Category: theatre

Football chants are a staple of any game. But art they art? Apparently so. Next year a sponsor has put up money for a £10,000-a-year “chants laureate” to be chosen from stadium crowds. “His or her role will be to rove round matches and ‘compose chants observing key moments within the season’. The search to recruit the new bard is to be led by five judges headed by the poet laureate Andrew Motion, who is paid a mere £5,000 in his 335-year-old post for composing verses for the royal family.”

Connecticut’s O’Neill Center is close to choosing a new artistic director. “The artistic director (wanted: a dynamic, inspiring leader with a large Rolodex) will be expected not only to save but to seize the day, to give the O’Neill something it has lacked: a clear, comprehensive and persuasive case for its existence. And to help bring in more money.”

Some theatergoers can only roll their eyes at the lengths to which some contemporary directors will go to “update” classics like Shakespeare for the modern era. But, says director Michael Bogdanov, such modernizations are absolutely necessary for the classics to remain relevant to today’s audiences. “By removing the barriers that exist between the language and the audience, by allowing them to identify with the characters clearly, by associating the events with contemporary politics, I allowed the plays to breathe.”

Canadian fiction has long since come of age on the world stage, but what about Canadian drama? “If its meta-narrative is to be taken at face value, the defining wave of English Canadian theatre in the late 1960s and early seventies has morphed from telling local stories into building a national identity, with international recognition viewed as an added bonus, if it happens.” But now, a series of international partnerships and a wave of productions in Europe suggest that Canadian playwrights are finally being elevated to global status.

When Boston’s Wang Center announced last month that it was severing ties with the perpetually strapped Boston Ballet, and that it would replace the company’s Nutcracker performances with a touring Rockettes show next season, it was seen as a severe blow to the ballet company. But upon closer inspection, it may be the Wang Center which is in the more serious fiscal hole: “It has steadily been beaten out for marquee productions by for-profit Broadway in Boston, a division of Clear Channel Entertainment… And the Wang’s attempts to invest in productions such as last month’s Thoroughly Modern Millie have so far resulted in losses.”

“Josiah Spaulding Jr., the president of the Wang Center for the Performing Arts, isn’t just well paid. He’s among the highest-paid leaders of a nonprofit performing arts center in the country, earning more than the directors of a range of institutions that, budgetwise, dwarf the Wang Center. Spaulding’s compensation package for the fiscal year ending in May 2002, the most recent available, was $536,159 a year. This figure was the first thing a group of nonprofit experts noticed when they were asked to review the Wang Center’s Internal Revenue Service filings.”

The assignment: write theatre for machines that interact with audiences in new ways. “The project is called the Technology Plays, a theater experiment that is trying to take the old man-versus-machine theme to new extremes. The writers, led by Mr. Dresser and Mr. Kennedy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Ironweed,” have fashioned an unsettling exhibition challenging conventional notions of what theater can be and how it can be delivered.”

There are rumors the Bolshoi Drama Theatre might get new leadership. It’s long overdue, as recent productions prove. “After Georgy Tovstonogov’s death in 1980, an adequate replacement was not found, and it was decided that the new artistic director would concentrate his efforts on preserving the legacy of the late legendary director. The most important thing was not to ruin the house that Tovstonogov built. Now, that house has become old, feeble and fragile. After being denied fresh blood and any new influence at all for so many years, the BDT troupe finds itself in an unappealing state of stagnation.”

“All across Broadway, producers, landlords and investors are suffering through one of the bumpiest fall seasons in recent memory, a snake-bit period that has seen one show close in previews (“Bobbi Boland”), another close in rehearsal (“Harmony”) and a Stephen Sondheim show (“Bounce”) close out of town.”

“In the last week, three shows headed for Broadway – the long-gestating Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman musical “Bounce” in Washington, D.C., the Barry Manilow-Bruce Sussman musical “Harmony” in Philadelphia, and Nancy Hasty’s play “Bobbi Boland,” which had already begun previews at the Cort Theatre – closed before opening here to critics and audiences. New York-bound projects failing are not uncommon, but three high-profile shows in a row facing this fate is most unusual.”