Category: theatre

London’s West End theatres are in dismal shape, many of them shabby and run-down. A new survey declares that the historic theatres need an urgent £255m facelift.

In 1957, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim joined forces to write the music and lyrics for “West Side Story.” Sondheim, of course, went on to a brilliant career in musical theatre. But Bernstein turned his attentions predominantly to a classical music career. What might Bernstein’s influence have been if instead he had pursued theatre?

London’s Royal Court has an outsized influence on European theatre. “Instead of engaging in the difficult process of cultivating new local writing, directors from Warsaw to Lisbon appear to be simply scanning the forthcoming programme at the Royal Court and snapping up the rights. One major appeal of these plays is that they afford a progressive gloss without risking any kind of dangerous formal experimentation or tackling relevant issues that might challenge local audiences.”

Next Wednesday Actors’ Equity will stage a rally protesting the proliferation of non-union tours of Broadway shows. “It is a contentious issue that will be at the center of Equity’s upcoming negotiations with Broadway producers in the spring. Equity’s contract with the producers expires June 30. With memories of the musicians’ strike that shut down Broadway earlier this year still fresh, both sides are gearing up for what could be another ugly battle.”

A growing band of critics believe that “the increasing number of poor-quality shows in the West End are damaging its image. ‘A lot of theatres are kept open because somebody will take something in that should never be in the West End. In the past five years there have been many shows in the West End that had no right to be there. They weren’t good enough, shouldn’t have been there and didn’t stand a dog in hell’s chance. It puts people off theatre’.”

AR Rahman, who wrote music for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bombay Dreams, has been hired to write the score for a musical version of Lord of the Rings. “Rahman is a star in his native India and has sold more than 100 million albums, composing the soundtracks to more than 50 Bollywood films. The £8m musical is due to open in the spring of 2005 in London.”

“More ambitious new theaters have popped up here in the last two years than in any comparable period in memory. Nobody seems to have told their founders that the 21st century is supposed to be hostile to all live theater except frothy Broadway musicals, and even those get little respect…”

Judges of a major UK regional theatre awards program, after years of warning of the dire state of regional theatre, have declared a new “golden age” of regional theatre. “It seemed to all of us that there were significantly more productions on a larger scale, lots of work for actors, lots of Shakespeare, lots of new plays, and lots of touring and co-production, with companies exploiting new productions by taking them around to other theatres.”

.Even at its darkest moment, when the euphoria of the Prague Spring was crushed by the Soviet invasion of 1968, Czech culture threatened resurgence. ‘A secret streamlet trickles on beneath the heavy crust of inertia, slowly and inconspicuously undercutting it,’ Václav Havel wrote in his famous 1975 open letter to communist president Gustav Husak, which resulted in Havel’s arrest. When the trickle became a torrent at the end of the 1980s, theatre played a vital role.”

Sportswriter Mitch Albom’s tender memoir of a friendship with an old college professor was a surprise hit when it shot to the top of the bestseller lists a few years back. But the elements that make Tuesdays with Morrie a great book may be the very elements which are making a new theatrical version somewhat disappointing, says Chris Jones. “It has so little shading and such limited thematic complexity. One could make a decent argument that the shamelessly sentimental Tuesdays With Morrie is to Hamlet what Dr. Phil is to Sigmund Freud. It uses the same language, but it emphasizes simple, accessible communication rather than difficult truths.”