Category: theatre

Earlier this month, playwright Roy Close sent a missive to the Playwrights Center and several of its funders, severing his ties to the organization and complaining that the Minneapolis-based writer’s haven has become an elitist autocracy, more concerned with its own glory and hosting America’s hottest playwrights than with helping locals build and develop their skills as playwrights. Director Polly Carl is attempting to mold the center, founded as a glorified support group for stage writers, into an organization with national membership and outreach. The conflict has stirred conversation among playwrights, theater practitioners and philanthropic organizations.”

“Provocative arguments about the role of faith in our private and public lives are dominating our typically secular stages right now, courtesy of playwrights and performers from Catholic backgrounds. What to make of this current run of plays with an explicitly theological bent? Not surprisingly, the subject of sexual abuse in the Church has been at the center of several productions already.”

One place of great growth in the arts? In the UK, in 2002/03, the country’s 40 rural touring schemes staged more than 3,000 professional shows to a quarter of a million people. Since the creation in 1997 of umbrella body the National Rural Touring Forum (NRTF), performances have doubled. “Village halls are places where, far from the nearest focus group fretting about access or elitism, real life takes place. Gigs are packed with people, because whole communities – farmers, retired people, young families – turn out to what is a major event in their social calendar.”

Dinner theatre is theatre for the old, right? So how do you attract new audiences? All arts organizations struggle with this, but dinner theatre has a stigma that younger audiences tend to reject wholesale. And when you try something new, your core audience… well it tends not to like change.

Will “Sweet Charity” be a hit? It’s currently in try-outs on the road, and it’s probably too early to tell. But one thing is already clear: “A so-so revival of a 1966 musical, doing fairly good business at the box office in its first two tryout cities (Minneapolis and Chicago), has now become the backstage drama of the year.”

“An architectural partnership which has designed only one previous theatre was yesterday appointed to the £100m transformation of the art deco Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. Bennetts Associates, whose Hampstead theatre, north London, opened in 2003, will convert the 1,400-seat end-on auditorium into a 1,000-seater with an improved relationship between actors and audience.”

So Toronto will play host to the first theatrical staging of Lord of the Rings. That’s all well and good, but who exactly is going to headline such a blockbuster show? If we know Canada, the best bet to sell tickets will be to pack the cast with Canadian superstars, so what about Christopher Plummer as Gandalf, Jim Carrey as Gollum, Martin Short as Bilbo Baggins, or even (wait for it) Celine Dion as Legolas? Hey, it could happen…

Spamalot, the musical, opens on Broadway. “It seems safe to say that such a good time is being had by so many people (including the cast) at the Shubert Theater that this fitful, eager celebration of inanity will find a large and lucrative audience among those who value the virtues of shrewd idiocy, artful tackiness and wide-eyed impiety. That includes most school-age children as well as grown-ups who feel they are never more themselves than when they are in touch with the nerdy, nose-thumbing 12-year-olds who reside within.”

Despite calls by a Christian group urging Britain’s regional theatres not to carry Jerry Springer, The Opera, it looks like a tour will go forward. “Christian Voice wrote to 250 theatres earlier this month urging them to boycott the controversial musical. But the musical’s producer, John Thoday, told The Stage newspaper that theatres had been largely supportive of the tour. Jerry Springer – the Opera is due to open in Plymouth in January 2006.”

The Broadway producing team at Dodger Theatricals has become something of an industry joke in recent years, with a long string of expensive, high-profile flops to its credit. But it wasn’t too long ago that Dodger was a certified hitmaker, and the company’s fall from grace illustrates the tough, unforgiving environment of the high-end theatre world. “The Dodgers’ difficulties have been met with a mix of sadness and schadenfreude along Broadway, where the company was considered talented and lucky, earnest and arrogant, often all at the same time.”