Category: theatre

“After an all-night negotiating session, Broadway’s stagehands and producers reached an agreement early yesterday on a new three-year contract. The deal is the latest between producers and the theater industry’s three major unions, effectively assuring labor peace on Broadway at least through the spring of 2007.”

Oskar Eustis is being cheered as new director of New York’s Public Theatre. “Though he has a long and impressive résumé of staging both classic and contemporary drama, Eustis has built his career away from the New York spotlight, which explains why he’s best known here as the genius who fostered Tony Kushner’s epic Angels in America. A chorus of praise has risen from playwriting quarters at the news of his appointment.”

Oskar Eustis was not an obvious choice to be the new director of New York’s Public Theatre. But “though the 46-year-old Eustis is not a high-profile New York director, the reaction by many in the theater community is that he has earned the right to the job.”

A New York theater is trying a new technique to get audience members to turn off their rage-inducing cell phones. Staffers at the Brooks Atkinson Theater noticed that the public had become fairly immune to a simple prerecorded announcement asking for the phones to be shut down, so just before curtain, they’ve begun playing an obnoxious recording of cell phone rings so realistic that people all over the house dive for their phones in horror. “And so a new front may have been opened in the long, hard war against the rude and the clueless… With some of those people, polite appeals are a waste of time.”

There is a Latino theater boom going on all across America, and while the works of Latino playwrights may not exactly be exploding onto the stages of the nation’s most prominent companies yet, many major regional theaters are recognizing the importance of the Hispanic audience. Still, Latino playwrights are a bit suspicious of the new embrace of legitimacy, and are reacting cautiously, wanting to avoid becoming token minorities in the still overwhelmingly white theater world.

Oscar Eustis on his new job running New York’s Public Theatre: “I think it’s the most important job in American theater. And I think it’s the most New York theater there is. It’s quintessential.”

Musicals are the hot product in London’s West End. “Many top directors, designers and choreographers are moving from opera into high-risk musicals, many of which crash on landing.” But “there is no ignoring the energy that is flowing into stage musicals – to the point where the genre is fast becoming the art form of the decade.”

Two Boston-area theatres are cutting back operations because of a “difficult economy.” “Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell, one of the longest-running theaters north of Boston, this week announced a multistep restructuring in an attempt to stay solvent. The Wang Center, meanwhile, said yesterday that it would cancel its production of “True West” early next year.”

“The board of the Public Theater, [New York’s] signature nonprofit theater company, is expected today to hire Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., as its next producer. If approved, Mr. Eustis, 46, will succeed George C. Wolfe, the current producer, and become just the fourth person to hold a job that is considered one of the most prestigious in the American theater… Mr. Eustis will probably face considerable challenges as the Public Theater producer, a job that often requires one to be equal parts diplomat and dictator, artist and administrator.”

A bevy of Broadway bigwigs of the non-profit persuasion gathers to discuss the role of non-profits in a city dominated by commercial Broadway. For one thing, “since Broadway rarely produces new writers these days, the task falls to the nonprofits to provide an outlet for new voices.”