Category: theatre

Zimbabwe has little theatre, but what theatre it has is making an impact. “Since the Zimbabwean government introduced tough media laws in 2002, theatre has taken on a new and edgy role. It is a place where entertainment can express, yet mask, deep-rooted anger; where in the face of a dying culture, humour and humanity can be tended like glowing coals, ready for igniting in the future. And since the media crackdown, audiences have started to grow exponentially.”

“It’s bad enough that some of the best and brightest theater talents are fleeing to television and the movies. But when the regional theater – where you felt you always had a home – blocks their main stages to you, you might as well start packing your sunscreen for the West Coast. And many already have.”

For more than 30 years the Cocteau Theatre, a small Off-Broadway company presenting classics in the 140-seat Bouwerie Lane Theater in the East Village, has been a valuable asset of New York theater. Then last week, a sizeable number of the organization’s board (and several actors) resigned in a dispute…

In the latest pop-music-comes-to-Broadway deal, a musical featuring songs by the Beach Boys – Surf’s up! “Good Vibrations,” a new musical using more than 30 Beach Boys songs – will open on Broadway in January.

A new concept is being tested in a few North American theaters: closed captioning. The idea is simple – patrons whose hearing loss makes it difficult to hear the voices coming from the stage can read the full text of the play in real time on a small screen placed near the stage. The captions are smaller than the surtitles used at many opera houses, and can be read easily from roughly the first ten rows of the theater. The hope is that the new technology will bring older audiences back to the theater.

A year ago, Detroit’s Meadow Brook Theatre severed its ties with Oakland University after the university tried to shut it down, determined to make it as an independent company. Not many observers gave the perennially money-losing troupe much of a chance. But “under its new management, [Meadow Brook] stopped losing money… [and] the organization finished in the black for the first time in seven years.”

The Boston Theatre Conference, going on in the Hub this week, is partly a chance for the theater crowd to reassure each other that their medium is still relevant. But more importantly, it’s the first time that so many in the local scene have gathered to assess their position in Boston. “Noting that theater has often been the “stepchild” in the Boston arts scene, taking a back seat to such renowned institutions as the Boston Symphony Orchestra or the Museum of Fine Arts, [one moderator] asked the six panelists from a range of local companies to look at Boston’s current position in the theater world and to talk about how it might develop.”

Australia’s theater scene is thriving in many cities, but at least one veteran of the industry says that the country is lagging far behind in the art of creating new plays. What would help is some sort of national program to encourage and instruct young playwrights…

The old debate over who wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare is the theatrical controversy that seems only to grow in intensity with every passing year. But a new seminar at the UK’s recreation of the Bard’s own Globe Theater has upped the ante once again “with the introduction of the first woman suspect — Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke.”

The direcctor of one of Edinburgh’s most high-profile venues says that the city’s Fringe Festival should be designated the main Edinburgh Festival. This is “the latest round in a lengthy pitched battle between the fringe and the official festival; the relationship between the two seems marked by mutual incomprehension and a distinct lack of cross-festival collaboration or cooperative programming. And whereas the international festival receives £2.5m in public money, the fact that the fringe gets just £65,000 has always rankled.”