Category: theatre

Your Flop Of Flops

“While a West End contract would once have come with a steady pay cheque, those job-secure days have long gone. London has never suffered from the same “smash or flop” psychosis that drives Broadway (where stories abound of actors celebrating first nights at fashionable restaurants, only to have their champagne glasses wrestled from their grasp by waiters just seconds after a duff review has appeared in the first edition of The New York Times), but the indications are that we are rapidly heading down the same road. With rare exceptions, shows today are often either enormous hits or ‘snigger-at-it-while-it-lasts’ shockers.”

George W., Theatrical Muse

You can’t turn around in the theatre world today without bumping into an on-stage characterization of the President of the United States. Ben Brantley has watched a wide array of the Bush portrayals, and is amazed at the passion the man seems to have inspired in actors and playwrights. “This wide-ranging theatrical Bush garden is the more remarkable considering that in the 1990’s, I never reviewed a work in which William Jefferson Clinton was the leading character.”

Glimmer Of Hope For Endangered Gem

“A group of top Broad way producers, who have backed some of the most important American plays of the last several years, may throw a lifeline to Gem of the Ocean. The producers — Elizabeth I. McCann, Roger Berlind and Scott Rudin — were trying yesterday to figure out a way to get the acclaimed August Wilson play to Broadway this season. Gem of the Ocean is on the brink of collapse because its lead producer, Ben Mordecai, has failed to raise the $2.3 million needed to bring it to the stage.” Still, the trio of producers has no intenion of bailing Mordecai out of his existing debts, so the production must still be considered a long shot.

For Sale: Broadway Dress-up

Broadway’s Theater Development Fund “began selling 20,000 costumes from its collection of nearly 85,000 in preparation for a move to a smaller space. The nonprofit Theater Development Fund, perhaps best known for its low-cost TKTS booth at Times Square, runs arts education programs and rents professional costumes at discounts to nonprofit theater groups and schools nationwide. Much of the development fund’s inventory comprises donations from the Metropolitan Opera, Broadway and private collections.”

Newfoundland Director Snags Coveted Prize

“Canada’s richest theatre award has gone to an artist from one of its poorest provinces. Jillian Keiley, 34, the founding artistic director of the St. John’s-based Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland, was named the recipient of the 2004 Elinore & Lou Siminovitch Prize in Theatre. The prize comes with a $100,000 cheque, of which the winner keeps $75,000 and gives the remainder to a protégé of her choice: in this case, fellow Newfoundland director Danielle Irvine.”