Category: theatre

Broadway shows made up of pop songs seem to be getting more popular. “The rise of the jukebox musical comes at a time when Broadway producers seem increasingly unable to consistently strike gold with either overtly campy new work (“Taboo,” “Bombay Dreams”), high-minded, chamber-opera fare (“Caroline, or Change”) or movie-inspired shows (“Never Gonna Dance,” “Footloose”). Add to that the near-complete inability of contemporary Broadway songs to crack the Top 40 list, and the appeal of the jukebox musical becomes even more apparent: here, it seems, is a prepackaged score guaranteed to be hummable and requiring no expensive stars.”

“David Lindsay-Abaire is a much-admired young playwright whose credentials include two years at the Juilliard Playwrights Program and an early stint staging absurdist dramas in the East Village and SoHo. His big career break came five years ago when Ben Brantley, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, raved over the Manhattan Theater Club production of his quirky dark comedy ‘Fuddy Meers.” Now, Lindsay-Abaire has improbably emerged as Broadway’s best hope of reviving the musical with his acerbic wit, willingness to push an audience’s buttons, and aversion to predictable form.

“The commercial theater increasingly relies on repeat visitors. Surveys conducted by the producers of ‘Les Misérables,’ ‘Miss Saigon’ and ‘Phantom of the Opera’ suggest that 40 percent of the audiences for those long-running musicals had seen the show before. For most, that probably meant returning one or two times, to take a friend or to see a new performer in a familiar role. But among repeat customers there is a repeat elite – ‘Rentheads’ at ‘Rent,’ ‘Q-Tips’ at ‘Avenue Q’- who demonstrate an extraordinary level of commitment to their favored entertainments.”

Canada’s most successful theatrical artistic director, Richard Monette, announced yesterday that he’ll be retiring as the head of the Stratford Festival of Canada, but staying on ”at least until the end of 2007, or until such time as a successor is in place.”

Fantastic new-generation theatres in Las Vegas eclipse anything Broadway can produce. “Freed of the constraints of space that are a struggle in jam-packed Manhattan, and armed with shocking amounts of money from wealthy casino conglomerates, show producers can dream far bigger and bolder than in New York. The theater at a Vegas resort is a piece of a much larger business model in which the patrons are also diners, shoppers, hotel guests, and casino players, making it worthwhile for Caesars Palace to plunge $95 million into a showroom for pop star Céline Dion, even though the hotel shares the ticket revenue with Dion and her production company.”

Broadway producers worried about developing a next generation of theatre fans are concentrating on more programs for kids. “Family fare has taken off on Broadway (think “The Lion King,” “Beauty and the Beast”), and a survey from the League of American Theaters and Producers shows that the number of kids filling seats is up slightly. In the 2003-2004 season, the league reports that nearly 1.3 million kids under 18 attended shows, the second highest turnout in more than 20 years (the highest was in 2000-01 season).”

“Imagine a world where the songbooks of American composers, from Jerome Kern to Richard Rodgers to Stephen Sondheim, have never been recorded or captured on film and the only people who knew them well were the performers who originated the roles on-stage and a small community of cabaret connoisseurs… [T]hat hypothetically apocalyptic scenario is the reality of the younger, but equally pedigreed world of English Canadian musical theatre. Hundreds of Canadian shows and thousands of songs have been written in the past 60 or 70 years for which there are no recordings or, in many cases, no musical charts.” Now, a group of performers is trying to fill the void, creating an aural and written record.

“To celebrate its 30th anniversary throughout the 2005-06 season, [Chicago’s] Steppenwolf Theatre has decided to take five big risks. For the first time in its history its principal subscription series will be made up entirely of new works.” Four of the five productions have already been announced, including new plays by Richard Greenberg and Steven Dietz.

Investors in Livent the former theatrical producer headed by Garth Drabinsky, have won a $23.3 million settlement against the company. The judgment “settles a six-year-old lawsuit filed by 200 investors who bought $125 million in corporate bonds offered in late 1997 by Livent, which had produced musicals including “Ragtime” and “Showboat” on Broadway in the 1990’s. Less than a year after issuing the bonds, however, Livent – a publicly held company – announced that it had discovered substantial accounting irregularities and declared bankruptcy.”

Philip Ridley’s new play is so shocking his publisher refued to have anything to do with it. He wonders: “Why is it that it is fine for the classic plays to discuss – even show – these things, but people are outraged when contemporary playwrights do it? If you go to see King Lear, you see a man having his eyes pulled out; in Medea, a woman slaughters her own children. The recent revival of Iphigenia at the National was acclaimed for its relevance. But when you try to write about the world around us, people get upset. If I’d wrapped Mercury Fur up as a recently rediscovered Greek tragedy it would be seen as an interesting moral debate like Iphigenia, but because it is set on an east-London housing estate it is seen as being too dangerous to talk about. What does that say about the world we live in? What does it say about theatre today?”