Category: theatre

Tennessee Williams’ plays have not worn well in recent years. But “nobody wrote like him – with the beautiful agony, compassionate brutality and sexually complicated women. On the other hand, no one overwrote like him either. Did the sexual revolution and gay liberation let the air out of his theatrical high-compression chambers? Are we so casual about our internal lives that even gorgeous imagery about sensual menace seems less majestic than ludicrous? If so, can his time come again? People in important places are betting that it can.”

“The Producers opened as a monster hit on Broadway. It was supposed to stay that way, packing houses for years. But it hasn’t turned out that way. “Less than three years after its incomparably auspicious opening, The Producers, in the eyes of many on Broadway, has become an underachiever. Its box office grosses, which set record highs — more than $1.2 million per week — in its first year, have fallen about 20 percent in the last 12 months. It now ranks below newer shows like Hairspray and Mamma Mia! as well as The Lion King.”

“James Houghton has resigned in a pique as the artistic director of the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, the country’s leading workshop for new plays, saying he was excluded from the board’s reorganization plans.”

Actors protest the use of non-union performers in traveling shows. “Hundreds of members of Actors’ Equity Association, the union for actors and stage managers, fired an opening salvo in a rally in Duffy Square yesterday, protesting the use of non-Equity touring companies. This is shaping up as the most contentious issue in coming negotiations between the union and producers. Their contract expires in June.”

As if the controversy surrounding the impending move of the Barnes Collection to center city Philadelphia weren’t confusing enough already, a new play by Thomas Gibbons threatens to muddy the waters even more. Permanent Collection is a fictional play, with made-up characters and a central conflict invented in the author’s mind, but it takes place at the Barnes, and uses the conflicts that have occurred there over the past decade as its historical base. “The wiliest trust lawyer could get lost in the baffling dilemmas involved, but Gibbons sees the difficulties as an invitation to compress some of them into a two-hour drama.”

“What’s going on with The Violet Hour? Richard Greenberg’s eagerly awaited new play has been in previews a couple of weeks and already there are so many bodies piling up, the producers might as well park a hearse outside the stage door.” Two lead actors and a director have been axed as the troubled production snowballs towards its official opening, and while the company producing Violet insists that things are under control, Michael Riedel isn’t convinced.

The Henry Miller Theatre on West 43rd Street in New York will be closing this winter, to make way for a new skyscraper. But Miller is more than just another Broadway showhouse: it is currently the home of the unexpected smash hit Urinetown, which will be evicted by mid-February. No other Broadway theaters are currently available for the show to move into, and a move to off-Broadway would cause all sorts of union troubles, and would also be a strange move for a show enjoying the success of Urinetown. The Miller’s owners are planning to rebuild, possibly within the new skyscraper, but that project won’t be completed until at least 2008.

In another life, Michael Grandage – who is artistic director of London’s Donmar Warehouse and associate director of the Sheffield Crucible – might have “made an excellent soccer manager – but he is better off where he is. He’s not only programming two thriving theatres in London and Sheffield. He has also proved that it is possible to be preoccupied by power without being corrupted by it.”

The UK’s National Theatre is disputing a report in the Sunday Telegraph which claimed that directors at the National were being asked to stage plays for one-tenth the normal budget, and that the cuts were directly attributable to the cut-rate ticket prices which the theater instituted last summer, and plans to continue for the next three years. According to the theater, the low-priced tickets are being completely underwritten by a £1 million grant, which has had no effect on the creative budget. The National does acknowledge a distinct change to its recent design aesthetic, one that is “more minimal, creating a space where metaphor flies.” Coincidentally, the minimalist stages are also cheaper.

Los Angeles’ theatre community is huge. But is it vital? “In this awful economic climate for the arts, and because of the quality of the actors here, Los Angeles’ own off-off-Broadway — 90 percent of what’s produced here — serves as one of the nation’s most vital laboratories not just for new plays, but for companies that are working to incorporate movement and text into combinations that keep providing alternatives to the products of our mass media.”