Category: theatre

The Lion King leaves Chicago after “a highly successful 39-week Chicago engagement that reported a total net gross in excess of $40 million and attracted more than 710,000 theater-goers to Chicago’s Loop.” The show, some observers say, could have run for three years here.

“To many aficionados, Adam Guettel – grandson of Richard Rodgers, the composer who set so much of Broadway’s agenda for so much of the previous century – represents the most accomplished exemplar of the musical theatre form, even without an actual Broadway show on his resume.”

Toronto theatre has a diversity problem “The current population of Greater Toronto consists of 43 per cent visible minorities. In their current seasons, the seven largest not-for-profit professional theatres in the city employed 79 actors from visible minorities out of a total of 394, a rate of 20 per cent. If you add the two major festivals — Stratford and Shaw — to the mix, the figure becomes 106 out of 622, or 17 per cent. That’s a considerable gap, and while everyone agrees the winds of change are blowing, they’re not moving rapidly enough for many people.”

Ari Roth’s Theatre J is a small Jewish theatre in Washington DC that is making much more of a splash than its size would suggest. “What he (Roth) puts on the Goldman stage often feels like the product of a much bigger operation than his, which chugs along with a skeletal staff in a cramped suite of offices and a budget of $500,000. Major regional theaters like the Shakespeare and Arena spend 20 times as much. Last season alone, he had several major successes.”

What went wrong with “Taboo,” the Broadway musical that is closing after losing $10 million? “There are no ‘villains’ in this story, really – just a volatile, distracted and ultimately ineffectual producer; a weak director; a timid bookwriter who watched his key scenes get cut because they couldn’t be acted or directed properly; and a star, Boy George, who wrote a fine score (let’s give him his due) but wasn’t much of an actor. One person involved in “Taboo” calls the show a “missed opportunity. There are a lot of really good things in it, there just wasn’t anyone around who could pull it all together.”

“As playwrights explore new ways of delivering storylines and delineating characters, they are tinkering, more and more boldly, with innovative ways to theatrically depict the passage of time. And the basic idea is as old as time…”

“The Sydney Theatre Company’s second theatre, an 850-seat building at Walsh Bay, opened last weekend with the additional gift of $2.5 million to create a full-time ensemble of actors.” That’s doing it right. So what about Melbourne?

“Winter on Broadway usually means a winnowing of shows as tourists leave town after the holidays and the audience in the New York region tends to stay home. Several shows, like “Cabaret,” closed in early January in expectation of the long, fallow cold months. But the first weeks of this winter, after a fall season crowded with money losers and critical pariahs, look a bit grimmer than usual because of bitter weather and continued doubts about the economy and tourism.”

“Donovan Marley, who as artistic director transformed the fledgling Denver Center Theatre Company into the largest regional theater between Chicago and the West Coast, announced Tuesday that he plans to resign before the end of his contract, citing his frustration over continuing budget cutbacks. In the past two decades, perhaps no individual has had more influence on the development of Colorado’s cultural scene. His exit not only is expected to trigger an upheaval that will be felt throughout the company’s 130-person staff, but is further evidence of the continuing demise of the American regional theater movement.”

“Taboo” is closing on Broadway after less than three months. Taboo was “the first Broadway show produced by Rosie O’Donnell, who financed it with $10 million of the fortune she had made on her television talk show, which ran from 1996 to 2002. Beyond that original outlay, the production has been losing money week to week.” The show is expected to have lost $10 million by the time it closes.