Category: theatre

Broadway was closed Thursday during the blackout, but Friday was back to business. “Theater box offices were open, as was the ticket agency Telecharge. Ticketmaster was experiencing some technical difficulties. The TKTS half-price ticket booth opened as scheduled Friday afternoon. Lines of would-be ticket buyers snaked a block south of the booth, located on Broadway and 47th Street.”

A couple of California investors sink millions of their own money into building their own new theatres in Los Angeles. The question is why?

Playwrights are all but invisible in London’s West End. Now it takes celebrities to sell anything. “The author is dead in the West End. Particularly, as it were, the living author. In a talk at the Edinburgh book festival on Monday, Alan Ayckbourn railed against the dominance of celebrities – picking out Madonna and Ewan McGregor for particular bile – in theatreland, and the now near-impossibility of staging good plays with decent actors, without a Matthew Perry or a Jason Priestley to jolly the whole thing along.”

While many arts organizations are struggling to keep audiences and cash flowing, this year’s Minnesota Fringe Festival – America’s biggest fringe – turned out record numbers. “Marking its 10th anniversary this year, the Fringe sold a total of 40,500 tickets to the 162 shows staged during the festival, which concluded Sunday. The box office figure is 27 percent higher than last year’s festival.”

The musical “Phantom of the Opera” plays its 7,000th performance in London. The musical has “packed theatres the world over and grossed £1.6 billion at the box office – more than any other film or stage play, including Titanic, Star Wars and ET. Written-by Andrew Lloyd Webber and produced by Cameron Mackintosh, Phantom opened in October 1986 starring Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman.”

It used to be that the Edinburgh Fringe was an adjunct to the tonier Edinburgh Festival. No longer. “For the 250,000 odd who pour into the Scottish capital – a 50 per cent population increase – the chief draw is the Festival Fringe (August 3 to 25). Once a mere tangent to the snootier international festival, it is now the world’s biggest arts event. Scorning fears of SARS, terrorism and war, hotel-room bookings are buoyant, ticket sales are robust and records have already been broken: there will be 21,594 performances of 1541 shows by 668 companies in 207 venues, the first time the number of venues has topped 200, 24 more than last year.”

Crowds are thronging to Jessica Grace Wing’s new musical “Lost” “Ms. Wing’s death so close to the production’s debut — she was said to have finished the musical’s final song just a day before dying — has created an unmistakable sentimental momentum for “Lost,” which is based on the children’s tale “Hansel and Gretel” and has a book and lyrics by Kirk Wood Bromley. Like the Broadway musical “Rent,” which also started in the East Village and whose composer, Jonathan Larson, died just after the show’s final dress rehearsal, “Lost” is selling tickets to those who knew Ms. Wing’s work and those who suddenly want to discover her. “

Critic Dominic Papatola takes in an orgy of theatre at this year;s Minnesota Fringe Festival, and comes away disappointed. “Consider my batting average: In one 36-hour period, I saw 13 shows. Two of them were quite good — the kind of thing I would recommend to friends and readers. Three of them were so-so; flawed but with enough merit to make them worth $10 and an hour of my life. But fully seven of those shows — nearly 60 percent, for those of you who like statistics — resided in the oozy quagmire between not-so-good and positively rancid: odious, smarmy, meandering exercises in precious self-indulgence that, even by the somewhat lower standards of the Fringe, were experiences that, at the end of my theater-going life, I will mourn as time utterly squandered.”

Is a play set is Scotland a Scottish play? And if it is a Scottish play, does that mean it doesn’t travel well outside the region? “Scottish theatre, unlike Irish, is seen as regional. The London establishment think that we should have our own plays, but they don’t think that they should have to listen to them. They think they won’t be relevant to them.”

When “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and “Enchanted April” close on Broadway at the end of this month, there will be only one play left running on Broadway. “Nineteen musicals will be around in September, but plays are never very plentiful on Broadway. Last season, though, was particularly dire for new work, and the coming drought is unusual.”