Category: theatre

Producer Cameron Mackintosh is trying to hit another home run with a production of “Mary Poppins”. It contains songs from the old Disney movie plus some new music. “The oft-predicted demise of the blockbuster musical is still a long way off, the impresario, unsurprisingly, believes. ‘The only thing that really changes is the writers. The profession can often be wrong about what the audience wants, but then someone will come up with something different’.”

When the success of your theatre is based on how many tickets you sold, it can be bad when attendance declines. Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre has a new director, and ticket sales are down 4,000 over the previous season. So now the Scottish Arts Council is “eyeing falling audience figures at Glasgow’s Citizens’ Theatre, amid concerns over whether the company is delivering value for money.” The Citizen receives an arts council grant of £910,000 a year, more than any other theatre in Scotland. It pulls in another £425,000 from Glasgow City Council.

With some of the worst reviews ever received in London, a musical about Oscar Wilde opened and closed on the same night last week. “Oscar Wilde” opened Tuesday at the 500-seat Shaw Theatre. It closed the next day after receiving excoriating reviews and selling just five tickets for its second performance.”

Was Shakespeare a member of a mystic Muslim sect? “While it has been suggested that Shakespeare dabbled with espionage and Catholic political activism, the new theory will attempt to persuade Shakespeare scholars that the playwright was a member of a religious or spiritual order which can best be compared to the philosophy of Sufism.”

This is the year of political theatre; it’s everywhere. But is it effective as theatre? “Much recent political theatre is informed by the desire to be either a report or an essay. Getting the facts out there is good – putting them on stage gives them electricity they would otherwise lack – but it is not the same as a play.”

“Is theater failing to attract a new generation of enthusiasts to replace those who, on the opposite end of the chronological scale, die off or become too frail to go out at night?” There’s certainly no question that the predominant audience at your average mainstream theater is decidedly, um, mature, but some in the industry insist that the overall audience has expanded, regardless of demographic shifts. Still, “in the decade between 1992 and 2002, the percentage of young people in the overall theater audience shrank significantly.”

A new West End musical about Oscar Wilde has closed ahead of schedule. Okay, that might be understating it a bit. The show, which debuted to scathing reviews and public indifference, was yanked from the Shaw Theatre’s schedule after exactly one performance.

The new partnership between the UK’s National Theatre and the small, scrappy Shunt Theatre is raising eyebrows within the industry, and in fact, the Shunt originally passed up a chance to perform one of its shows at the National, for fear that it would be attracting the wrong crowd. But when the head of the National offered to help the Shunt acquire its dream theater, the temptation was too great to ignore. “By acquiring this striking new space and allying itself with the National Theatre, Shunt significantly increases its profile and ability to attract new fans. But it also risks undermining its underground credibility and alienating core fans.”

The art of human sculpture is a corner of the world of mime about which few people have much knowledge. And yet, for the dedicated individuals who make their living by covering themselves in metallic paint and standing still on street corners and in subway stations for hours at a time, it’s both an art and a sport, requiring the utmost in both creativity and physical conditioning.

New York gets five new Off-Broadway theatres, carved out of a former movie multiplex. Ambitious, but how do they work for the live stage?