Category: theatre

“The Mambo Kings” won’t be going to Broadway after all. Producers canceled a planned opening in August. The “lavish” $12 million show was critically panned in a tryout engagement in San Francisco that ended June 19.

“There’s been a predominance of television realism and of a section of the critical culture that demands a moral message from new writing. This is in danger of making theatre about as interesting as muesli. Why would anyone write stage plays now? If you can write dialogue and you can hit a deadline you can write TV. You can write about your south London council estate or your middle class swingers and you can make more money and reach more people and therefore have more impact. Apart from anything else, the denial of the larger stages to living playwrights has made it harder and harder for them to earn a living from writing, as they see their income from royalties dwindle to insultingly low levels.”

Marshall Fisher is a hunter of lost musicals. “In the middle of his career, Orson Welles said to Cole Porter, ‘I want to write a musical’ – Around the World in Eighty Days – ‘I want to direct it and I’m going to be in it.’ Truman Capote wrote House of Flowers with Harold Arlen. John Steinbeck wrote with Rodgers and Hammerstein, who had wanted to make a musical out of Cannery Row. But Steinbeck, classy John Steinbeck, said, ‘No, I’m gonna write a sequel specifically for you,’ – so he wrote a little novel called Sweet Thursday.”

John Lahr finds himself intrigued by the new “Billy Elliot” musical that has earned raves in London. “The British love musicals; they just don’t do them very well. The problem, it seems to me, is spiritual. The jazz of American optimism, which lends elation and energy to the form, is somehow alien to the ironic British spirit. At its buoyant core, the American musical is the expression of a land of plenty. England, on the other hand, is a land of scarcity—the Land of No, as a friend of mine calls it. Billy Elliot is fascinating because it situates itself precisely on the cultural fault line between the two traits.”

Myriad Broadway shows closed last weekend weekend (including the musical “Brooklyn”, the revivals of “La Cage aux Folles” with Robert Goulet, “On Golden Pond” with James Earl Jones and Leslie Uggums, and the limited run of “Mark Twain Tonight!” with Hal Holbrook), this coming Sunday will see seven more shows close…

The Theatre Communications Group held it annual meeting June 16-18 in Seattle. “The 15th annual conference featured over 700 artists and administrators from 43 states and the District of Columbia, as well as delegates from 15 other countries, including Ireland, Iran, and the Czech Republic.”

Los Angeles’ largest theatre cuts its major program to encourage diversity in the theatre. So what is lost? “To what extent did the initiatives that came about in the ’80s and ’90s lead to diversification of the management staffs of theaters? In the past two years some important artistic director jobs opened on the national scene. How many people of color were on the short list for the jobs? How many women? How many women and people of color who were not right for the jobs, or not available, were brought in to be a part of the process? Did board members ask about diversity as they put together their wish lists? Did women board members ask these questions? Did board members of color ask?”

Small theatres often become so identified with the leader who brings them to life that it’s sometimes difficult to imagine them without their patron saint. “At least half a dozen of the Twin Cities’ best-known, most innovative, highest-quality theaters face the same situation. Penumbra Theatre Company, Mixed Blood Theatre, Park Square Theatre and Illusion Theater all are facing a future without the artistic directors who have poured their lifeblood into them. Their long-term survival depends on figuring out how to transfuse that lifeblood into a new generation of leadership.”

Whatever happened to the Broadway producer, the networking genius who could bring together the right author, the right composer, and the right director to create a great show? These days, most Broadway hits are corporate concoctions, based on Disney movies or the rock bands of yesteryear, and there doesn’t seem to be much room for the old-school masters. A new fellowship program is aiming to train the producers of tomorrow, but no one seems quite certain of what that job will entail.

Need a puppet? Or a whole show? Head for Brooklyn’s new New York Puppet Library, “an unusual joint venture inside the landmark Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza.” The library is the brainchild of the Puppeteers Cooperative, and is basically a bartering arrangement, under which the cooperative gets rent-free space to store their creations, and the public can come right in and borrow a puppet or two for a party, a political demonstration, or anything else they can think up.