Category: theatre

A show coming to Off-Broadway is using a “virtual orchestra” and the musicians union is protesting. But the show’s composer says he isn’t replacing any musicians with the device – he likes the sound he gets from it. In previous productions, the show used three musicians, and it does now as well.

Portland Center Stage is getting a new, state-of-the-art home, one that will “put its facilities on a par with the country’s best regional theater venues in such cities as Chicago, Minneapolis and Dallas. It also will bring back to life one of the city’s oldest buildings, the 1891 Oregon National Guard Armory at Northwest Davis Street and 10th Avenue. And it is vying to be the most ecologically sound building so far completed in the Northwest. Sounds pretty good. What’s not to like?” So why so many critics of the project?

Just how are plays chosen for inclusion at the Festival of New American Plays in Louisville? This year, five of the six full plays presented were by women. And they were also young. “This time the plays we liked happened to be mostly by younger writers. We just felt the writing was interesting and strong and worthy of production.”

“Five of the six new full-length works at this year’s buzz-generating Humana Festival of New American Plays were written by women. Coincidence?

Theater people love to talk about “process,” whether it be the actor’s process of developing a character or the director’s process of fashioning a cast, crew, and set into a believable story. But the behind-the-scenes process that goes into creating a single theater season may be the most fascinating process of them all, and for the people who run Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage, it’s a study in compromise and a careful balance between challenging the audience and satisfying the ever-present demand for the familiar.

“Broadway has always been an incubator of lunatic dreams, but these days, with the outrageous expense of putting on a production, and a theater marketplace ever more reliant on the credit cards of out-of-towners, a lot of the adventurousness has gone out of producing.” So for Rocco Landesman to be seriously pitching a play featuring a suicide bomber as a sympathetic character to the Broadway poobahs is, well, something of a noticable display of hubris. In fact, most of Landesman’s usual New York investors had closed the door before he even got the pitch out of his mouth.

Doug Wright’s “I Am My Own Wife” won the Pulitzer for drama last week, and the question is how much the award will have an impact on its commercial prospects. “In the last decade only two plays have won the Pulitzer while running on Broadway, and both eventually made back their investments. But this evidence is by no means conclusive. The 2002 winner, “Topdog/Underdog,” opened the same week it won the award, so it is difficult to discern the effect the prize had on sales. And in 2001 “Proof” received only a slight bump.”

David Mamet doesn’t have a high opinion of producers: “They watch while the lowly make bricks and suggest, at regular intervals, that the brick-makers begin to gather their own straw. And they propound heresy. They sell all parts of the pig but the squeal. And then they sell the squeal.”

London is getting two new theatres (in one). “The old Whitehall Theatre near Trafalgar Square will house a 100-seat and a 400-seat space to create the Trafalgar Studios. The theatre first opened in 1930 and is owned by the Ambassador Theatre Group.” The smaller spaces are intended to attract younger audiences, and the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Young Vic have signed up to produce there.

A new ruling by the National Labor Relations Board is being hailed by the American musicians union as supporting the union’s fight to keep live music on Broadway…