Category: theatre

Broadway has some meaty new plays this season. “Significant new works by August Wilson, Michael Frayn and Donald Margulies were produced on the Great White Way this season, and the two new plays still on the boards, John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt” and Martin McDonagh’s “Pillowman,” are causing the kind of excitement among audiences that is usually reserved for overproduced and overhyped musicals.”

“Vowing to kick their campaign up a notch, theatrical unions have unveiled a bright yellow, 700-square-foot billboard as the next phase of their Blue Man Group boycott. ‘Why won’t the Blue Man Group work with us?’ asks the billboard, which is just south of the Panasonic Theatre where the Blue Man production is slated to open next month. A lunchtime information picket was held yesterday outside the theatre to mark the unveiling of the billboard. The unions — Canadian Actors’ Equity, Toronto Musicians’ Association, and Locals 58 and 822 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees — are angry at the Blue Man Group’s refusal to sit down and work with the unions on issues such as wages and benefits.”

After months of toil, strife, and seemingly endless backstage drama, the Christina Applegate-led revival of Sweet Charity has opened on Broadway. “This production has generated theater news of a kind you supposed didn’t happen anymore, or perhaps never really happened except in old backstage movies. Star breaks leg (well, a bone in her foot) twirling off lamppost onstage in Chicago; talented understudy (Charlotte d’Amboise) opens for star in Boston; producers decide to close show; star insists that she will, will get better in time for a delayed New York opening and helps raise the extra money to ensure show’s arrival, just before the deadline for Tony nominations.” But a fairy-tale ending requires more than determination, and Charity may not make the cut.

“Valiant behavior is no replacement for musical talent or the know-how acquired in years of stage experience. Applegate possesses neither. She has limited musical theater instincts — she wanders off-key rather often — and though she makes admirable attempts to move like a real dancer, you’re aware in every pivot that she isn’t one. (The character, after all, is supposed to dance for her supper.) These deficiencies are as fatal to the production as root rot is to a garden.”

Ray Charles’ life story is going to be made into a Broadway musical. “Ray, a biopic inspired by his career, was released last year – just months after he died. Three producers who worked on that movie are behind the stage adaptation.”

“The promise of Tony Awards is one of the ways that Broadway productions, rarely cash rich, are able to draw Hollywood performers to the stage for much less money than they could make doing a movie or a television show. (Or operating a nice lemonade stand.) But this year, Tony dreams will go unfulfilled for some big-name actors,” due to a veritable glut of star power on the stages of the Great White Way.

“The traditional view of Broadway is that it’s the greatest place in the world for razzle-dazzle musicals, but a desert when it comes to high culture. That’s certainly not the case this year.” In fact, this year’s crop of New York theatre hits reads like a list of great American drama.

“Young audiences are big business for Broadway. Last year the group accounted for 1.3 million tickets sold, 11.2% of all tickets. And 30% of those 1.3 million were sold to kids younger than 12, according to surveys… Young people are such a presence at Broadway shows that the League of American Theatres and Producers has launched a kid-targeted Web site, generationbroadway.com, for children age 8 to 12.”

“Michelle Hensley, artistic director of Minneapolis-based Ten Thousand Things Theater Company, has won the 2005 Francesca Primus Prize, a national award recognizing outstanding accomplishments by female artists in theater… She is the first non-playwright to win the award… Hensley founded Ten Thousand Things in Los Angeles in 1990, and moved to the Twin Cities in 1993. The company’s repertoire includes everything from Shakespeare to Brecht to its current production of the musical Ragtime. Using actors with credits on the Twin Cities’ major stages, Ten Thousand Things’ productions are a perennial part of local critics’ annual best-of lists. Though the company does paid public performances of its work, its core patrons are those in prisons, urban community centers, senior high rises and other audiences not generally exposed to theater.”

There is slightly more than a month to go before the popular Blue Man Group is to open a major show in Toronto, and the media blitz to promote the production has begun. But the group remains locked in a bitter struggle with the unions representing actors, musicians, and stagehands, with no end in sight. Blue Man Group has never been a union show, but has usually paid its participants at rates comparable to those required by labor organizations. Organizers say they don’t understand why they can’t coexist with union shows, as they have in so many other cities, but the unions appear dug in, and are ready to call for a boycott of the Toronto production.