Category: theatre

The turnaround of the Royal Shakespeare Company in the past year has been amazing. Artistic director Michael Boyd was visibly jubilant at the company’s most successful Stratford season in 10 years, the slashing of the crippling deficit he inherited – and above all confounding the advisers who warned him Middle England would stay away from his current season of 17th century Spanish plays: “I’m glad my optimism about human nature has been rewarded.”

The National New Play Network aims to make it easier for playwrights to get new work produced. “The economics are very challenging, and looking for national attention is part of everyone’s goal. We’re trying to find the best way to share and maximize resources. We’re using the model of the new Europe instead of a feudal system where companies build walls around themselves.”

Fifty thousand fans pack Times Square for a free preview of the new theatre season. “The 13th annual “Broadway on Broadway” concert featured musical performances from 16 shows, including “Mamma Mia!,” “Avenue Q” and the new musical “Little Women.” The outdoor show prompted some to line up as early as 8 a.m. for the chance to catch a glimpse of their favorite performers.”

“How did Shakespeare become Shakespeare? Apart from the poems and plays themselves, the surviving traces of Shakespeare’s life are abundant but thin. The known facts have been rehearsed again and again for several centuries.” But the issue has never been settled. Will it ever be?

This fall marks a turning point for Cleveland theatre. “One of the most important such dramatic dialogues in Cleveland this fall isn’t at one particular theater, it’s at all our theaters. It’s about the theater. What kind of theater are we willing to support? To what degree do we value our theatrical institutions and artists? Enough to keep them around and performing at the same level?”

Gillian Slovo’s play about Guantánamo detainees was controversial in London – so how would it play in New York? “For a novelist who has not previously written for the theatre, New York did seem rather unbelievable, and, it has to be confessed, not a little frightening. This is a play, after all, that centres on British Asians or British Islamic converts, people who had all got caught up in the events that followed the obliteration of the Twin Towers. How would Americans deal with it?”

British theater is unapologetically political at the moment, and plays satirizing the Bush and Blair governments are wildly popular with UK audiences frustrated by the unresponsiveness of their leaders to public sentiment. But so far, the newly activist theater community has coalesced entirely around one point of view – the liberal one – and no one in the theater community seems to have a problem with that. Still, with some theaters beginning to blend political fact with Orwellian ideological fiction, the liberal dominance of activist theater is sparking debate in critical circles.

Chicago’s distinctive and aptly named Defiant Theatre closes its doors forever this week with a production of Anthony Burgess’s classic of violence and societal manipulation, A Clockwork Orange. “Anyone who’s been watching the distinctive theatrical work of Defiant — the original bad boys and girls of the off-Loop — over these last 10 years quickly gets [director Christopher] Johnson’s meta-point. Defiant is over… The original people have gone soft, gotten married, acquired proper jobs. You can’t keep churning out the old ultra-violence, as Alex would say, on a shoestring in those circumstances.”

“The British Library is putting online 93 high-resolution digitised copies of 21 of Shakespeare’s plays. The texts date from Shakespeare’s lifetime and are pamphlet editions of plays prepared to be sold after performances had finished. The printed works show how the text evolved and cast doubt on the idea of definitive versions of his plays.”