the notion that at least some of the city’s 40 million tourists a year will embrace entertainment with plots, characters and — gasp! — life lessons. Wynn hopes the change of pace will mature the town and ‘add another dimension to the entertainment menu’.”

Ticket-buyers don’t know what Mike Leigh’s new play is about (or even the title) but it’s sold out its run at London’s National Theatre. “The truth is that no one but Mike Leigh and his actors know what his first stage play for 12 years is about. But that has not hindered its performance at the box office. The new production, which is currently going by the intuitive title of A New Play by Mike Leigh, has already sold out after theatregoers snapped up more than 16,000 advance tickets. The only clue is the play’s publicity poster, a black-and-white shot of a solitary palm tree against a backdrop of sand dunes.”

What’s holding back Danish theatre? Politics. “Theatres will always be obligated to focus their work with politicians in mind. That makes it quite difficult to create interesting new ventures, because you have to negotiate with politicians who don’t necessarily know much about theatre. And that is a catastrophe for theatre in Denmark,”

Monologist Spalding Gray has inspired a generation of solo artists paying homage. “The man who turned the most intimate details of his life into the stuff of brilliant solo storytelling becomes the haunting presence in the lives of a whole new generation of actor-writers. As it turns out, it’s not all that easy to come to terms with an artist who inspired them (directly or indirectly) and then, at the age of 62, committed suicide.”