Category: theatre

Where is the music that originally accompanied Shakespeare’s plays? “Many scholars believe that the music that originally accompanied Shakespeare’s plays has been lost. But perhaps it was so much a part of the popular culture of Shakespeare’s time that we simply haven’t been able to sort it out from all the surviving examples in library archives. Enter Canadian musicologist Ross W. Duffin, who has not only collated and reorganized all previous known studies on this subject but used computer-matching techniques to supply appropriate period music for songs that have come down to us with Shakespearean lyrics but no known melodies.”

Producers are billing an Ulster-Scots epic “On Eagle’s Wing,” being staged in Belfast, as the biggest theatrical production in the world. The show “has a distinctly international flavour with a 100-strong cast and crew, as well as a choir of 300 and an orchestra. Featuring West End star Peter Corry and Scotland’s Alyth McCormack, the musical traces the journey of the Scots-Irish to the US and examines their influence on American music and culture. More than 400 costumes will be worn during the show which is set on a three-storey, 4,800 sq ft stage, using one of the largest light sets ever constructed.”

The show tunes making the most noise during Broadway awards season are of a different variety than those your mama loved to hum. And these new songs are changing the theatre around them. “The desire for familiarity, for hit songs or pseudo-hit songs, can override narrative coherence without anyone’s caring very much.

A prominent playwright and director who “developed his theater company as a part of the farmworkers’ labor movement, is planning to open a non-union tour of his signature production in San Jose in August. Luis Valdez says the `tremendous irony’ of staging non-union performances at the Center for Employment Training throws a spotlight on the cultural, financial and political challenges faced by regional arts groups.”

“How do you solve a problem like nonunion tours of Broadway shows? The issue is at the center of the current negotiations between Broadway producers and Actors’ Equity… The contract between the union and the League of American Theatres and Producers expires June 27 and the two sides have been meeting regularly since April 1 to resolve the touring matter and other issues, most notably, rising health-care costs. Equity still dominates the road but in recent years, nonunion tours, which are cheaper to produce, have been gaining strength… Last week, the union issued a strike authorization that it called ‘part of normal negotiation practices.'”

The Producers may be Broadway’s biggest smash hit in years, but apparently, the Mel Brooks musical doesn’t hold the same appeal everywhere. Officials yesterday announced that the Toronto production will be closing after only nine months due to slow ticket sales.

John Heilpern revisits Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul and reaffirms his opinion that the play is the most important of our time. “Name me a better play of our time — for our time. Name me one that takes on the whole, wide, wonderful, fucked-up world.” Kushner has continued to tinker with the play since it debuted three years ago “but I believe he’s come as close as he can to a fully realized Homebody/Kabul, unless he wants to drive himself mad.”

When economic times are tough, the temptation for theaters to get conservative is strong, and there’s no surer way to make a quick theatrical buck than for a company to bring back a show that has already been a proven success for them. But the remounted productions don’t always work out as planned, and sometimes, an audience’s nostalgia for a great show can actually work against the new version.

Following an 8-year legal battle over ownership rights, Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre is being folded into the operations of Roosevelt University, and the theater’s new director “plans to more closely align the historic downtown venue with the educational institution that fought long and hard for the right to govern the Auditorium as it saw fit.” Brent Batterson, a 45-year-old set designer turned arts administrator, has been brought on largely because he has no history with the Auditorium, and therefore no axes to grind in the various wounds that developed over the course of the court fight.

From a New York point of view, Edward Albee is solidly back. Yet, from his own perspective, he never went away. “You’re in fashion, you’re out of fashion. That comes and goes. I’ll be out of fashion again.’ He notes, however, that in the years the theater establishment regarded him as passe, he ‘was performed everywhere except in New York. I was still writing all the time. My output has always been pretty steady, a play every year and half’.”