Category: theatre

Washington, D.C. is experiencing a theatre building boom, and the designs reflect not only an impressive devotion to audience comfort, but a revolutionary new way of looking at the building process. “For the first time, many theater artists are sitting at the design table, shaping the spaces in which they’ll practice their craft.”

“Just at the moment when Hollywood North has moved into meltdown mode, with deep-pocketed U.S. movie and TV producers running away from Toronto instead of to Toronto, Broadway North also has become a vanishing act. With the early closing of The Producers and Hairspray, open-ended, long running $8-million or $10-million musicals have become an endangered species in this town… For now, Toronto has reverted to taking limited runs of big touring shows. Where there used to be four long-run musicals in town, now there is only one.”

The Twin Cities-based theatre company known as Outward Spiral has called a “town meeting” to discuss its future. At issue is not so much the cost of doing business – Spiral has always been a low-budget company – but whether there is still a place for a gay-themed troupe in an age when mainstream theatre regularly features gay characters and issue-themed plays. “It sounds scary and foreboding, but it’s a healthy conversation. Just as none of us is immortal, so does not every arts organization need to live forever. Art, like life, has cycles, and people who claim to have the perception and insight to produce art should be able to use those same skills to ascertain when an arts group has reached the end of its useful life.”

So the Broadway play is becoming an endangered species. Is this evolution of the Great White Way into a musical-dominated tourist trap really worth getting all worked up about? “What’s striking is the recent inability of the Broadway drama to stir the passions of anyone except the most dedicated theatergoers. TV, films, books and music all create waves of discussion about the way we live or run our government… When a play does tap into a hot issue these days, it tends not to happen on Broadway.”

How are people deciding to go to the theatre in New York? It’s changing: “Our research shows if you’re a young person in your 20s and you want all New York has to offer, you read Time Out New York or The Village Voice. In other words, the Times is less important, and nothing beats word of mouth. Well, one of the things we’re interested in is how to build word of mouth as news coverage shrinks.”

The musical Bombay Dreams is closing on Broadway eight months after opening. “The musical opened to negative reviews in April and has been playing at half-full capacity in the Broadway Theatre.”

Ontario’s Stratford Festival managed to balance its books for the year. “But attendance continues to fall, dropping nearly 40,000 compared with the previous season — to 568,715 from 608,080. Average paid attendance at the Festival’s four theatres was 68 per cent of capacity.”

The Denver Center Theatre Company’s new director Kent Thompson has a plan to position the company as a champion of new plays. “One of my first priorities will be a major expansion of the new-play program here. With the help of the board and the community, I know we will find a way to support some of the great new voices of the American theater.”

British theatre legend Peter Hall has a new challenge with a new theatre. “The burly, indefatigable and often outspoken father figure of modern British theatre, who created the Royal Shakespeare Company and then took the National Theatre to its present home on the South Bank and ran it for an often turbulent decade, has found a new berth in Kingston-upon-Thames.”

A London theatre is trying a new ticket-pricing scheme. The earlier you buy, the cheaper your ticket. “For all 27 performances, the first 20 seats will be sold on a first-come-first-served basis at £10 each, the next 20 at £20 and so on, until only the final 20 seats are available priced at £30 each.”