Category: theatre

Slava Polunin is one of the world’s busiest clowns, although, he protests, ‘There are no competitors among clowns’.”

In the UK, playwrights have been energized by politics. “It is a remarkable moment for political theatre. Not only have 9/11, the Iraq war and the Bush administration energised playwrights, the acoustic has never been so good. People want from political theatre a clarity they are not getting from politicians. Harold Pinter claims: ‘We live in a country the government of which is totally discredited, in a poisonous atmosphere in which everyone is under the weather’.”

Last season only two one-person shows made an impression on Broadway. But this season “no fewer than six one-person shows — some of which may be termed special events or plays, depending on the administration committee’s frame of mind — have been announced.”

Before Frank Wildhorn’s Dracula opened on Broadway, producers announced that a “G”-rated version would be shown at matinees (omitting a nude scene). Evidently audiences have voted with their ticket purchases, and the cleaned up matinees are being discontinued.

“If musicals amused people in the 1930s, hypnotised them in the 40s and 50s and more or less died out in the 1970s, they have, despite their recycled storylines and arch dialogue, never really wanted for fond audiences. After a long, slow decline, the film musical appears to be coming back. There are at least five in production at the moment, among them Rent and The Producers, and one soon to be released, De-Lovely, a biopic of Cole Porter in which Kevin Kline plays the lead and the songs are performed by pop stars.”

Chicago’s House Theatre is the latest of the city’s “generation-defining ensembles that includes Steppenwolf and Lookingglass. With 26-year-old Nathan Allen as head carpenter, the House — with its boyishly playful, highly physical shows that keep a steady finger on the pop-cultural pulse as they win mostly rave reviews — has quickly become the theater for the under-35 crowd, a demographic that few other companies seem able to pry away from their date movies and ‘Friends’ reruns.”

Charles Isherwood, the chief theater critic for Variety since 1998, will become The New York Times’ second-string theater critic Sept 8. He replaces Margo Jefferson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Times veteran whose six-month tenure was remarkable for the ire it inspired in the theater community.

Dublin’s Abbey Theatre has a legendary past and, under Artistic Director Ben Barnes, a stable present. But as it stands on the brink of its second century, what lies ahead is less than certain.

As the number of Singapore’s arts organizations rises, so does competition for government funding. Many theater groups are opting for safe programming that poses little risk at the box office, but the shift toward proven titles and sexy plays is edging out new and experimental work. “Once-diverse groups are in danger of becoming market-driven clones.”

The debate on who wrote the Shakespeare plays has erupted at London’s Globe Theatre, where all theories are getting an airing. “For a long time, over on this side of the Atlantic at all events, to doubt that William, the man of Stratford, wrote the plays, was for a person who hoped to have a literary career in the university a very dangerous view to entertain,” he said. “It was not popular, to put it very bluntly. Very unpopular. It was felt to sort of suggest you were, to use a word, ‘unsound.’ We merely say that in the present state of knowledge, we certainly don’t think that the Stratfordians have made out their case, but we equally don’t believe that the Oxfordians have either.”