Category: theatre

Five years ago, it seemed that the out-of-town pre-Broadway trial run was dead, the victim of high production costs and increasingly devastating critical reaction. But these days, nearly every big-budget Broadway show is getting a trial run outside the Big Apple, with Chicago having replaced the various Northeastern cities that used to host tryouts. “With a metro area of about 9 million, it has the requisite population base. It has a sophisticated theater audience with a track record of interest in new work. It has an ample supply of technical crew and stagehands who, due to union concessions, come considerably cheaper than their counterparts in New York.”

How popular is Chicago’s pre-Broadway run of the Monty Python-inspired musical Spamalot? Tickets are going for as much as $450 on ticket-swap web sites, and the best way to get a decent seat may actually be to get a pricey hotel room for the night, and then leave your ticket order in the hands of a professional concierge. “In its first seven-performance week, the show did $778,599 in business, selling virtually every seat.”

“It’s been a rough couple of years for Broadway musical revivals, with a series of high-profile financial failures, including Gypsy, Man of La Mancha and Wonderful Town. What each of those shows had in common were stars like Bernadette Peters, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Donna Murphy, all of whom had respected theatrical résumés but lacked lasting box office punch. Theater fans might have cared, but the general public, it seemed, did not.” So the producers of two of this year’s most anticipated revivals are going outside the traditional theatre world for stars, hiring jazz singer Harry Connick and sitcom actress Christina Applegate in an effort to boost ticket sales.

Whose fault is it when a theatrical production bombs? Actors tend to blame directors, who have ultimate control over what goes on onstage. Directors fault bad casting, uneven acting, and lack of money for flops. And when all else fails, everyone can always get together and blame the writer.

The hottest theatre ticket in Chicago? It’s the Monty Python “Spamalot,” which has opened in previews. It’s the biggest show at the box office since The Producers. “In its first seven-performance week, the show did $778,599 in business, selling virtually every seat. (By contrast, the concurrent first week of the pre-Broadway tryout of “All Shook Up” did only $457,768.)

Broadway had a record year of revenue and attendance. Still, “Broadway continues to be a very high-risk investment and continues to be challenged by enormous cost pressures. Many shows have enjoyed strong grosses; many shows have not. Those grosses don’t invariably mean profits. Historically, one out of every five shows breaks even, and an even lower percentage make money. That trend continues. There’s no change in that.”

Tacoma Actors Guild, which suddenly shut down last month, has bought a little time. A suburban Seattle theatre will take over the theatre’s building for the next 2 1/2 years while TAG tries to regroup. Bellevue Civic Theatre, a semiprofessional compared to TAG’s fully professional status, will “hire actors and crew on a show-by-show basis. TAG’s staff might get occasional work, but will not be rehired.”

The best year for theatre? How about 1905, suggests Dominic Dromgoole. “What made the plays of this moment hit the target so often? Historically, these dramatists occupied a unique moment, precariously balanced between traditional structures and modernism. Ibsen began a process of stretching and distorting the sturdy Victorian play, disturbing its traditional scaffold of strong narrative and regular crisis and resolution. Others took it further. The old form wasn’t sufficient for expressing the miasma of little moments they saw and heard around them. They took the four-act form and filled it with the lazy chaos of life and the confused mess of the inner self.”

Last month, after 26 years in business, Tacoma Actors Guild suddenly closed its doors. “By December, TAG had only $30,000 in the bank, enough to cover a single two-week payroll. But when the bank heard about the indefinite closure and layoffs in the newspaper, it froze the $30,000 against the $165,000 note. Staffers refused to work without pay, and the Christmas play ended abruptly, its set left standing onstage.”

“The announcement that former Dublin Fringe director Vallejo Gantner has been named P.S.122’s artistic director has quieted fears about the East Village institution’s future. But what will Russell—one of the city’s most visionary performing arts curators, the man who fostered the careers of John Leguizamo, Eric Bogosian, Spalding Gray, and Danny Hoch—do without a venue to program? Why, program the city, of course…”