Category: theatre

“The juggernaut shows are no longer based on teary epics or lugubrious legends or dark poems. The singing gloom-and-doom characters of the Great White Way — the bedraggled street urchins and guilt-ridden Vietnam War veterans and weather-beaten felines — have packed up their dressing rooms. One formidable survivor, that spectral opera-house haunter in the half-mask, is looking ever lonelier. Today, the hits are all about tee-hee and ha-ha and oh-ho-ho. What packs ’em in is hilarity in major chords. Monty Python, Mel Brooks, sex-crazed puppets, Harvey Fierstein in a triple-D cup: These are the new aristocrats of Broadway. Types with a thing for the funny bone.”

Broadway cast albums rarely make much money. But they are very valuable as promotional tools for a show trying to hit it big. So the producers of Broadway’s “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” is giving away 50,000 copies of the show’s album as a way of promoting it.

“Product placement and endorsement deals have long been staples in television shows, movies and radio programs and even, more recently, on video games. But they have been rare on Broadway. Now, advertisers, casting about for new ways to attract increasingly distracted consumers, have turned their attention to the theater world. And producers, always looking for extra cash to offset rising costs, are receptive.”

How can you see all the theatre you want without spending a cent? Just show a few people to their seats, stuff a few Playbills, and wait for the lights to go down. Welcome to the world of New York’s Off-Broadway volunteer ushers, a strange and wacky collection of eccentrics, elderly fans on a budget, and hypercompetitive prima donnas.

“As the Tony Award races start to come into focus, it looks as if the biggest star on Broadway this spring may find himself shut out of the nominees’ circle. Critics and theater insiders have greeted Denzel Washington’s turn as ‘Brutus’ in the wrong-headed revival of Julius Caesar at the Belasco with, at best, indifference and, at worst, disappointment… [Still,] the competition for the five slots for Best Actor in a Play is fierce — and there is no shortage of big names to spice up the category.”

Director Peter Brook has stripped away a lot for his new production. But it took him a long time to do it. “I tell young people: ‘At the age of 80, I have discarded many, many things to find that my taste is for simplicity. Don’t take that as a formula when you’re at an age when you should be plunging into every sort of experience, as I was doing.’ “

Last week critic Michael Billington compained that the new generation of 90-minute plays was creatively challenged. Ian Rickson begs to disagree: “New cultural and political eras demand new forms. There is a scepticism towards big ideas among the young – but that does not mean they are not engaged with or disturbed by contemporary society. We live in a time when there is a disappointment with unifying ideology and a greater consciousness of contradiction. The old forms in which the writer diagnoses and hypothesises no longer speak to today’s playwrights. In dramatising a more complex, atomised culture, playwrights may seek vivid, suggestive fragments as a better form.”

Broadway musicals used to crank out hits. No more. “Shows just aren’t giving us any new hit songs. Sure, you can hear top 40 hits along Broadway. But the songs were composed 20, 30 or 40 years ago, and they weren’t written for the theater. Instead, they’re shoehorned into shows like “Mamma Mia!” (ABBA), “Movin’ Out” (Billy Joel), “All Shook Up” (Elvis Presley) and “Good Vibrations” (the Beach Boys). Next up is “Lennon,” which opens in July.”

Denver Repertory Theatre is only two years old. And now the company finds itself out on the street after an inspection of the company’s theatre resulted in a list of violations that would cost more than $100,000 to fix…

“There are still plenty of musicals and one-man shows on Broadway, but the classic boulevard comedy – once the backbone of commercial theater – has become scarce. By contrast, Off Off Broadway, home base for the avant-garde of Big Ideas and Serious Intentions, is filled with vaudevillian high jinks and lowbrow satire.”