Category: theatre

Seattle’s Capitol Hill Arts Center is a classic non-profit theatre that has chosen not to run as a non-profit. “CHAC, pronounced ‘shack,’ is for-profit, meaning it gets no public and private donations. CHAC survives on ticket sales, building rentals and concessions. Yet CHAC also is anti-commercial and has no intention of using the tools designed to protect nonprofits from having to bow to the bottom line – government grants and fund-raising campaigns.”

Tacoma Actors Guild Theatre, which shut down operations last December, is considering an idea to create an old-style salaried repertory company. “Years ago, acting companies were the foundation for many of the country’s greatest theaters, but they fell out of favor because of the expense of keeping actors on salary.” Under the plan, TAG would cast a company of 12 to 20 actors contracted for one year in January.

“Forget Spamalot, The Light in the Piazza and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. The musical everybody on Broadway is talking about is Billy Elliot, which opened in London last week to ecstatic reviews.” Plans are already underway to bring the show to New York, but there might be some problems with translation from what is clearly a very British show. “Like the movie, it’s set in a working-class coastal town during the miners’ strike of 1984. Much of its power, the critics said, comes from its fierce, left-wing, anti-Thatcher political viewpoint… New York theater people who’ve seen the show say it would lose that power if it were Americanized the way another working-class British movie, The Full Monty, was when it was adapted for Broadway, where the story was set in Buffalo.”

“Toronto’s Lord of the Rings musical is becoming a hot ticket around the world with $1 million in tickets sold internationally on the first day they were offered. Because of the international appetite for the J.R.R. Tolkien epic, Toronto’s Mirvish Productions decided to begin public ticket sales on the internet on Sunday – a day before tickets could be purchased by telephone… The internet sales added to approximately $3 million the company has already racked up in group ticket sales to large parties, like tour operators who buy blocks of tickets.”

“After the forced closure of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play ‘Behzti’ in December, two things were widely predicted. One was that theatres would become more conservative in their programming of potentially contentious Asian work (particularly on religious and sexual themes). The other was that it would be more difficult for theatres to retain an already fragile (and tiny) non-white audience.” In fact, neither has happened…

The new Lord of the Rings musical doesn’t open in Toronto for 9 months yet, but tickets are selling like crazy. “Tickets for The Lord of the Rings went on sale yesterday on the Internet only and were expected by midnight to reach an impressive total of nearly $1 million (all figures Canadian). Add to that the $3 million in advance group sales and it means that close to $4 million or roughly 40,000 tickets have been sold before the box office opens to the general public today at 9 a.m.”

This year’s Tony nominations ignored jukebox musicals – those that are built around the songs of pop groups or pop songwriters, inserting them into a story. But that doesn’t mean the popular shows are disappearing any time soon.

Franco Dragone has reinvented theatre in Vegas. After a string of hits, he’s undertaken his most ambitious show yet, at Steve Wynn’s new mogul-named hotel. “Dragone’s new water-based extravaganza — which opened here last weekend — is at once deeply troubled and proudly uncompromising; arrestingly original and inevitably derivative; dripping with heart and strangely removed. You could say much the same about the much-hyped Wynn Las Vegas Hotel, wherein whimsy has been left outside on the street. And yet “Le Reve” also is at war with its surroundings.”

Washington, D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth theatre has been around for a quarter century without ever managing to settle down. Until now. “After playing for 25 years in churches, reconditioned auto repair shops, borrowed lodgings and places with stage ceilings only 12 feet high, the adventurous theater company today has almost everything its heart could desire. Just in time for tonight’s official opening” at its new home in downtown D.C.

Tony De Santis has opened a new theatre in Chicago – the Drury Lane at the Water Tower. This is the latest addition to the 91-year-old’s theatre empire. “Well, I don’t know anything about theater per se, so it’s fair to say that I’m not a theater person,” De Santis says with a chuckle from his office at Drury Lane Oak Brook. “But I am a very good businessman.”