Category: theatre

Belfast’s Lyric Theatre has staved off demise with an injection of cash fundraising. “The Lyric is Northern Ireland’s only producing theatre. It famously kept its doors open during the Troubles, with actors such as Simon Callow sometimes performing to a background of bombs and gunshots. Neeson, born in Ballymena, called it his “Belisha beacon of light”. During blackouts, actors would hold candles and ask the audience to hold lamps. But the Lyric’s rotting building has been described as squalid. Backstage, the actors cannot flush the toilet during a performance.”

The Royal Shakespeare Company is returning to London, performing in three theatres owned by Cameron MacIntosh. “It is hoped Tuesday’s deal, to last over the next five years with theatre producer Sir Cameron, will provide a more stable future for the RSC, which receives almost £13m of public funding.”

Children’s theatre is booming across the US, but Chicago, despite its vast theater offerings, has long lacked a dedicated children’s theater. That’s about to change…

“Dinner theater is big business in Colorado. Nine major venues generated about $9.2 million last year. Together they drew about 318,000 people – and that includes only the 550-seat Pinnacle’s first month in business. But dinner and a show can run anywhere from $25-$75, a number that keeps increasing along with the quality of the food. At those prices, patrons are becoming less likely to take a risk on edgier shows.”

Broadway shows winning Tonys Sunday night got a nice bump at the box office Monday. But “according to preliminary numbers, the celebrities did almost nothing to increase the flat overnight national ratings, showing only a slight increase of about 160,000 viewers. In years past, a number of factors have been blamed for the low ratings, including competition from the N.B.A. playoffs and new episodes of hot HBO shows like “The Sopranos” or “Six Feet Under.” This year, however, the show had no such competition, but still drew only 6.6 million viewers, up 2 percent from last year’s audience of about 6.5 million viewers.”

Sure the Tonys have been handed out. Howard Kissel picks his personal Broadway season highlights. “With the perennial laments about the death of serious theater, it seems worth noting that there were enough candidates to fill the Tony Best Play Revival category but only three shows to fill the comparable musicals category.”

“Doubt,” John Patrick Shanley’s drama of suspicion and certainty has won this year’s Tony for best play. “Monty Python’s Spamalot” wins best musical.

The Blue man Group is opening an outpost in Toronto. But there are problems. “With the first preview set for Tuesday night, the major focus is not on the show itself, but on the boycott against it waged by Toronto’s three major performing arts unions — Canadian Actors’ Equity Association, the Toronto Musicians’ Association and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. Inflammatory rhetoric is now the order of the day, lawsuits are being threatened and the unions are planning continued action once the previews start.”

“When Broadway hands out the 59th annual Tony Awards tonight at Radio City Music Hall, one contingent will be conspicuously absent: the British. Well, OK, that’s not entirely true.” There are British actors nominated in several categories, but all are considered long shots to win. In fact, Broadway has taken a distinctly American turn this year, and Brits are finding themselves shut out of the top roles for the first time in decades.

Minneapolis/St. Paul is America’s 15th-largest metropolitan area, with virtually none of the national buzz and star-driven glitz that hews to cities like Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco. So how is it that the Twin Cities theatre scene has been racking up so many national awards and accolades in recent years? Part of the answer can be found in Minnesota’s nearly unmatched public and private support for the arts, but there’s more to it than that. In fact, much of the Twin Cities’ theatrical success may lie in the local scene’s almost total lack of interest in sucking up to New York.