Category: theatre

The bizarre on-again, off-again story of the Broadway-bound (for now) revival of Sweet Charity is a whopper of a tale, even by theatre standards. “According to the show’s ad campaign tagline, the tale of Sweet Charity is that of ‘one woman’s belief that in the midst of adversity, she will find hope and the strength to know that someday all of her dreams will come true.’ The offstage story is of one revival’s belief that in the midst of adversity, it will find hope and the strength to know that someday some of its dreams and even, if one believes in miracles, a smidgen of profit will come true.”

Two unions – Equity and AGMA – are joing forces and vying to take over representation of the Radio City Rockettes. A Equity representative say that “over the years, the Rockettes have expressed their dissatisfaction with the American Guild of Variety Artists, citing lack of service and regular meetings and the inability to get copies of appropriate documents, including the contract and the constitution, from the union.”

From the outside, theatre in Los Angeles might look like it’s struggling. But Luis Alfaro believes a theatrical Golden Age is about to bloom. “What L.A. is on the brink of now, artistically, I think there’s more muscle. I think there’s an age of experimentation, like when Highways was getting going.”

Peter O’Toole has blasted the state of today’s theatre. “Reserving his most corrosive words for the Royal Shakespeare Company and The Royal Court, O’Toole said things have got so bad that up-and-coming young actors are no longer interested in treading the boards.”

Just days after canceling a planned Broadway run of a revival of “Sweet Charity”, producers say they’ll open the show anyway. “I spent the whole weekend on the telephone with Christina Applegate, who made a passionate and compelling case for moving forward with the Broadway plans. Her doctors also confirmed this morning that she will be ready and able to resume performances on April 18.”

London’s Tricycle Theatre is staging a series of enactments of real events. “Critics have hailed the ‘tribunal’ productions as more revealing than any news report. For a start, we can go where cameras are banned. And, thanks to painstaking verisimilitude (every word in the script was spoken by the characters to whom they are attributed), the key players come alive. We see lawyers exchanging notes, water being poured, secretaries looking bored. Lights remain up during the performance, so you can’t help feeling implicated as witnesses lie or prevaricate.”

Puppetry has not traditionally been one of the more respected theatrical forms (witness the hapless practitioner in the hit movie, Being John Malkovich), but in recent years it has begun to emerge from a fifty-year malaise in which puppeteers were relegated to entertaining young children who presumably didn’t know any better. “In the era of special effects and computer-generated imagery, it is unabashedly low-tech. And it’s an art form that stubbornly refuses to die.”

The way performers sing in Broadway musicals is changing, and not for the better, says Ben Brantley. “Close your eyes and listen as their larynxes stretch and vibrate with the pain of being an underdog and the joy of being really loud. Bet you can’t tell them apart. For that matter, bet you can’t distinguish the heroines of the current Broadway musicals Wicked, Little Women and Brooklyn from the average female finalist on American Idol… The accent is on abstract feelings, usually embodied by people of stunning ordinariness, than on particular character. Quivering vibrato, curlicued melisma, notes held past the vanishing point: the favorite technical tricks of Idol contestants are often like screams divorced from the pain or ecstasy that inspired them.”

The supposedly Broadway-bound revival of Sweet Charity starring Christina Applegate won’t be making it to New York, after all. Intial test runs of the show in Minneapolis, Chicago, and Boston garnered mixed reviews, and Ms. Applegate broke her foot midway through the Chicago run, further depressing already-slow ticket sales. Facing the possibility of an expensive Broadway flop, the producers pulled the plug this weekend.

Everyone wants to be a comedian, right? Now you can – with karaoke for standup. “The idea for Joke-e-oke is simple. It’s basically karaoke with stand-up comedy material. Many dream of the chance to be a comedian with killer material in front of a laughing crowd. With Joke-e-oke, people are able to live out their comedy fantasy of being their favorite comedian onstage, choosing from a list of stand-up comedy icons to perform. A built in laugh track is added, timed perfectly to accent punch lines.”