Category: theatre

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is starting a new award, worth several thousand pounds, to pay for winning performers to take their show to a major New York theatre. After ticket sales increased by a record 10 per cent last year, the Fringe sees further opportunities to draw both American performers and audiences to the biggest arts festival in the world. It is also keen to offer a chance for performers from Britain, Europe, or even the United States to get their big break in New York.”

The range of nominations for this year’s Tonys give a good sense of the health of Broadway, writes Howard Kissel. “These nominations suggest that “mainstream” theater is now less easy to characterize than it was when, say, “Death of a Salesman” or “The Crucible” won Best Play or “Diary of Anne Frank” beat “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” for that award.”

After a decade, Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theatre stages a musical. So what? Regional theatres in America have largely avoided musical theatre for a long time…

A chandelier crashed to the seats in a West End theatre Saturday night. “Audience members ran for safety as plaster started to fall during When Harry Met Sally at the Theatre Royal Haymarket on Saturday. The show’s star, Luke Perry, leapt off the stage to help people to safety.”

Last week’s Daniel Okrent column in the New York Times about the Tonys in which he called the awards a sham had Broadway producers fuming. But on a couple of points at least, writes Simon Houpt, he had a point.

Tony organizers are angrily rejecting claims by New York Times editor Daniel Okrent that the awards are exclusionary and “artistically meaningless.” The Tonys are designed to reward the best performances on Broadway, they say, and the fact that Okrent seems to believe that Broadway itself is exclusionary doesn’t have anything to do with the awards.

Is London’s West End in decline? Last year 100,000 fewer people attended the theatre. “Cameron Mackintosh’s profits fell by nearly 30% to £6.4m last year. The theatre impresario’s empire also saw sales fall by 10% during the 2002-03 financial year as foreign visitors stayed away and the company’s money-spinning musicals, Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera, began to show their age.”

There are curious omissions in this year’s Tony nominations. “Not for the first time in a theatre culture that is at least as much about commerce as it is about art, the list of omissions has a drama all its own.”

Adrian Noble speaks about his bumpy last year and resignation as head of the Royal Shakespeare Company: “Of course, there were things that went dreadfully wrong at the RSC, and I deeply regret them. The principal mistake was announcing everything at the same time. I did not leave the RSC in a mess. For one thing, the deficit was £1 million less than what I inherited in 1991, and all the big successes that have come to fruition in the last couple of years – the Jacobean season, Judi in All’s Well – are the result of the changes I was setting up.”

Why does anyone pay attention to the Tony Awards, asks Daniel Okrent? They are, he says “an artistically meaningless, blatantly commercial, shamefully exclusionary and culturally corrosive award competition. The awards are a real estate promotion, restricted as they are to shows put on in the 31 houses owned or controlled by the Shuberts, the Nederlanders and Jujamcyn, plus another nine thrown in by accident of geography or affinity to the idea of the Big Musical. Like the theaters, the voters themselves are to a large degree controlled by the Big Three and the touring company operators.”