Category: theatre

The Minnesota Fringe is the biggest festival of its kind in the U.S., boasting 25 venues and hundreds of performances in a single two-week period. And while many fringe festivals have embraced politics this year, the Minnesota Fringers have gone a different way. Specifically, a shocking number of this year’s productions are focused, laserlike, on sex, which wouldn’t be surprising in, say, New York, but which seems a tad out of place in the buttoned-up Midwest. The Fringe’s director has an explanation: “A lot of it is the Teen Fringe. We don’t censor the teens, and it turns out that when you let teens talk about whatever they want, they talk about sex.”

Critic Howard Kissel usually sits in prime seats when he goes to Broadway. So he headed for the balconies of popular shows to see how the rest of us live. “Given the sophisticated state of amplification, hearing is never a problem upstairs. But the fact that performers can rely on their body mikes means they do not feel a need to project their characters all the way upstairs the way they had to in the old days.”

Six shows are closing on Broadway in the next few weeks. “All the departures will still leave Broadway with 20 shows (21 if “Lennon,” which opens Aug. 14 at the Broadhurst, does well with critics and ticket buyers), more than usual in the summertime when it always has been the custom to see the total of legiters and musicals playing on the N.Y. boards reduced to a handful. (In years past there have been as few as 10 during the dog days of August.)”

“Traditional plays are losing their dominance. And nowhere is this cultural shift more evident than at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. Flick through the Fringe programme and it hits you. Along with the familiar plethora of one-person shows and revivals of Accidental Death of an Anarchist is a whole body of British-based work that owes more to performance art, the circus and devised, physical and visual traditions than to text-based theatre.”

Totonto actor Adam Brazier wins an audition and finds himself whisked off to England to star in an Andrew Lloyd-Webber production. Then he wins the lead in ALW’s new “Woman in White” on Broadway. It’s all a little difficult to imagine, he writes, “and if you see the guy whose career I stole, tell him I’m taking it to Broadway with me.”

“The first Playwright’s Showcase of the Western Region, held in Denver last August, attracted 168 entries from 18 states, making the fledgling effort, which returns Friday to the Arvada Center, one of the largest of its kind in the United States – at least geographically.” It’s not nationally prominent, but there are plenty of success stories coming out of last year’s showcase to pump up optimism for this year’s event.

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival opens with a parade through the city watched by 170,000 people lining the streets. Some 16,000 performers are taking part in nearly 27,000 performances in 300 venues until the end of August.

This summer Los Angeles’ powerful Center Theatre Group eliminated four programs intended to help develop minority plays. Director Michael Ritchie says the programs weren’t effective. But Margo Jefferson wonders what the theatre plans that will be more useful. “Talent is not an equal opportunity employer. It certainly isn’t. Most of the plays produced by traditional mainstream theaters are written by white men; many of these plays are terrible. Quality isn’t the barrier. Access is. Experience is. Exposure is.”

“In the last decade, though, nudity on and off Broadway has taken a decided turn for the male. An informal examination of Broadway and Off Broadway shows and a survey of longtime theater industry people showed that over the last 15 years, there have been about 25 plays with full frontal nudity. In a count of the nude bodies seen in those shows, 40 or so belonged to men, and only about 10 belonged to women.”

Michael Stotts is leaving as managing director of New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre because of conflicts with the theatre’s board. Stotts declined to detail the conflicts other than to say there were “clashes between me and some board members. There is a culture of governance that made it very difficult for a managing director to do what that person was hired to do. I’ve been increasingly frustrated with these differences in the last few months and so it was time for us to part ways.”