Category: theatre

When they started in the late 80s, the Blue Man Group was “perfect for its time.” These days, though, “Blue Man Group is not an art story, but a business story about art. They are the McDonald’s of the music world. Blue Man Group Productions employs 450 people. Its four stage productions attract one million people annually. Basic math shows they’re pulling in millions in revenue. Blue men have done Intel ads and are favourites of the late-night TV-show set. Their first CD, Audio, was nominated for a Grammy in 1999 and went gold. The original three blue men don’t perform any more. They are executive producers who keep up the, uh, brand standard.”

Fresh into the job as director of London’s National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner has changed the way critics think about the institution. “The season has been risky, adventurous, yet critically acclaimed and popular. Hytner has the near-superstitious look of one who can’t quite believe it is happening. ‘All the shows that have opened so far are full at the box office. We can’t do any better. It is all that I could have hoped for. We can only go downhill from here’.”

A group of community leaders in Beverly Hills are trying to raise $30 million to build the state’s first full-time professional children’s theatre. “The move comes at a critical time for arts education as budgets shrink for public-school programs and computers and television claim a substantial share of kids’ leisure time. At the same time, children’s theater, traditionally the stepchild of the professional stage, is maturing to new levels of excellence as evidenced by last month’s Tony nod to the wunderkind of the genre, the Minneapolis-based Children’s Theatre Company, the first such troupe to win the award.”

When Ben Brantley first heard about Deborah Warner’s “Angel Project,” a “theatre” piece that sends participants on a tour of Manhattan, it it sounded, he writes, “more like my idea of hell than heaven.” But “as the aesthetic philosophers of the early 20th century liked to point out, if you put a frame around anything it becomes art. Everyday objects begin to vibrate mysteriously. The mundane acquires instant drama; you start to see poetic patterns in flat surfaces. The immodest goal of Ms. Warner — the British director responsible for last spring’s brilliant and brutal “Medea” on Broadway — is to condition you to see all of New York in such terms.” So was it hell?

Local productions of classic Broadway shows generally aren’t expected to measure up to the New York originals, even in sophisticated theater towns, but a new version of “Annie Get Your Gun” currently playing in Denver is drawing some uniquely ugly reviews, and more than a few snickers from the audience. “When Annie’s gun sticks but a dead bird falls from the sky anyway, what are we to do but cringe? And when the band resorts to banging on drums to cover misfiring guns, what are we to feel but mawkish empathy?” And the problems don’t end with misfiring rifles.

There are signs that Black theatre has come of age in Britain. “No longer tucked away in fringe venues, or in companies that specialise in black work, it is striding confidently across the stages of major London theatres. ‘The talent has been there for a very long time,” he says. “The dominant culture has been slow to open itself up to the new voices that are blossoming in our midst. I think we’ve not been good enough at that.’ That may well be true. But the delay means that these new voices have arrived fully formed…”

“If Shakespeare were alive today, there’s no telling what his place in pop culture might be. Musically, he might be another tattoo-branded Eminem or Tupac Shakur, scribbling out reams of rhymes on barroom cocktail napkins (but with a decidedly broader world view). If he gravitated toward TV, he likely would be found on HBO, cranking out barrier-breaking scripts as prolifically as Aaron Sorkin (“The West Wing”) or David E. Kelley (“Boston Public”). Or perhaps the Bard would helm a show like “Law and Order,” a popular series just as well-known for, shall we say, borrowing plot lines. But given the visceral way with which Shake- speare toyed with universal human emotions, he would probably be most at home as a cutting-edge filmmaker.”

An American Hellenic group in Connecticut plans to build a replica of the classic theater, “modeled after the theater of ancient Epidauros, where an actor can whisper at center stage and be heard in the last row without a microphone. The first load of black-veined white marble for the new theater has already been shipped from Greece. But residents near the site have taken the decision to court, arguing that the 500-seat theater, to be built into a hillside on Dog Lane, will be too big and noisy and create parking problems. They also believe that the theater will have about twice the seating capacity the society is claiming.”

“You could see a lot of actors stripping this past season, especially if you were one of the many people who took opera glasses to the theater. This bumper crop of flesh, both subtly achieved and blatantly revealed, offered audiences a chance to study in depth how nudity actually functions onstage. One thing was clear in almost all of last season’s strips: it was the moment of first removal (rather than the eventual full monty) that brought the biggest gasps.”

Used to be that theatre productions used to depend on stars to attract audiences. But lately, movies have been the draw. “Miramax, the studio that created ‘Chicago,’ has secured the rights to film at least three more Broadway musicals. Two of them — ‘Guys and Dolls’ and ‘Damn Yankees’ — have been given the Hollywood treatment before. And industry publications have said in recent weeks that uber-producer/director Steven Spielberg is interested in creating a film version of Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 masterpiece, ‘Sweeney Todd.’ If these projects do make it to movie theaters, it will represent a turnaround from Broadway’s recent history.”