Category: theatre

London’s Unicorn Theatre, which is constructing a £12.6 million new home on the banks of the Thames, is running out of available cash for the project, and needs to raise £1.6 million immediately if the building is to be completed in time for next year’s planned opening.

Across Boston, new theatres are being built. “This growth, though, comes with a sobering reality. Theaters have more seats to fill, more competition, and more unknowns. That has some local theater directors a little nervous.”

Vallejo Gantner, the director of the Dublin Fringe Festival, has been chosen as the new director of PS 122, New York’s bastion of avant garde theatre and dance. Mark Russell, his predecessor, announced his resignation in December after two decades in the job.

August Wilson’s beleagured play, Gem of the Ocean, has found a new lead investor to rescue its recently delayed Broadway run from oblivion. San Francisco producer Carole Shorenstein Hays has stepped into the funding void after receiving a call from executives at Jujamcyn Theaters. Rehearsals will start up again this week, with previews set to begin later in the month.

After several years of struggle, the Royal Shakespeare Company has turned around its fortunes, reducing its debt from £2.8m to £400,000 in the past financial year. “Bosses say box office hits and cost-cutting have improved their outlook. Artistic director Michael Boyd said: “If we’re going to innovate and experiment on stage, we need to balance the books first.”

With its expense and risk, why has the American musical not only survived but dominated the commercial theatre? “By changing, the musical has remained a truly popular form because it has shown itself capable of speaking to new generations. They grow up on Gene Kelly, but end up loving Velma and Roxie.”

John Heilpern wonders what has happened to the spine of non-profit theatre. “I’ve no argument with bottom-line Broadway producers. Apart from the usual British import or star-driven revival, Broadway has more or less abandoned serious drama. But when the producers of nonprofit theater throw in the towel, we’re in real trouble. They represent the last bastion of the true artist, ‘because it’s where the money isn’t.’ Because their stages are the only places left in American theater where the commercial bottom line isn’t intended to rule.”

The Producers opens in London to a noisy rapturous recepstion. Creator and director Mel Brooks told the Theatre Royal crowd: “So much for British reserve, you people should be arrested for disorderly conduct.”

Pop Idol was a hit trying to find telegenic pop singers. Now a new TV series in the UK applies the format to the Broadway musical, attempting to find stars worthy of the West End. “Yet it is the very difficulty of performing musical theatre to anything approximating a competent standard that, the makers claim, elevates Musicality above the level of your bog-standard TV talent show.”

“Montgomery Davis, one of the prime architects of Milwaukee’s sustained theater boom, will leave his artistic director position with the Chamber Theatre at the end of this season. He will step aside in the spring, 30 years after he founded the Chamber Theatre with actress Ruth Schudson.”