Category: theatre

“Angels in America” is such a creature of the theatre, that no matter how skilled the screen translation, it loses something on the TV. “For all its gorgeous writing, “Angels” doesn’t prove suited to film the way “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” did. Mr. Kushner’s plays are strict creatures of the theater in ways that many of his predecessors’ and most of his contemporaries’ are not. He is our foremost playwright of the imagination. I mean this partly in the sense that he can send characters darting off to Heaven or Antarctica without seeming foolish, but mostly in the sense that, on the stage, his plays demand that we engage our own imaginations.”

This week, Lincoln Center Theater’s production of Shakespeare’s Henry IV played to a packed house – of public high school students. Student audiences are rarely a performer’s dream, but this one was apparently quite different. “Certainly they were not the usual Wednesday matinee crowd. They hooted, cheered, hissed and roared with laughter. They were probably closer to an Elizabethan audience at the Globe than anything the actors at the Vivian Beaumont Theater had ever faced. It was, in the language of the theater, a great house.”

Ontario’s Shaw Festival saw revenues and attendance plunge this season. “Total attendance at the Niagara-on-the-Lake theatre festival in 2003 was 269,407, compared with 315,477 in 2002 and 331,001 in 2001. Revenues from theatre operations slumped to $13.2 million, compared with $16.9 million in 2002. No one was available last night to comment on how deeply the festival will be in the red. One previous estimate in the Star put the total at about $2 million.”

“According to Tom Wright, theatre in Melbourne has become stylistically mired in late-19th-century naturalism and has lost its intellectual edge. ‘There’s a discourse in Melbourne, mostly led by Adrian Martin, that takes cinema seriously and contextualises it as an art form. That’s exactly what’s lacking in theatre. No one’s providing a sense of historical perspective, and that makes it easy for theatre companies to develop a certain plodding sensibility where comfort becomes the major factor’.”

“Angels in America is, like any good funeral, more for the living than for the dead. That’s where “life beyond hope” comes in. Even if an AIDS cure were announced tomorrow, survivors and caretakers couldn’t simply block out the last quarter-century and groove on the latest Rufus Wainwright disc. You’ve seen the purple leg – in the flesh – and there’s no going back.”

Connecticut’s Goodspeed Musicals has been offered a sweetheart deal to leave the town it’s called home for 127 years. Maybe the theatre could operate in two venues? “While it would be great to support two theatres, I don’t think it’s possible. We have to choose between the two towns. The clock is ticking: We want to finally get this theatre built so we’re not going to drag our feet in making a decision.”

The TV version of “Angels in America” has been well-hyped. Jan Herman watched and came away disappointed. “The common complaint that big films come off poorly on the tube applies doubly in this case to big plays. It’s hard to imagine how Nichols spent $60 million when the production looks like a routine TV drama, despite the special effects. Actually, in contrast to the play, which largely dispensed with realistic scenery and left most of the design to the imagination, Sunday night’s “big event” often looked so set-bound and old-fashioned in the way it was shot that routine TV dramas have more edge.”

Back in 1993, “Angeles in America” was a miraculous thing, and it promised a generation of new plays that would follow. But, writes Frank Rizzo, “the plays that followed, on Broadway at least, were largely more of what had come before: naturalistic or tiny-cast shows centering on family crises or issues of personal identity. They examined the characters as individuals; some were wonderfully done, but few explored who we are as a community, as a country and a member of the global village. They…furthered their canons but did not necessarily stretch their art. But nothing compared to our being touched by Angels.”

The hit musical “Urinetown” had its origins ten years ago in Chicago in a tiny storefront. But the show never got traction there, and it took a move to New York and a decade for the show to morph into a hit. “And yet had ‘Urinetown’ become a fringe Chicago musical – which it was inches away from becoming – it likely would have run here for a month and then sunk without a trace in a city that still seems woefully unable to propel its homegrown properties to national prominence and longevity – unless those artists involved ship out for the coasts and start all over.”

“Labor strife is the most contentious dispute in touring theater today, a battleground that could create aesthetic and financial casualties for audiences as well as producers and presenters. Using non-Equity actors can greatly reduce a producer’s costs of putting a show on the road: Union actors in major productions earn $1,252 a week plus $742 in expense money, which covers lodging, meals and other incidentals of life on the road. Non-Equity producers generally don’t disclose their payroll figures, but the union asserts that non-union performers’ earnings hover around $500 a week, with an additional $250 for expenses.”