Category: theatre

The Royal Shakespeare Company denies it hs decided to tear down its Stratford theatre. “The Sunday Times said plans to demolish the RSC’s grade II-listed venue to make way for a £100m ‘theatre village’ were being scrapped. An RSC spokesman said demolition was ‘the least likely of our options’ but no definite plans had been finalised.”

“Back in the days of Rodgers and Hammerstein, there wasn’t much of a difference between showtunes and pop tunes. The songs sung from Broadway stages had a multigenerational appeal, received wide radio airplay and were the staples of Your Hit Parade. Today, that trend is reversed: Instead of Broadway driving pop music, it’s the other way around.”

A new Stephen Sondheim musical (his first in nine years) is preparing for Broadway, and producers are studying the audiences. “The conventional wisdom is that you are better off listening to the audience as a group than to any one individual member of it. As far as critics’ responses, because each review reflects the opinion of just one person, the show’s collaborators tend to discount them. In the case of Bounce, most notices have sounded disappointed. It’s not that critics dislike the musical; it’s more that they think it’s a minor work. Some, though, have added that even below-average Sondheim is better than almost everything else.”

It looks like the O’Neill Playwrights Conference is close to nameing a successor to James Houghton, who left as artistic director last week. “Mr. Houghton left the O’Neill after discovering that its board had decided to centralize control to reduce costs without consulting him. In a telephone interview on Tuesday, he said he would have cooperated with the centralization and would never have changed the submissions policy if he had known about the board’s cost-cutting plans in advance.”

James Houghton’s departure as artistic director of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s Playwrights Conference took many by surprise. “The sudden resignation took the theatre community by surprise, coming just five weeks after Houghton’s decision, announced publicly Mon., Sept. 15, that the O’Neill would ‘suspend’ indefinitely its longstanding policy of open submissions, a move that quickly provoked discord in the national playwriting community. The resignation also came following the O’Neill’s receipt of a letter, written by a three-time Playwrights Conference alum, questioning Houghton’s claim that the decision was largely based on the state of the institution’s finances.”

Russians are not generally eager to discuss the dark period in which Josef Stalin ruled their nation, and who can blame them? During his rule, Stalin ordered the killing or banishment of more than 10 million of his countrymen, a human catastrophe which even today is underrecognized as one of the great governmental crimes of the 20th Century, and which Russia has never fully confronted. “Indeed, though millions of their compatriots died or were imprisoned on Stalin’s watch, many Russians don’t consider him among the 20th century’s most evil men. In a poll early this year, a clear majority of Russians said Stalin’s role in the country’s life was, on balance, positive.” Now, a new play being produced in Moscow is putting the horror of the Stalin regime on full display, and forcing modern Russia to acknowledge and deal with the dictator’s true legacy.

So why is The Producers fading on Broadway? Terry Teachout believes he knows: “To see ‘The Producers’ is to be immersed in that older style of comedy, and for anyone born before 1960, the experience will be as nostalgic as a trip to the county fair. Somehow I doubt that was what Mr. Brooks had in mind, though. My guess is that he still thinks it’s titillating, even shocking, to put swishy Nazis on stage. It’s no accident that he hasn’t made a movie for years and years: Broadway is one of the last places in America where he could draw a crowd with that kind of humor, and it’s not an especially young crowd, either.”

There have been a number of plays in recent years that take up science as a topic. But most of them bury the science behind personalities. But why not put science or math upfront? “Doing mathematics can often feel like the creative process of a theatre improvisation. You set up a tableau with conditions for collisions of ideas and let the thing run. Very often it gets nowhere – but sometimes there is a dynamic created that clicks. Like the rules of a theatre game, the conditions push you in extraordinary unexpected directions that too much freedom would stifle.”

After months of lagging ticket sales, the Broadway production of The Producers is bringing back the show’s original stars – Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. “The show’s producers want to make the most of the stars’ return. The show’s regular tickets cost $30 to $100, and the producers are also expected to sell nearly a hundred $480 tickets in the best rows of the orchestra for each performance through Broadway Inner Circle. With the new $480 tickets, the show is likely to post the highest box office take on Broadway, as much as $1.3 million a week.”

Colorado’s top theatre school is the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. But budget cuts to state colleges have decimated UNC’s theatre program.