Category: theatre

Behind the Iron Mask, a three-actor chamber musical based loosely on The Man in the Iron Mask opened this week in London’s West End to terrible reviews, and announced it will close. How bad were the press notices? “It’s so bad that it is merely unendurable,” wrote Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph. “There’s no insane flourish to its mediocrity, no sublimity to its awfulness. It is just relentlessly, agonisingly third-rate.” The cast, he said, “perform as if they have been on a prolonged Mogadon bender”.

London’s West End doesn’t seem to have suffered much in the wake of the 7/7 bombings. Attendance at West End shows is ahead of last year’s pace, and an immediate 6% drop in ticket sales in the days after the attacks was short-lived.

“Five years ago, if you had looked at the programme for the Edinburgh Festival, you would have been overwhelmed by the amount of “up-your-bum experimentalism”. Now, though there is still an unconscionable amount of that sort of thing, plus a lot of other general silliness, there are also more plays than I can ever remember that engage with the big issues of the day.”

Ontario’s popular summer theatre festivals are as vibrant as ever, and appear to have recovered nicely from an extended post-9/11 downturn. But what is the true mission of such festivals, exactly? Should Stratford and Shaw be focused on creating a nice vacation destination, or on presenting high art? At their best, the fests can serve both masters, but it’s a delicate balance.

British comedy has become increasingly darker, and one theory is that Britons are laughing less, losing their sense of humor. “A survey earlier this year by cruise company Ocean View even concluded that the amount of time we spend chuckling daily has fallen from an average of 18 minutes in the 1950s to just six minutes today. Traditionally, the English only peep out from their caves of national self-disgust to trumpet their alleged good sense of humour, their subtlety with irony, their readiness for laughter. Has our comedy become unfunny, and is our laughter on the brink of extinction?”

The National Black Theatre Festival opens this week in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “The festival consists of more than 100 performances on 12 Winston-Salem stages between tonight and Saturday. Organizers expect the festival to draw more than 60,000 visitors to the area and pump nearly $15 million into the local economy.”

LA’s Colony Theatre was a small theatre that grew big and got successful. “Yet recently, the troupe has been involved in a bitter power struggle between many veteran company members and artistic director Barbara Beckley, contributing to the departures of more than half the actors in the group.”

“Two distinct but interrelated types of musical theater have won a following here over the decades: traditional imported Broadway musicals and home-grown, often quirky Brazilian musical shows that draw on a variety of sources but add distinctly local twists.”

Seattle theatre has rebounded after a couple of down years. Every major theatre in the Seattle region reports increased ticket sales, reduced deficits and a generally healthy outlook…

A new study says discrimination against actors with disabilities is high. “Performers with disabilities are more than 50 percent more likely to experience workplace discrimination than Americans without disabilities.”