Category: theatre

Ontario’s Stratford Festival (one of Canada’s largest arts organizations) has signed executive director Antoni Cimolino to a contract extension that runs until 1015. “Under Cimolino’s stewardship, ticket sales since 1998 have increased from 523,000 to more than 600,000 and the festival has been in a budget surplus in each year of his administration. The operating budget has increased from $34-million to $51-million annually.”

Why should someone go to a university theatre program in Texas rather than work at a proper theatre? Greg Leaming, artistic director of Southern Methodist University’s theatre program says his program can do things other theatres can’t. “There’s no reason why a person can’t decide to go to the theater and say, ‘Let’s go to SMU.’We have the resources to do larger things than professional theaters can afford to tackle these days, and do them well. We just have to keep the bar raised good and high.”

The Royal Shakespeare Company has fallen on hard times. “Millions of dollars in debt, scrambling for London outlets for its work and hungrily in pursuit of a vigorous new aesthetic, the company is in the midst of an ambitious attempt to reinvent itself under a new artistic director, Michael Boyd, the fifth man to hold the job since the company’s inception in 1960. Each step taken by this new administration is being watched closely, especially since it’s encountered obstacles in exporting productions from Stratford.”

Are protectors of literary estates too protective of the work they watch over? “In a theatrical age where the director is king and the quickest way to make your mark and your reputation is to let your ego run rampant on an established text, it is perhaps not surprising that estates and literary executors feel bound to protect the reputations of those who can no longer protect themselves. Unfortunately, these guardians often behave like ferocious guard dogs and are in danger of deterring directors and theatre companies from tackling classic works in new ways and keeping those texts alive.”

The essential act of theatre is that it is live and that it happens in front of an audience. But what audience? In the past year, theatre artists have been playing with the idea of theatre created for audiences of one (or two…), theatre created special-sized for those willing to experience it.

As more veterans of the theatrical stage defect to Hollywood, establishing lucrative film careers, many in the theater world are lamenting the trend. But are stage actors really damaged goods the minute they appear on film? “Is [Judi] Dench less convincing as the Countess of Rossillion in All’s Well That Ends Well than, say, Peggy Ashcroft was, because the latter had avoided playing James Bond’s boss? Do [Ian] McKellen’s decades of speaking the greatest verse ever written help or hinder him and us when he starts spouting piffle about pixies chasing rings?”

This has been Broadway’s Year of the Understudy. “Thanks to star walkouts, babies, influenza and the common cold, understudies – typically theater’s most obscure, least appreciated actors – have been stepping into the spotlight in record numbers.”

What with the down American economy and the SARS scare keeping many tourists out of Ontario, the last couple of years have been a struggle for the Shaw and Stratford festivals, southern Ontario’s duelling theater showcases. The numbers on the latest season are out this week, and Stratford posted a modest surplus, while Shaw announced its first deficit in a decade. Still, Stratford exceeded 600,000 ticket-buyers for the fourth year in a row, even after having to cancel six shows as a result of the massive power outage which hit the northeast in August.

Plays are starting to look too much like TV, complains playwright Joanna Laurens. “Where are the subtle plays, plays that address current social issues by sidling up to them, not by hitting you over the head with them? That is what I want to see. I don’t want the same experience from both television and theatre. The mediums don’t function in the same way – and yet, they are increasingly being used interchangeably. Let’s put this play on the screen; let’s put this film on the stage. Let’s clog up our theatres with naturalism.”

What can you tell about a country by the plays it produces? An American critic drops in to the London stage, and reports that British playwrights seem to have a dismal perception of today’s UK. “The organised, shimmering intelligence of contemporary British theatre contrasts, shockingly, with its vision of a hopelessly incompetent wanker nation. Is the Great Brittle of these 12 plays, a country where no one has any faith in anything, true to the life people are living outside the theatre? Or is the truer portrait of Britain in late 2003 that piece of street theatre enacted by thousands of well-behaved, jolly protesters in Trafalgar Square last month, toppling the papier-mché statue of George Bush?