Category: theatre

“Ten years ago, Michael Grandage was a struggling actor who could barely afford to go out for dinner with his friends. Today he has arguably the best job in British theatre, having last year succeeded Sam Mendes as artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse in London.”

Critics are panning the Rosie O’Donnell-produced “Taboo,” which opened on Broadway this week. Clive Barnes says that while the show was an eccentric charmer in London, on Broadway it’s just out of place. “The Plymouth Theatre is not that kind of place at all, and a professional Broadway producer would have seen that at once. First-time producer Rosie O’Donnell, attracting more attention to herself than David Merrick in his heyday, seems almost virginal in her lack of experience.”

Ben Brantley forgot for a moment where he was at the opening of Taboo. The show, he reports, is “a dressed-up, low-down temple to the holy trinity of sex, drugs and soft rock ‘n’ roll, and the sort of place where good boys and girls go bad real fast. So why do I keep waiting for one of them to step forward and belt out “Memory”?”

“A Greek play is to be staged for the first time in more than 2,050 years after fragments of the text were found in Egyptian mummy cases.”

The Seattle Fringe Festival is in crisis, and must raise $120,000 in the next six weeks in order to survive, according to its executive director. The fiscal crunch will apparently not affect the separate FringeACT theater festival presented each spring in Seattle, but the main FringeFest has suffered mightily in recent years from slumping ticket sales and a drop in corporate and individual giving.

Michael Billington is distubed by a “disturbing European trend that Britain has largely escaped: one where the director is an unassailable monarch and classic texts are pieces of clay to be shaped to his often infantile needs.”

Regional theatre in the UK is having a great year. But (and isn’t there always a but?) “What about Britain’s smallest theatres – those that have to balance their books on seating capacities of 300 or less, those that receive little or no core funding, never see a national reviewer and are still waiting for some of the Arts Council’s £25m injection of cash?”

John Heilpern says the Manhattan Theatre Club’s latest offering is just more evidence why it’s a bad idea for non-profit theatre to go to Broadway. “The Manhattan Theatre Club’s expansion into Broadway at the Biltmore as another dangerous example of nonprofit-theater “Broadwayitis.” In my view, the entire purpose and lifeblood of the uncommercial theater isn’t to become part of Broadway, but to offer a radical alternative to it.”

Andrew Lloyd-Webber tells a parliamentary committee that London’s commercial theatres are at a big disadvantage to non-profit theatres. ” ‘We are not on a level playing field with the public sector’. He said central London’s theatres were crumbling while state-backed venues picked up grants to fund revamps.” There is a proposal to grant tax breaks to the theatres to help refurbish them.

“More than 60 years after its premiere, the musical that Eubie Blake and Andy Razaf considered their masterpiece – ‘Tan Manhattan’ – finally is getting a second chance. To the songwriters’ considerable dismay, the show died in February 1941, after just a few engagements…”