Category: theatre

“Ever since Jerry cornered Peter on a Central Park bench in “The Zoo Story” and demanded an audience, Albee has served as ‘an invaluable irritant to the status quo.’ With ‘The Zoo Story’ hitting off-Broadway in 1959 and, three years later, ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ on Broadway, the American establishment had an unnerving new commentator wielding a venomously witty pen. Albee was in, or It, for a good while. Then, by the late 1970s, Albee was out. Since the success of “Three Tall Women” a decade ago, he has been in again.”

“In its 24 years and 255 productions, the Denver Center Theatre Company has grown from a civic curiosity in a ghostly part of downtown into the largest regional theater between Chicago and the West Coast. In 1998, it received the Tony Award as the best regional company in the nation.”

As America’s political divide grows ever wider, with the right wing in control of the government and the left settling into its familiar role as vocal minority, the theater world is struggling with the question of how to engage its audience on a political level. Behind the scenes, many theaters have had to get conservative, slashing expenses in the face of a crippling recession and the decreasing governmental commitment to the arts. “But as the nation and the state have shifted rightward on the political spectrum, local theater people with progressive political agendas are coming off the sidelines and putting their beliefs on the stage.”

In Barcelona, where Catalan language and culture dominate, the theatrical community is at an interesting crossroads. “Despite the fact that the Catalan language is central to identity here, most of the major Catalan theatre companies either banish the spoken word entirely or relegate it to a very distant and neglected second place.” Such wordless theater began under the brutal reign of Franco, who banned the Catalan language. And while the ban led to the development of a uniquely image-based theater tradition, no one can quite explain why that tradition has continued to dominate Barcelona’s drama scene, even as the rest of the world has moved on.

“Arena Stage, the 53-year-old godmother of Washington’s lively theater scene, is getting ready to change its architectural personality from introvert to extrovert in one huge, but perhaps not-so-easy, step… Making it happen poses a formidable challenge. The price tag is estimated to be a cool $100 million, exactly 100 times the original cost of Arena’s 42-year-old building at Maine Avenue and Sixth Street SW.” Still, says Benjamin Forgey, the Arena renovation is a crucial project in the District’s ongoing renewal efforts, and architect Bing Thom’s design is deserving of completion.

“Leave it to Michael Frayn, author of the Tony Award- winning Copenhagen, to take a 30-year-old European political scandal and turn it into a play that’s packing the National Theatre to the rafters. The play is Democracy, and it’s about the spy scandal that brought down Willy Brandt, the West German chancellor who reconciled his country with its communist neighbors in the East. Already, the groundwork is being laid for a Broadway transfer, probably in the spring.”

This year, the National Endowment for the Arts is promoting an unprecedented 15-month, 100-city tour of Shakespearean drama. The idea for the tour came from former NEA chairman Michael Hammond, and was brought to fruition by the NEA’s current bundle of energy, Dana Gioia. According to Gioia, “the NEA is hoping to ‘revive the tradition of touring theater, which has been in jeopardy.’ By making connections between touring companies and local presenters, he says, ‘we’re creating a circuit that I hope these companies can go back to.'”

“Half the theaters on Broadway, including some of its most famous stages, will become fully accessible to disabled people under an agreement announced Thursday between the landlord and the government. Work on the 16 landmark theaters operated by the Shubert Organization is to be finished by year’s end. The organization has spent $5 million over several years to improve wheelchair seating areas, restrooms, entrances, exits, ticket windows, concession areas and drinking fountains. But legalities formally bringing the theaters into compliance with the federal Americans with Disabilities Act were completed only this week.”

At the beginning of last season the National Theatre’s Nicholas Hytner lowered ticket prices in an attempt to draw younger audiences. It worked. “It represents a triumph for Nicholas Hytner, the National’s artistic director, who gambled on filling the giant Olivier auditorium with audiences for edgier plays, if ticket prices could be reduced. Two-thirds of the thousands who flocked to see the musical skit based on the American television show were under 35, and they all came at full price. Nearly half had never been to the National before. “

Why is it that the world of “classical” theater in the U.S. has been reduced to a single name? William Shakespeare was a brilliant playwright, yes, but he was not the only guy to put quill to paper over the last millenium, and frankly, Michael Kilian is getting a little sick of him, particularly the comedies. “If we are to have classical theater in this country — and certainly we must — why keep dragging out the Bard’s tired old comedies, which seem always to do with mistaken identities and mass marriages? Why not treat audiences to some actual classical fun, with rip-roaring Restoration romps such as Sheridan’s The Rivals?”