Category: theatre

“The Producers won three prizes at the UK’s most prestigious annual theatre awards, while Mary Poppins won two. Alan Bennett’s The History Boys was the big winner in the straight theatre categories, picking up three trophies.”

The African nation of Uganda has banned The Vagina Monologues following a concerted push by Christian church groups which consider the performance pornographic and derogatory towards men. “Rarely-used powers of censorship have been reinvoked to demand drastic script alterations, including the deletion of references to lesbianism and the removal of the crucial word ‘vagina’ from the title.”

Is the business of Broadway getting better? Some producers say yes. The new corporate investments in Broadway, the road and Las Vegas are making it more attractive financially. Not plays, of course. But those big musicals…

“Producer Rocco Landesman became the owner of Broadway’s third-largest theater chain, Jujamcyn Theaters, yesterday. Mr. Landesman, the longtime president of the chain, said he paid less than $30 million for its five theaters to the estate of James H. Binger, the wealthy Minnesotan who was chairman of the company and who died in November.”

Randy Kennedy takes a tour of New York theatre intermissions. “The tour, fairly random and thoroughly unscientific, took me from the elegant and easeful (two intermissions, one 40 minutes long, during “Turandot” at the Metropolitan Opera) to the middling (bad red wine and strange fashions in a pretty lounge at the Music Box Theater on West 45th Street) to the merely puzzling (a prominent sign announcing the official Champagne of the Classic Stage Company near Union Square, but no Champagne anywhere in sight). In between, several general rules of intermissions were deduced.”

Schiller is the big hit in London this winter. And drama is king. “It has already been a memorable winter for drama in London. There have been three intriguing productions of ‘Macbeth’, one as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s season of Shakespeare’s tragedies. The RSC has also brought in from Stratford-upon-Avon a season of plays from Spain’s Golden Age, and there are some excellent revivals of work by Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan and David Mamet. For a serious, committed theatre-goer, the West End is heaven at the moment.”

Marj Halperin, the long times head of the League of Chicago Theatres, is stepping down from the job. “Established in 1979 — as the Chicago theater community was just beginning to become a cultural force to reckon with — the League now serves as umbrella organization for about 170 Chicago area commercial, not-for-profit and presenting theaters. It is a community of organizations whose budgets, artistic missions and audiences vary widely.”

New York’s Roundabout Theatre has left the League of American Theatres and Producers, which represents Broadway theatres. “Todd Haimes, Roundabout’s artistic director, wasn’t available for comment. Variety quoted him last week as saying only, ‘The league doesn’t serve the needs of a nonprofit theatre operating on Broadway’.”

Is their a scientific explanation for the love Shakespeare writes so eloquently about? “Merging art and science, the Royal Shakespeare Company has engaged a psychotherapist to explain the “science of love” to actors rehearsing new productions of Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It hopes that they will get an understanding of what is happening in the human brain when one person gazes into another’s eyes and murmurs: I’ll follow thee and make a heaven of hell.”

Movie adaptations are everywhere in London’s West End. So a new “Days of Wine and Roses” seems straightforward – a new version of the 1962 Blake Edwards movie. And yet – this “world première” is a riff off the 1973 stage version. That in turn was based on the first Days of Wine and Roses, a play for television, broadcast live in 1958.