Category: theatre

“For the first time ever, Victory Gardens Theater’s Chicago Stories benefit is sold out. A swank annual gala attended by some of the city’s biggest power brokers, it has become immensely popular among philanthropists and drama mavens alike.” The event features semi-autobiographical one-act plays by such local celebrities as basketball coach Phil Jackson and food writer/”Queer Eye” star Ted Allen. The results can range from embarrassing to hilarious, and the performances are now a bona fide hot ticket.

After almost four and a half years the Disney musical “Aida” is closing on Broadway. It’s the first Disney musical on Broadway to close. “The Lion King,” which has been running for more than six years, remains one of Broadway’s biggest sellers. And “Beauty and the Beast” still draws sizable crowds after more than a decade.

The Hull Truck players are Britain’s best-known vagabond theatre company. But now it’s time to settle down. “Named after the elderly lorry which formed their first base, the Hull Truck players are to move to a £13.6m arts centre, the designs for which go on display in the Yorkshire port this week.”

“So, 400 years ago today Shakespeare turned 40. The theatre is not kind to ageing talent. Contrasting his own autumnal face with the cruel energy of spring, middle-aged Shakespeare must have wondered whether he had passed his prime. In fact, he had. Shakespeare at 40 was already, like the Julian calendar, conspicuously behind the times.”

In Madrid, “the final night of a Spanish play entitled In God We Shit was in jeopardy yesterday after a week of controversy culminated in attacks on the performers and an attempt to burn down the theatre in the middle of the performance.”

Maybe it was predictable – Stephen Sondheim’s “Bounce” wasn’t a hit when it first played last year. “Though Bounce closed in Washington last fall with an air of failure, any show with a name as big as Sondheim’s on it will have the shortest of stints in musical-theater purgatory. It’s part of a death-and-transfiguration cycle that has been going on at least since the mid-1950s, when the Leonard Bernstein musical Candide went down like a rock, but whose original cast album became a classic that continues to inspire increasingly successful revisions. Failure? Success? Not for nothing is show biz mythology full of “Springtime for Hitler” instances in which failure and success are mere matters of perception that change from moment to moment.”

Stephen Sondheim’s gut-punch of a musical, Assassins, has finally made it to Broadway more than a decade after its debut, and the reception has been largely positive. But audiences have been reluctant to reward the actors with the usual standing ovation, and Frank Rich thinks he knows why. “If the old maxim has it that you should never yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, it’s even worse to wave a gun in a crowded theater in New York City at a time when an Associated Press poll shows that two-thirds of Americans expect a terrorist attack before the election, with one-third expecting the political conventions to be a target.”

Between the SARS virus, the blackout that left a good chunk of Ontario in the dark for an entire weekend, and the American invasion of Iraq, 2003 was not a good year for the Shaw Festival and its first-year director, Jackie Maxwell. “Tourists stayed away in droves and the end result was a deficit of $3 million, of which $2.5 million was attributable to falling attendances.” The Shaw will look to rebound this summer, and Maxwell is looking to put her stamp on the festival’s artistic image after a tumultuous first year on the job.

Chicago’s Noble Fool Theatre Company has shut down, but the company’s founder and board will continue to operate, hopefully reemerging as a more wide-ranging arts organization. In the short term, “Noble Fool will continue as the exclusive theater presenter at two new venues at” a local resort, and certain performances will continue as the company attempts to reorganize financially.

It’s the best of times and the worst of times for the musical theater scene in Los Angeles. On the one hand, the quality of local productions is way up in recent years, and there seems to be no shortage of work for the area’s actors. But on the other hand, the cost of mounting such productions has gone through the roof, and there are even whispers that the business model may no longer be viable in the longer term. Still, in an era when many sectors of the American cultural scene are struggling to survive, L.A.’s theater crowd is learning to adjust to new realities.