Category: theatre

The UK’s National Theatre has announced that it will continue a ticket-sales promotion, launched this past summer, under which all seats to certain performances were reduced to £10. The price slash resulted in full houses throughout the summer for the National, and garnered a fair amount of media interest, as well. The theatre says that it plans to run the promotion again next summer, although ticket prices have returned to normal levels for the main season.

The leader of a regional theatre in Leeds charges that high ticket prices are killing creativity in London’s West End. But defenders claim that London prices are “still relatively cheap compared with Broadway, where seats sell for more than £70. Last year 12 million went to West End shows – a record. Top-priced tickets [between £40 and £50] are always the first to sell.”

“Farce, like cricket, comes in two forms: English and French. One is an exercise in connoisseurship, distinguished by its practitioners and ennobled by tradition; the other a jolly knockabout enjoyed by amateurs. Although the two traditions developed side by side, many people acknowledge that the English play real cricket, while the French write real farce.”

The Children’s Theatre Company won a Tony and saw one of its plays go to Broadway. But the company still lost money this year. “The Minneapolis theater, which in 2003 advanced its production of ‘A Year With Frog and Toad’ to Broadway and won the Tony Award as outstanding regional theater, ended its fiscal year with an operating deficit of $350,000 on a budget of $15 million. It’s the first operating deficit in four years for CTC, and it came despite increases in attendance and contributions to the theater’s annual fund.”

New York’s Biltmore Theatre, once a thriving landmark, but more recently a derelict shell, is reopening fully refurbished as a home to the venerable Manhattan Theatre Club.

The medieval York mystery plays, originally performed on wagons on the feast of Corpus Christi, are in danger of not being performed again. “The uncertainty has been prompted by a dispute between traditionalists who favour small-scale outdoor performances every three or four years and modernisers who think York Minster should stage a bigger show once a decade. This ambition follows the success in 2000 of the production of the plays by Gregory Doran, of the Royal Shakespeare Company, in York Minster.”

The National Endowment for the Arts’ ambitious new Shakespeare tour begins. “It is the launch of something that could change the political fortunes of the once-embattled, now-neglected national arts agency. NEA Chairman Dana Gioia, at a reception Saturday evening, called the high-profile Shakespeare initiative ‘a Hail Mary pass.’ Dana Gioia’s approach is to try to bring a lot of positive attention, a lot of positive play to the NEA.”

“The charge that playwright Tony Kushner’s theater is more pedagoguish than dramatic stems partly from the inability of his accusers to differentiate between a politically charged play and a screed, or between a character and its author. Kushner’s characters may spout diatribes, but his plays, many coming from an Elizabethan tradition, are about the collision of those arguments into a kind of forum. Kushner’s works are composed of conflicts and discussions merging into a skeptical, ironical and often paradoxical vision; a play with a vision can shed some light, whereas a play with an opinion can be merely annoying. It’s helpful to distinguish the two.”

The Greek coastal city of Epidaurus is one of the most theatrically significant places in all the Western world. The city’s history as a center of classical theater has made it a haven for directors and actors all across Greece. “At the same time, the long shadow of tradition has transformed Epidaurus… into a bulwark against innovation. For the most part, the acting style that dominates is one of contrived high artifice. An army of conservative critics carefully polices every production, savaging any whiff of novelty and pouncing on even the vaguest suggestion of modernism.”

Spoken-word poetry is catching on in some theatres, but is it more than just the latest fad? “This isn’t poetry like you read it in the English Department. This is ‘performance poetry,’ and there’s no roadmap for how the genre develops audiences. Part of it is that the industry doesn’t know what to do with these people.”