Category: theatre

Details are emerging about the new contract between actors and producers. “The pact includes an annual 3% wage increase over the contract’s four-year life, along with “meaningful increases in health-fund contributions” to stabilize the fund “for the foreseeable future.” The two sides have also agreed to experiment with a new tiered salary system for national tours. The current weekly minimums under the old Production pact are $1,354 for actors in a musical or play. For stage managers the minimum stands at $2,225 for a musical and $1,913 for a play.”

“The Royal Shakespeare Company is to return to central London in November for a six-month season at the Albery theatre in Soho… The company transferred none of its plays to London last year because it could not get enough financial backing from producers – the first time it had not had a London season since the 1960s.” The RSC will offer special discounts to theatergoers under 25 at the London shows, in a bid to reinvigorate and expand its core audience.

Broadway actors nearly went on strike this week over something that didn’t really have much to do with Broadway theatre. “The road is a far less certain bet than it used to be, as evidenced by the recent decision by the producers of “Avenue Q,” the Tony Award winner for best musical this year, to opt instead for an open-ended run in Las Vegas. Each side recognized that there needed to be a new economic model. It was no great secret that the road had to be restructured. The question was how.”

More than four centuries after it was written, Miguel Cervantes’ play “Pedro the Great Pretender” is getting its world premiere, by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The 14th annual Contemporary American Theater Festival in West Virginia is all about character. “The menu at this year’s festival, one of the few across the nation devoted entirely to new work, offers a variety of perspectives on a country divided against itself. From the racially driven pessimism in Lee Blessing’s playlets to the terrorism-fueled paranoia of Stuart Flack’s “Homeland Security” to the lighthearted culture clash in Richard Dresser’s Little League comedy “Rounding Third,” the writers invited to the campus of Shepherd University find their voices by tracing the fault lines in the contemporary American character.”

Broadway actors and producers have reached a tentative deal on a new contract. “The deal settled most of the major outstanding contractual issues between the union, Actors Equity, and the producers, including the knotty issue of non-Equity tours, which threatened to sidetrack negotiations — and Broadway shows — several times.”

Negotiations between Broadway producers and the actors union Equity broke down over the weekend. “No new negotiations are scheduled but Broadway and touring shows were not disrupted because the guild has kept its members working throughout the past few weeks of tense negotiations.”

The days of the sell-em-out touring mega-musicals is over and the business of touring theatre has changed substantially. Eight years ago Equity actors logged 44,000 tour-weeks of work. By last season it was 21,000. More shows are hiring non-union actors, and more venues are vying for the shows that are out there. It all makes current negotiations on a new union actors contract a dicey affair…

The Cleveland Play House has fallen on hard times both artistic and financial in recent years, but the arrival of new artistic director Michael Bloom seems to be generating real excitement for the future of theater in the city. Bloom talks less about reinvigorating the Play House as he does about reinvigorating the city, with theater as a focal point. “There has been what I would call a ‘standard repertory vision’ that just kind of assumes people are going to know why you are doing a play. You can’t assume that.”

London’s West End is in trouble, and the debate is on concerning the best direction to take London’s theater district. Should the West End be imitating Broadway, where producers “take risks and maintain a buzz”? And should such buzz be more important than maintaining some gauzy image of theatrical integrity, especially if going Broadway puts rears in the seats? “What London needs is a stonking great hit.”