Category: theatre

The Humana Festival has chosen the six plays for this year’s festival. All the dramatists whose work appears in this year’s festival arrive with accolades already in hand, and many have NYC connections.

Toronto’s theatres are taking on corporate names. The latest is the New Yorker Theatre, which is becoming the Panasonic Theatre. The company reportedly paid $4 million for the deal, spread out over 10 years. “The theatre’s lobby alone will be equipped with $250,000 worth of state-of-the-art audio-visual equipment from Panasonic, including its latest 65-inch high-definition plasma TV.”

Broadway scored a record week at the box office in the last week of 2004. “During the week between December 27 and January 2, the 31 shows on the Great White Way took in a total of $22,069,502. That topped the previous record, set during December 23 to December 29, 2003, by $718,869.”

A man burst into the box office of the Town Hall Theatre in Galway, Ireland and took the evening’s ticket receipts. But “on his way in and out of the theatre, he pointedly walked past the bucket of money in the foyer, donations which had been collected for the tsunami disaster fund before each matinee and evening performance.”

Members of New York’s venerable Jean Cocteau Repertory Company were dismayed when a new artistic director took the theatre in a direction they didn’t like. So they quit and built a new theatre company – the Phoenix. Its first run sold out to critical praise. But can the company sustain itself as a going concern?

The baby boom generation is stifling Australian theatre, according to the younger directors and writers struggling to worm their way into the business, and one prominent playwright is calling for nothing less than a revolution. “We have lost the notion of a ‘whole’ Australian theatre, one in which each component part has a vital yet interdependent function… This has been the most serious casualty of Anglo-New Wave disaffection. We have lost a sense of overarching identity in our theatre. And we need to get it back.”

Andrew Lloyd Webber, who dominates London’s West End theatre district not only with his music but with his ownership of eleven venues, is reportedly in talks with a mystery buyer to sell off four of his theatres.

Nicholas Hytner’s tenure at the head of the UK’s National Theatre has not been without difficulty, but at the moment, he is presiding over an institution widely thought to be at the top of its creative and popular game. “In the last financial year he made a small profit, even with a slash in ticket prices, instead of the $900,000 loss that was predicted. He has filled 90 percent of the 2,300 seats, many with first-timers (as credit cards receipts attest). And he has staged new, risky work and venerable classics – from “Jerry Springer – the Opera” to Euripides’ “Iphigenia at Aulis” to David Hare’s “Stuff Happens,” a docudrama about the Iraq war – while sometimes dazzling audiences and critics.”

Boston’s African-American Theatre Festival has been around since 2001, but it’s barely registered as a blip on the radar screen of one of the country’s top theatre towns. But “this year the festival has gotten a major boost in visibility and cachet. The Huntington Theatre Company is hosting the festival in the larger of its two new theaters at the Calderwood Pavilion in the South End.”

It’s a bit early to be declaring 2005 the Year Of The Anything, but a look at the upcoming Broadway schedule does make a few trends abundantly clear. If all goes as expected, this will be the year that the Broadway musical regained its footing (likely on the back of the Monty Python blockbuster Spamalot), and the year that the Great White Way threw in the towel on new plays, opting instead for a host of revivals of classic stage works featuring big-name stars to draw in the tourists.