Category: theatre

Michael Billington is afraid plays are getting into a rut: “While I’ve no wish to lay down laws, I find myself increasingly disturbed by the fashionable tyranny of the 90-minute play. It is everywhere; and I believe it is crippling ambition, ironing out contradiction, and effectively de-politicising drama.”

“As The Independent’s reviewer, I have seen theatre across the globe, from Bucharest to Phnom Penh. But nothing feels more foreign than Broadway. This is because, in some respects, it has the appearance of being so like home, while actually being very different.”

Performers at this summer’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival are being warned not to use space in one of the Festival’s largest venues after the theatre failed to pay a third of the performers who had worked there. “As the second largest venue in the Cowgate, with a capacity to hold 36 shows, it is a big loss for the Fringe. The Underbelly, which can hold more than 60 shows, is the only larger venue in the area. City festival leaders last night said it was a great blow for the prestigious event and called on new venues to come forward to bridge the gap.”

The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, in Waterford, Conn has decided to reinstate its annual cabaret conference this summer. “The goal of the new and expanded conference is to “keep pushing the envelope” of cabaret and performance, and that this is another way to “keep the O’Neill at the modern edge.”

“Back in bad old Soviet times, the Kirov Ballet and the Moscow Circus seemed to be the only representatives of Russian culture on Western radar screens. But in the 15 years since the Iron Curtain was unhooked from the rigging and stored backstage, dozens of Russian theater companies have traveled around the globe, and much of the globe has rolled its way across Russia’s stages.”

What ails Louisville’s venerable Humana Theatre Festival? Michael Phillips thinks it might be something as simple as a lack of competition for contemporary American drama. “The festival would [also] benefit from writers with a sense of honest, vital political engagement with our country today. This year the protestations amounted to a soapbox derby of speechifying, not entirely uninteresting but not persuasively dramatic.”

The Monty Python-inspired musical, Spamalot, is more than just the latest Broadway smash. It’s an actual piece of legitimate musical theatre that has succeeded in attracting a traditionally elusive demographic on Broadway: men.

“Back in the golden days of Hollywood, studio executives would often scour the theatres of New York and Chicago, searching relentlessly for talented new playwrights to bring out West to join their studio’s creative staff of writers. In that spirit Fox has teamed up with New York’s Naked Angels Theatre Company to produce Naked TV, an innovative project that mirrors those historic days in its attempts to discover and develop new writers for television.”

” Director Peter Brook is on a mission. “Wishing to make theater accessible to all, he’s the first internationally known director to lead the way by insisting that ticket prices must come down. Mr. Brook is saying, in urgent effect, if so many people can no longer afford to go to the theater, what’s the point of theater? It’s the most pressing question of all. The cost of tickets is killing the audience. They’re also killing the future. Kids can’t afford to go. Broadway will always be opportunistic Broadway. The bottom-line choices, the safe, star-driven revivals, are by now normal. We’ve come to expect no better. But in our proudly multi-ethnic city, the loyal audiences at our big nonprofit institutions remain noticeably white, middle-class and aging.”

This year’s Humana Festival of New American Plays was something of a disappointment. “If the playwrights showing new works at the festival earned marks in the category of social significance, their grades in other, more artistically relevant subjects were middling at best. Admiration for their desire to inspire audience interest in tangled social and political issues mingled with disappointment at their inability to channel these concerns into potent theatrical forms.”