Category: theatre

Cameron Mackintosh is building a new theatre. “The 500-seat Sondheim will be the first new theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue in more than 70 years. Not that you will be able to guess. The truly clever, if controversial design led by the husband-and-wife architect team of Nick Thompson and Clare Ferraby, of RHWL Architects’ Arts Team, will join the existing Gielgud and Queen’s theatres at their Edwardian hips.”

Theatrical producer Sir Cameron Mackintosh, the man behind such smash shows as Les Miserables and Miss Saigon, has pledged to pump £35 million (about $58.25 million) into London’s struggling West End theatre district. Mackintosh, who owns many of the West End’s venues, will significantly revamp six of his properties, and build a whole new 500-seat theatre, to be known as The Sondheim. The pledged amount is thought to be more than 10% of Mackintosh’s estimated personal fortune.

You’ve heard of fantasy baseball camps. Now there’s fantasy Broadway camps. “Now, for folks who’ve imagined belting to the back of the house like Betty Buckley or Nathan Lane, the Broadway Musical Fantasy Camp (BMFC) is here.”

Four small Dallas theatre companies are banding together, hoping to find a way to share a home and resources to help them prosper. The idea is to give the companies resources of a larger organization that they wouldn’t have by themselves. “We all want to grow our companies – to take them to the next level. What we’re hoping in our starry-eyed optimism is to have the benefits of a large organization and the integrity of a smaller one.”

Leaders of America’s non-profit theatres gather in Milwaukee to talk about the state of the business. “Last year more than 50 percent of the membership’s theaters ran deficits (compared to 29 percent the previous year). ‘For this [current] year, if I’m hearing the murmurs in the field correctly, it brings an even darker picture’.”

“Amazingly, while Shakespeare’s plays have been regularly shown on television and there have been dramas and documentaries speculating on their authorship, there has never been a full-blown television biography of the national icon. Perhaps it is not so surprising, because so little is actually known about his life, particularly the early years. When Michael Wood first posited the idea, one TV executive sniffed that it would be rather dull as you would only be able to film in Stratford-upon-Avon and at the Globe, while an eminent history scholar pointed out that it was going to have to be a very short series given the paucity of solid facts known about Shakespeare’s life.”

Cameron Mackintosh is spending £30 million to clean up some of his West End Theatres. But the West End itself is a dismal disgrace. “The West End is absolutely sordid. No Londoner goes there. It only exists for junkies, itinerants and tourists. It’s not London, it is something else. Having better, more attractive streets makes people behave better. Why don’t they wash the streets, as they do in Paris? I don’t know what the Mayor of London is doing but addressing the West End would be a start. Ten years ago, in Barcelona, the mayor spirited the city into something else, stopped it from being a sleazy tip. I don’t know anybody who goes to West End theatres – if you were to ask them, it would be as if you had passed them a dead rat.”

“Musical theater composers used to groom their shows out of town before taking them to Broadway. Now the country’s best new theater composers aren’t sure they want to go to Broadway at all. They feel they can be more creative and more original someplace else – maybe anyplace else.”

“The first published version of the play commonly regarded as Shakespeare’s best was yesterday revealed as a travesty of the drama that helped shape the modern English language. The version of Hamlet known as the ‘bad quarto’ is a salutary warning of the dangers of literary piracy. An entrepreneurial player in Richard Burbage’s company at the Rose Theatre, where Hamlet is believed to have been first staged, beat the Bard to the press with a version of the play he remembered from rehearsals and its first performances in 1600.”

Ontario’s Stratford Festival and Shaw Festival are suffering as American tourists stay away because of fears of SARS. With their seasons ravaged by the ticket slump, theatres will get $800,000 in emergency help fromthe Ontario government.