Category: theatre

London’s National Theatre has had a record year at the box office. “The experiment of using sponsorship to slash ticket prices for half the seats in the largest auditorium throughout the summer paid dividends. Sceptics feared it would give regulars a cheap night out, but the season attracted 50,000 first timers. A third of those returned regularly, buying full-price tickets for other shows. Overall the National sold 750,000 tickets, an 11% rise on the previous year.”

“The National’s success with £10 tickets reinforces a basic law of economics. As budget airlines found, passengers will fly to remote destinations if the price is right, so theatre-goers will fill the stalls. Yet theatres must reassure their audience that quality has not been discounted along with the ticket price, or risk suffering the fate of the Savoy Opera earlier this year.”

The Republican Convention was death on Broadway box office. “For the week ending Sun., Sept. 5, all but five of the 22 shows running on the Main Stem suffered significant shortfalls at the box office.”

Seventeen thousand people have signed a protest over the decline of the Broadway original cast album. “Original cast recordings are on the verge of extinction. More and more record executives consider cast recordings a waste of time and money, and have made it clear that the days of recording Broadway shows are numbered.”

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s last two shows didn’t do well. Now he’s got another show opening and a chance o get back on track. “Whether something is actually any good is quite different from whether it is commercial. This time I have gone out as far along the operatic route as I have ever done, if not further. It’s what I wanted to write at this particular point.”

Dodger Stages is “a gleaming new theater complex” on the edge of the Broadway theater district. It is “one of the most expensive Off Broadway theater projects ever – $23 million – and includes five theaters and a range of amenities not always found in the regions Off Broadway, including ample air-conditioning, big dressing rooms, three bars and – its owners proudly point out – “more women’s bathrooms than you’ll find in any space like this.” The company hopes “the new complex would provide the company with an opportunity not only to produce theater without breaking the bank but also to regain some of the youthful energy of the company’s early days.”

Dublin’s powerhouse Abbey Theatre is having a dreadful year. “Last week the incredulous staff were told that one third would have to go, the axe falling hardest on those engaged in bringing on new writers, which they felt was particularly unfortunate in an institution known worldwide as a “writers’ theatre”. The theatre’s studio space, the Peacock, may be closed and its director sacked. To top it all there was an organisational foul-up about the dates for an ambitious run of “18 plays in 14 days” during the Dublin theatre festival later this month.”

“A 1989 Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd at Circle in the Square that used just 14 actors and a synthesizer band of three was wittily re-dubbed “Teeny Todd.” Now a new cut-price West End version of this tale of throat cutting employs only nine actors and no band — the actors double as musicians — to become Teeny-Tiny Todd.”

“No one can underestimate the havoc wrought in Chile by the Pinochet military dictatorship from 1973 to 1990. ‘Culture,’ in the words of my dramatist friend Benjamin Galemiri, ‘was seen by Pinochet as an act of terrorism.’ Under the dual threat of state censorship and physical intimidation, many artists were silenced.” But now, Chilean theatre is reawakening…

Scottish theatre has plenty of talent and produces much good work. But theatre is so underfunded, the country’s theatres are starving for oxygen. “When dairy farmers are milking their cows, they increase their ration. If the cows do not get enough, they move on to their own body mass. That’s the state of Scottish theatre. We don’t have enough resources to maintain the body.”