Category: theatre

St. Paul, Minnesota’s Penumbra Theatre is one America’s leading African American theatres. And it’s been looking to build itself a real home for some time. Now it looks like the theatre might abandon those plans and move into the Ordway Performing Arts Center. “A potential collaboration between the Ordway and Penumbra provides a possible: Penumbra would provide cachet, a density of activity and, most probably, rental income to the Ordway.

A musical about porn star Linda Lovelace is being workshopped in Los Angeles. Producers hope to stage a full production in LA or New York. “It’s the idea of finding ourselves in a bad situation and surviving that audiences will relate to.”

Broadway saw its usual post-Tony box office bounce last week. But the awards also signalled the closing of six shows this month as producers realized they were on the downside and not likely to survive.

As theatre critic of the New York Times, Ben Brantley is the most powerful theatre critic in America. He says that stories of Broadway’s decline over the years have been overblown. “The so-called golden era of Broadway was actually pretty short-lived. We are always lamenting its decline and saying it is no good now, but I don’t necessarily think that is anything new. Theater in general is certainly less glamorous then when I first came to New York as a kid, but I am also looking at it through adult eyes. I sit through some bad stuff, but when I get to sit through some of the good stuff, it is still rewarding like nothing else.”

Does Canada need a national theatre festival? “The very undertaking both addresses some obvious lacks and points to some troubling challenges. English-Canadian theatre artists don’t tour enough, leaving pockets of dynamic activity in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto and Halifax that are largely mysterious to the other centres. Performers on Vancouver’s burgeoning small theatre scene, for example, complain they can’t find affordable venues in Toronto, to introduce their work to the country’s largest theatre centre. So, the festival program put together by artistic director Mary Vingoe is consciously transnational.”

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival turns 50. “Because it is the way it is, in the place that it is, at the time that it is, it has become perhaps our nation’s most important yardstick and proof of her cultural identity and diversity. For three weeks in August, it is a living, breathing, heaving accumulation of creative energy that is unparalleled. Sound dramatic? Maybe. But it’s fact. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world. On the one hand it is evil, disillusioning the naïve and pillaging the weak. On the other it is good, rewarding the strong and praising the innovative. Its thirst unquenchable, its attraction undiminishable, its value undeniable.”

So TV ratings for last week’s Tony Awards broadcast were down. It was the most entertaining Tony broadcast in years. “The telecast was young and multicultural, traditional and classy – oddly enough, just like the real boundary-defying season. There were shockingly few of those moments that made a person embarrassed to have spent so much of her precious life in the theater. And despite the show’s hilarious preponderence of prescription-drug sponsors, I’m told that ratings actually went up 19 percent in that tyrannically desirable and healthy 18-49 demographic. Ambien, anyone?”

Researchers recently tried to determine the world’s funniest joke. And then they crunched numbers to find what was the funniest time of the year. Sure – maybe the biggest joke of all is the idea that scientists thought they could pin down what funny is. “There may be no more subjective art. One man’s glee might be another man’s unforgivable insult. Men and women often diverge wildly over what makes them laugh. Age, too, creates gulfs. Geography dictates still more patterns of comic appreciation.”

With the Minneapolis-based Children’s Theatre Company collecting the Tony award for best regional theatre, is the world of high drama finally ready to embrace truly excellent productions for kids? More important, should audiences now expect the same high level of performance and production from shows directed at children as they do from ‘adult’ theatre? “For decades the field was seen as the theatrical bush leagues, the province of sanctimonious pedagogues, dramaturgical amateurs and dubious actors in animal suits. But those prejudices have been eroding, and now there is a highly visible emblem of this shift.”

“Three of London’s major theater institutions – the Royal National Theatre, the Donmar Warehouse and the Almeida Theatre in Islington – acquired new artistic directors in the past year. A fourth company, the Old Vic, has a new head as well, a starry American one: Kevin Spacey, who plans to act in and direct Old Vic productions.” But can any amount of new blood manage to pull the West End out of what has become an embarrassing and extended slump? Michael Phillips sees some promising signs.