Category: theatre

For the second season in a row, attendance at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland has declined. “Attendance was 356,770 for the year, a drop of about 25,000 from 2003. The theater sold about 80 percent of its seats during the season, for ticket revenues of $12,854,751. The 2003 season finished at about 86 percent of capacity.”

“In a week when the culture gaps between Britain and America have been much discussed, here’s another: a performer few Britons have heard of is simultaneously the biggest star on Broadway. Only now, finally, Britain is starting to get it. Nathan Lane is a name half-glimpsed on a billboard or in the entertainment listings of newspapers. He is still on the periphery of our vision, almost focused and almost famous, but come Tuesday he will step magnificently centre stage.”

Should a theatre’s incoming artistic director fire his resident ensemble acting company and starting over? The Denver Center Theatre Company’s outgoing director suggests the move is essential. “If anyone came in from the outside and made the blanket statement, ‘I want everyone to stay,’ then I would say that person is not qualified to take the job”

“West End theatre producers are to make radical attempts to fireproof new shows against the critics as they survey the smouldering wreckage of productions closed following bad reviews.” Specifically, the idea is to change the tradition whereby every critic in the city shows up for opening night, and reviews that one performance. “Producers believe the opening night combination of nervous relatives and anxious financial backers can destabilise performances. The experimental move, which has been cautiously welcomed by several critics as well as by theatre owners, is a response to the growing power of the London critics.”

Georgia’s Aurora Theatre is much in demand. Three cities are competing to lure the theatre to take up residence…

“Conceding what had become painfully obvious along Broadway, the producers of Gem of the Ocean, a new play by August Wilson, said yesterday that they were postponing the show’s first performance while they continued their hunt for financing. All performances through Nov. 14 have been canceled.”

Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, “associated with the greats of Irish culture, including W B Yeats, Augusta Gregory, Sean O’Casey and J M Synge, is embroiled in an off-stage drama which rivals its front-of-house productions. Mounting debts, disastrous box-office numbers and a very public row between board members and the theatre’s creative director, Ben Barnes, have rather overshadowed the festival to celebrate the founding of what was intended as a cornerstone of Irish cultural and artistic life.”

A look at the making of the London production of The Producers shows how the modern musical is built these days. “Huge producer consortiums are now the norm for modern stage musicals. The single, all-powerful producer exerting full artistic and financial control has become exceptionally rare – Cameron Mackintosh being the notable exception. But most big shows, particularly those that transfer internationally, are financed and packaged like films.”

“The ingredient fuelling all of these works is a burning hatred for George W. Bush and his government, particularly as manifested by the war in Iraq. While this kind of agit-prop has been around since the ancient Greeks, it usually doesn’t hit the stage this quickly after the events that inspired it.”

“No doubt that may be the feeling of some people who believe theater should be uplifting and inspiring rather than critical and political. They may believe theaters should focus on uncontroversial classics by dead playwrights rather than rabble-rousing by decidedly live and lively ones. But in this election season, there are some who like their theater on the hot side.”