Category: theatre

Hartford Stage Takes Foot Off Accelerator

After six years of deficits, Hartford Stage is downsizing in an attempt to grab control of its budget. “It’s like the last scene in the movie `Thelma and Louise.’ But instead of pressing on the accelerator, as many organizations are doing, we are taking our foot off the gas and putting on the brake. And then we’re going to turn the car away from the cliff.”

Inspired By The Silver Screen

Broadway had a healthy year at the box office this season. But more and more it seems, theatre is looking for its inspiration from the movies. “Despite these flashes of risk-taking creativity, the looming presence on Broadway this season has been the movie-musical and the musical revival. In the former genre, the year’s biggest smoking craters were left by such derided bombs as Dance of the Vampire and Urban Cowboy. But when producers turn their envious eyes to the grosses from Hairspray, the exuberant version of the John Waters cult film and a heavy favorite tonight, they still want to take a chance and get into the picture.”

Edinburgh Fringe: We Have To Get Bigger Or Bust

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, with a 22-day calendar and 1,541 acts, staged in a record 207 venues, is the largest performing arts festival in the world. But in “unveiling the 2003 Fringe programme, Fringe director Paul Gudgin warns that, without future growth, ‘the law of diminishing returns will kick in’ and the quality and reputation of the Fringe would be undermined.”

The HipHop Musical – Reinventing Musical Theatre?

So far, hip-hop theater’s most distinctive, exciting quality is ‘how’ — the way in which its stories are told. In the brightest moments of ‘Flow,’ Will Power shows that hip-hop’s fusion of verse and song could make it a potent update of the traditional ‘Oklahoma!’-style musical, one better suited to the stage than rock music. Like Rodgers and Hammerstein, who proved that even a carnival barker can sing a musical soliloquy, his work suggests that hip-hop’s narrative tools will function well beyond one generation’s concerns.” Maybe hiphop musicals operate more like opera, “with one critical exception. ‘Right now there are no conventions, the way opera is full of well-understood, time-honored conventions. It’s evolving now.”

Through The Lookingglass (Theatre)

Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre has become one of the city’s most respected theatre companies. But in its 15 years, the company has camped out in a variety of spaces. Now it’s moving into “a newly renovated performance space in the Water Tower Water Works. The site, in the heart of the Magnificient Mile, where thousands of people, locals and tourists alike, will pass by daily, gives the company perhaps the highest visibility of any theater in town…”

Running Shakespeare

A production of Shakespeare’s “As You Line It” in New York’s Central Park involves a workout for the audience. “When you enter in at 97th Street and Central Park West and you will be led into Central Park where the play will begin. As you watch the show, the next scene that is about to happen, happens about 50 ft away, and then they are off. The whole audience runs to where the scene is taking place! Every 5-7 minutes. The play moves between 97th St & 100th Street using trees, rocks, benches and even the audience as scenery.”

A Great Year, But Still There Are Complaints

Broadway had a record year at the box office. But “the box-office upturn has not gladdened some local critics. They have seized the occasion of this Sunday’s Tony Awards to bemoan the dearth of serious new work on Broadway: a hackneyed lament. For at least three decades, cost has dictated that challenging drama be based off-Broadway and in America’s regional theatres, where, despite the price of tickets and the distractions of television and the internet, it remains quite robust.”