Category: theatre

Time magazine has ranked what it considers the five best regional theatres in America. Chicago’s Goodman Theatre topped the list, followed by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland; the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass.; the Guthrie in Minneapolis, and the South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Calif.

“Spanish drama is fascinated by rules, by the code of conduct by which life is lived in matters of love and honour. Generally speaking we may seem to have lost interest in honour as a topic, but that does not mean that we cannot be stirred by a play in which honour is the motivating force. After all, we understand what humiliation (the opposite of honour) is, and we pursue honour in various of its aspects all the time, by other names. Respect is the current street-slang under whose rubric issues of honour are discussed and fought out.”

David Hare wonders about the lack of ambition of British theatres and audiences compared to playwrights. “It is clear that much of the free theatre we once loved has become sclerotic, choked up by damp-palmed development officers and fetid sponsorship deals, and patrolled from the watchtowers by a bureaucratic Arts Police that has sought to rob the activity of its very point – its spontaneity – it is remarkable how many of us feel that even if it has been a lifetime of failure, it has not been a lifetime of waste.”

What is it about washed-up 80s music stars? “Two members of the eighties good-time girl group the Go-Go’s this week announced they were working on a musical about porn queen Linda Lovelace (Deep Throat).”

Here are some rules: “The first rule would be to decide what story you?re telling and then get on with it; adults may enjoy the odd interesting digression, children simply lose interest and start eating crisps. The second would be to avoid irony and political point scoring at all costs; children can sense the strident negative energy a mile off and are bored by it. The third rule is to avoid deliberate artiness in design and to make things look like what they are supposed to be. And the fourth is to keep it simple and remember that less is more; children come to the theatre to be told a story, not to admire someone?s fancy set design or hard-won clowning skills.”

There are many good plays that get produced in America that never get to New York. “Why would a great work go unproduced? The answer is multifaceted, but much conversation swirls around non-profit business models, the economic climate, and changes in funding bases. Simply put, many theaters? particularly those invested in new and challenging work?don’t proffer as many plays as they used to.”

“What has happened to political theatre in the US? Engulfed as we are by the coverage of the chaos in Iraq and the ongoing threat of terrorism, it’s hard not to wonder what kind of rarefied world our playwrights are living in. Suffice it to say that the great wealth of work seems strangely removed from anything approaching the urgent reality of our daily headlines. But critics should be clear on how they’d like the theater to respond. Are we merely looking to theatricalize the same journalistic images that CNN and its rivals have transformed into Nielsen rating packages? Or is it a bit of didacticism that we’re after, a cup of moral advice sweetened by a dose of drama?”

The West End’s thirst for American TV and movie actors seems insatiable. But are they good for London theatre? “Some months, it seems that any Yank with their TV or film career on the skids can come over here without a by-your-leave and grab worthless showbiz headlines with the revival of some hoary play that only serves to confirm Richard Eyre’s thought that London’s West End has all the appeal of a yawning grave. Worse yet, many of the West End plays in which American actors have starred have been by US playwrights exploring US themes.”

“Not so long ago, high-profile revivals tried to be time-travel experiences, replicating the original sets and disinterring original cast members. Now, the pressure is on old works to reveal new things. Sometimes they are forced into it, with revised librettos and resequenced songs. Yet truly canonical works rewrite themselves by not changing a word or a note. History does that for them…”

Where are this year’s outrages among the Tony nominations? Usually there’s at least something the nominators did that offends. “For the most part, however, the nominating committee has sorted heroically through the season’s extremely peculiar mixture of shows. The awards, to be dispensed June 8 on CBS, are not likely to be placed in unworthy hands. What hurts my head this year more than ever is the necessity of having to choose at all.”