Category: theatre

The UK’s National Theatre has been trying a new strategy this summer to attract larger audiences to its performances: dropping ticket prices. Astonishingly enough, as it turns out, the public is in favor of spending less on tickets. “The gamble of slashing most seat prices to £10 in the National Theatre’s largest auditorium has filled the yawning spaces of the Olivier with new young theatre goers. In the past sweltering weeks, when other theatres were discounting frantically to keep their shows alive, the Olivier has been more than 90% full.”

A national gathering of theater critics took place in Minnesota recently, and Celia Baker came away from her week in the Land of 10,000 Lakes wondering why more American metropolises can’t be like the Twin Cities. “More than 2 million seats were sold by Twin City theaters in 2000, equal to the combined season attendance of the Minnesota Twins, Vikings and Timberwolves. More theater tickets per capita are sold in the Twin Cities than any other place in the United States outside of New York City… The area’s cultural life helps lure business to the area, and many large corporations with headquarters in the Twin Cities are generous in funding arts programs and the buildings that house them.”

Over the years, fans of the Boston Red Sox have become accustomed to watching their players bolt Beantown, and take up a bat for the hated New York Yankees. But former team general manager Dan Duquette may be the first Red Sox to land on a stage with the Bronx Bombers. Duquette (who was fired by the Red Sox last year during an ownership shuffle,) is scheduled to appear in a Western Massachusetts production of the Broadway musical, Damn Yankees, portraying the manager of the Washington Senators. The show will go on in an actual ballpark in Pittsfield, and yes, Duquette will be singing.

Theatre tickets are starting to resemble airfares, and not just because they’re ridiculously expensive. Generally, when we go to the theatre, we expect to have paid the same price as the people on either side of us, but increasingly, Broadway producers are charging less for ticketbuyers willing and able to make their purchases well in advance, and even less for folks willing to be flexible about where they sit, and what date they attend the show. “For complete control — the ability to choose your seat and the date you sit there — you will probably pay top dollar. In most other cases, you can make a deal.”

Shakespeare himself could never have imagined a project of this scope, but Clive Brill wouldn’t give up on it. The result of Brill’s efforts is a new 98-CD set featuring the complete dramatic output of William Shakespeare, as performed by some of the great actors of the era. “Produced in London recording studios between 1996 and 2000, and featuring many of the most accomplished classical actors on the British stage, the full set feels like one of those astonishing feats of engineering that result in mile-high towers or friezes chiseled into the sides of mountains.”

The secret of box office success for touring shows? Stars. No matter who they are. “There are, for example, fading sitcom stars, former pop teen idols from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, or, in some cases, their extended families. When it comes to casting a touring musical in the American hinterlands or a self-dubbed world-class city like Toronto, any one of the above can headline a show and be guaranteed audience and media adoration.”

“The fad for ‘flash mobs’, where hundreds of people gather at a place in the city, perform a bizarre if harmless mass action before scattering without trace, has spread in less than a month from its origins in the New York art scene to cities across the US. Now the movement is to come to Britain with a series of “flash mobs” in London, and if the craze picks up in Britain as quickly as it did in America.”

No matter the planning and professionalism of those involved, mishaps happen often in the theatre. Indeed – being live pretty much guarantees something will fail. John Heilpern recounts some of the more memorable snafus he’s seen or heard about…

At Connecticut’s O’Neill Playwrights Conference, women playwrights are taking an increasingly major role. “The League of American Theaters and Producers reports that the audience for Broadway shows in the 2001-02 season was 63 percent female — the same percentage of plays by women (63.6 percent) that get script-in-hand public performances at this year’s playwrights conference. But nationwide, according to American Theatre magazine, only 17 to 18 percent of plays produced in professional theaters in 2001-02 were written by women. In the same season, 16 percent of productions were directed by women.”

“When the Post-Gazette crunched statistics for an Index of Theatrical Activity of the 15 midsize metropolitan areas tracked in the Benchmark Series in 1998, Minneapolis-St. Paul regularly vied with Seattle for the top spot. Of course, New York and Chicago are securely Nos. 1 and 2 in the national rankings, but the Twin Cities vie for third…”