Category: theatre

The National Endowment for the Arts’ Shakespeare tour is the largest tour of Shakespeare in American history. Since September, seven professional companies have been presenting five plays around the county, and will have been seen by audiences in 100 cities and towns, as well as on 16 military bases. “Later this month, the NEA will announce the addition of 21 professional nonprofit theater companies to the tour as part of Phase II. They will do a range of the Bard’s plays. By the time both phases are complete, at the end of next year, ‘We hope to have introduced 1 million children to Shakespeare’.”

Brian McMaster has been programming the Edinburgh Festival since 1992. He’s constantly tinkering with ways to bring in unlikely audiences. “It is this engagement with the audience that makes the International Festival seem so alive. McMaster’s tenure has coincided with increasing collaboration between all the festivals, so that there is growing self-assurance to the city. Once, almost every resident would meet August with a scowl, fleeing if they could, but now only the most curmudgeonly swears at the thesps on the high street. McMaster has brought us in, and without dumbing down.”

A new generation of Arab-American women playwrights born in the 1960s and 70s is making its mark on New York stages. “Their religious roots vary: they are Christian, Muslim or Zoroastrian, and their national ancestry may be, to name a few, Iranian, Palestinian, Lebanese or Indian. But they are united by a commitment to take their hyphenated experiences to the New York stage, and by their perception that, although many of them are not Arab, that is how they often are seen in the United States at this tense moment in the country’s history.”

The Cincinnati city council has taken a theatre company’s name off a list of grants. Last summer the company staged a production of Terrence McNally’s “Corpus Christie.” No protesters appeared before City Council during recent discussions about the grant, but a local group — the Coalition for a Just Cincinnati — sent a mass e-mail entitled, ‘Cincinnati City Council Subsidizing Blasphemy.’ In the e-mail, CJC’s leader, Nathaniel Livingston Jr., wrote: ‘This is America, and everyone has a First Amendment right to free speech, even if the speech is offensive. There are, however, consequences to your actions. And there should be no reward for the producers of ‘Corpus Christi’.”

Cast members in the Broadway production of Gypsy are out on the streets around the TKTS booth in Times Square drumming up business for the show. “Most people have no idea what they want to see. So if you give them a reason to come, like ‘I’m in the show,’ they’ll usually come. It is a grass-roots effort that might be working. Since March 10, the cast’s first day on the TKTS line, the show has been averaging sales of more than 300 half-price tickets a day. Prior to the campaign the show rarely broke 200 at the booth.”

“The last time Broadway producers faced off with a major labor union — the musicians union in March 2003 — the results were disastrous. Talks broke down at the 11th hour, resulting in a four-day strike on Broadway that shut down 17 musicals and cost the industry $5 million. Starting tomorrow Actors’ Equity, the actors’ and stage managers’ union, will sit down opposite the League of American Theaters and Producers. Both sides agree that to avoid another strike they will have to come to terms with the knotty problem of non-Equity tours of Broadway shows.” But it’s not a cut-and-dry issue, and no one really knows how far Broadway actors are willing to go to protect theoretical union gigs in touring shows.

London theatre has turned into a labratory for political ideas. “In the subsidized London theater, where a lengthy, big-cast political opus on global governmental affairs still can pack the house and get the British blood up, talky playwrights David Edgar, Michael Frayn and David Hare get paid to dream how governments would work if they were in charge.”

The Dallas Theatre Center was once an ensemble company and the theatre was successful. But in recent years it has abandoned the ensemble model and hired from out of town. “Truth is, for economic and other reasons, the ensemble model has been slowly evolving at many regional theater companies into a looser collection of regular and guest artists. But the ensemble ideal remains near and dear to many actors’ and directors’ hearts.”

There was a time when Dallas was known nationally for its thriving theatre scene. “Sure, there currently is — and has been for decades — lively theatrical activity in the Metroplex. But as the theater communities in cities such as Chicago, Minneapolis and Seattle grew in the years after World War II, Dallas and Fort Worth stagnated.” The question is why…

The historic 3,600-seat Chicago Theatre is being restored and revived – by a couple of theatre entrepreneurs with an impressive track record. “We are going to be the on-the-ground, in-the-theater general managers of the Chicago Theatre. And if you look at our entire careers — our entire lives, really — you will see people who have been interested in taking old downtown theaters, reviving them and contributing to the after-dark lives of this country’s great and historic cities.”