Category: theatre

The Royal Shakespeare Company is rethinking the redevelopment of its Stratford-On-Avon home after architects working on the project quit. The RSC has been planning to replace its current home with a “theatre village”, but the plan has been controversial.

What does the average Broadway Joe make? “This season, the minimum salary for a Broadway performer is $1,354 a week, a figure dictated by the contract between the union and the League of American Theaters and Producers, the trade association for the commercial theater industry. The current four-year contract expires on June 27. The two organizations are negotiating a new one that could last until June 2008.”

The fact that the Tony Awards exist to memorialize the best productions of the year of around a dozen New York theaters and absolutely no one else has always limited the appeal of the ceremony. But this year, the Broadway-only restriction could also prove embarrassing, after a season in which nearly every new production on the Great White Way was a disappointment, and the most innovative and engaging theatrical events in New York were occurring off-Broadway.

“Of the many odd aspects of the Tony Awards, one of the oddest is that the prizes rarely have any effect on a show’s box office. Of course, this is related to another Tony quirk: many of the nominated shows have closed by the time the awards come around (this year, two of the four nominees for best play are already gone). But even winners that are still being performed may not benefit much from their prizes.”

The number of theatre offerings in Italy increased by 10 percent in 2001. But audiences didn’t increase to keep up. In 2001, 26 percent of the country’s residents attended the theatre.

Washington DC’s Shakespeare Theatre has “just broken ground on its own performing-arts facility – the Harman Centre for the Arts, for completion in 2007. It would be absurd to say that the centre – which will consist of a new 800-seat theatre, the Sidney Harman, as well as The Shakespeare Theatre’s current home, the 450-seat Lansburgh – will rival the Kennedy’s concert hall, opera house and smaller theatres in grandeur. It will nonetheless provide America’s capital with another first-class performing arts destination, much as in New York, BAM complements the Lincoln Centre.”

Athol Fugard represents the “conscience of his country.” “I still believe theatre’s amazing. It doesn’t command the size audience that the movies do, or television, but I still think that somehow it’s at the matrix of a society in a way that I don’t think film and television ever are, certainly not television. Except of course when you get [a show] preceded by a stage production–something like Angels in America. And I think the impact of Angels in America on American society is going to be working itself out for many, many years to come.”

“American theater always manages to reinvent itself at the worst of all possible times. The best of our new theater practitioners have already begun to imagine a set of goals and procedures in which perception requires no other justification than the beauty that entitles it. In this dramatic universe, theatrical high jinks are their own reward; and so it is with the new plays one is beginning to encounter these days in New York.”

“A theatre director has lost her high court claim that she should be credited as joint author of the hit West End play Stones In His Pockets by award-winning writer Marie Jones. But Mr Justice Park, sitting in London, ruled that Pam Brighton, who claimed she had made an “extraordinary” creative contribution to the comedy, did have copyright in a draft opening script of the play.”

“Owners of Scotland’s oldest working theatre – the Theatre Royal in Dumfries – have warned that it could close if they are forced to abandon a planned multi-million pound renovation scheme. The playhouse, in Shakespeare Street, was built in 1792 and was saved from demolition in 1959 when it was bought by the Guild of Players. Robert Burns was a patron and JM Barrie was inspired at the theatre to write plays including Peter Pan. Stan Laurel and Charlie Chaplin were visitors.”