Category: theatre

With Dublin’s historic Abbey Theatre in the throes of a powerful fiscal crisis, Mary Kenney worries that a large percentage of the Irish public may not be interested in saving it. “Although they say, in opinion polls, that that they approve of a national theatre, not enough ordinary people really go there. [BBC soap operas] Coronation Street and EastEnders, along with Irish television soaps such as Fair City, now provide the everyday stories that were once part of the Abbey repertoire. When you go to the Abbey these days, the audience is often composed of visiting Americans and the well-heeled Dublin bourgeoisie. After it is “restructured”, with proper subsidies, I hope that it will connect more to the life of the people.”

Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece of 20th century drama, Waiting For Godot, is almost more of a caricature than a touchstone these days, with parodies abounding. Even so, 50 years after its premiere, Godot “has lost none of its power to astonish and to move, but it no longer seems self-consciously experimental or obscure. With unerring economy and surgical precision, the play puts the human animal on stage in all his naked loneliness. Like the absolute masterpiece it is, it seems to speak directly to us, to our lives, to our situation, while at the same time appearing to belong to a distant, perhaps a non-existent, past.”

“An abridged version of the Broadway hit Spamalot will open in Las Vegas in 2007 at a custom-built theatre. Casino impresario Steve Wynn plans to stage the show at his Nevada resort at a cost of more than $50m. The musical, written by Eric Idle and based on the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, opened on Broadway in March and won three Tonys in June.”

“Alzheimer’s, 9/11, Asbos, the Yorkshire Ripper, the ‘war on terror’, the apocalypse – there’s no shortage of provocative topics on the Edinburgh Fringe this year. The extraordinary thing is they are all being tackled in musicals. It’s striking that song-and-dance extravaganzas can be staged out of such sensitive subjects. How did a ‘low’ artform get so grown-up?”

Broadway junkies just can’t seem to get a proper fix in the Twin Cities. “There’s much to brag about in local theater, from the reported number of seats sold to the fact that we have three Tony-winning regional playhouses in Minneapolis: the Guthrie, which is completing its $125 million, three-stage complex on the Mississippi River; the Children’s Theatre, which will soon unveil its own $24 million expansion, and Theatre de la Jeune Lune, whose inventive creations have drawn a growing international following. But the upcoming seasons in Minneapolis and St. Paul, each without a pre-Broadway show or buzz-heavy blockbuster, make us look as if we are in the sticks.”

Minneapolis is an arts mecca, no doubt about it. But there’s one category in which it consistently loses out to Chicago and San Francisco: premieres of Broadway-bound plays and musicals.

The formula is simple: Budget woes demand cheaper shows. But when theaters cut costs by hosting nonunion touring productions, Actors’ Equity feels compelled to object — as it threatens to do if the debt-saddled Civic Light Opera of South Bay Cities presents a non-Equity tour of “42nd Street.”

“Every summer, a theater world routinely awakens, Brigadoon-like, in the Berkshires. But the past few summers have brought a genuine surprise: Julianne Boyd’s nonprofit Barrington Stage Company, which has emerged as a serious challenge to the dominance of the region’s most established venues.” A little show that premiered there, “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” won two Tony Awards this year.

France’s world-renowned Avignon Festival is having a bad year, with critics calling it “purgatory” or worse, and patrons walking out of performances in droves. “The festival was crippled in 2003 after a strike by theatre workers, but returned with healthy audiences last year. Ticket sales for this year’s events had been strong.” One critic described this year’s festival as the worst in 37 years, and another wrote, “You think you’ve reached the last point in mediocrity, pretentiousness and confusion. But no. There is always something worse.”

“Ireland’s national theatre, founded 100 years ago by WB Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory, narrowly avoided having to turn out the lights and declare insolvency this morning. The entire management board offered its resignation yesterday after a disastrous year in which it managed to lose almost €1m [$1.2 million] into a ‘black hole’ without even noticing. The Abbey has slipped €3.4m into the red and witnessed a battle of egos worthy of Oscar Wilde’s cruellest comedy. Now a report by independent financial consultants has accused the byzantine management structure of gross incompetence.”