Category: theatre

The UK’s National Theatre is leaping into the increasingly dangerous fray surrounding the country’s role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. “The NT’s new season will culminate in September with a play by one of the war’s fiercest critics, Sir David Hare.” The play focuses on several “neoconservatives” within the Bush Administration, and argues that they intended to remove Saddam Hussein from power years before the 9/11 attacks which supposedly precipitated the American action. The title of the work, which is taken from a statement by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, is “Stuff Happens.”

Tonight, Phantom of the Opera becomes the second-longest running show in Broadway history, sliding ahead of Les Miz. The show has gone on 6,681 times “through 11 Phantoms, beginning with Michael Crawford, but just one chandelier: that 900-pound, beaded monster that has since traveled 422 miles in its nightly plunge over its audience’s heads.”

Running only since last May on Broadway, the musical Gypsy is closing, losing much of its investment. “The production, starring Bernadette Peters as the legendary stage mother Momma Rose, will have lost a little less than half of its $8 million capitalization.”

Circus owners in the UK are protesting a new law that will require them to get licenses for every place that they perform. “Licences, which could cost up to £500 each, will be needed when the Licensing Act 2003 comes into force in April. The act is designed to ensure public safety and has already prompted outrage from other performers, including folk singers and Punch and Judy operators.”

The British musicians’ union is protesting plans by producer Cameron Mackintosh to replace some musicians with a virtual orchestra. “Any fan of West End musicals will recognize that the orchestra is the beating heart of the production. Take the musicians away and you remove at a stroke one of the vital elements of the live theatre experience.”

The Denver Center Theatre is looking for a new director. But the way it is going about it seems a bit narrow, writes Lisa Bornstein…

“Students performing a play about the dangers of mindless political indoctrination were disqualified from a Broward County theater competition after cutting up an American flag, as judges questioned the legality and offensiveness of that act.”

The art of theatre seems stubbornly rooted in the pre-digital age. But maybe that’s not a bad thing. “Plenty of academics … have argued that the communal experience of live performance will only get more attractive as technologized art grows in influence. Surely people will need and crave external escape from the isolating forces of a digital age that traps them for more and more hours in front of a two-dimensional screen.”

Charles Dickens was a wilfly popular performer. “As well as being our greatest novelist, Dickens developed a new, composite art form in his stage performances, acting out specially adapted passages from his own works and varying his expressions and speech patterns, so that it seemed as if he were becoming possessed by the characters he created. His reading tours won him huge popular acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. And in all probability they contributed to his premature death, from a stroke, in 1870.”

Washington DC is in the midst of a theatre building boom. “All over town, all over the region, theaters are hiring architects and raising millions and embarking on ambitious plans to move to spanking new homes or enlarge and refurbish existing ones. It’s Act 1 in a period of monumental physical change for Washington theater, a building boom that is going to affect every major company – and even some less-than-major ones – in and around the city. By the time the boom is over, sometime around the end of the decade, the area’s premier theaters will all have roomier accommodations and new looks.”