Category: theatre

Is it because the war kept tourists away from London’s West End? That’s one theory why “Contact” – expected to run for a year or more – is closing after only six months. “Contact came to the West End with an apparently gilt-edged pedigree. It was devised by choreographer Susan Stroman, and John Weldman, and was a smash hit on Broadway, where it won a string of awards, including a Tony.”

Seattle’s ACT Theatre, which said earlier this year that it needed to raise $1.5 million in emergency cash by April 15 or it would close, has found the money. “It was a squeaker, but we did it,” said Susan Trapnell, a former ACT manager who volunteered her time for three months to help raise $1.5 million to keep the wolf from ACT’s door.”

Fifty years ago a passion play was first staged in a remote Brazilian village. “Now titled ‘The Passion of Christ in New Jerusalem,’ it has become the best-known religious entertainment in Brazil, the largest Roman Catholic country. The play, being performed nightly through Saturday, has grown into a lavish million-dollar spectacle that annually draws as many as 70,000 people to what is described as the biggest open-air theater in the world. It is so successful that it has even inspired a rival, dissident pageant.” But last year the founder died, and attempts to modernize and show-biz it up are ignited big controversy.

Scientists have sonstructed computer models of Athens’ Odeon Theatre, built 2,500 years ago in the time of Pericles. “They have reconstructed the world’s first indoor theatre in three-dimensional virtual reality, only to find that 40% of the audience would have had an obstructed view. They say it would have been worse ‘than being stuck behind a 6ft 10in bodybuilder at a modern cinema multiplex’. Athens in the 5th century BC was the home of Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides and other playwrights of the golden age. The Odeon was next door to the open-air theatre of Dionysus, near the Acropolis.”

Seattle’s ACT theatre said earlier this year it needed to raise $1.5 million by April 15 or it would go out of business. No word as of Wednesday if the goal had been met, but as of Monday (03/14) “a total of $987,000 had been raised to date, approximately two-thirds the overall goal. The great bulk of that sum has come from a small group of targeted individuals, including ‘board members, past supporters, general public subscribers, and people who know us,’ and donations have ranged from $5,000 to $100,000.”

If Jerry Springer can be an opera, why can’t Monica Lewinsky be a Broadway musical? Now she will be: “Monica! The Musical” will get its first reading at the Manhattan Theatre Club on May 7. “Its creators, hope that the reading will lead to a stage berth here in New York, where it would join unlikely post-post-ironic musicals such as Debbie Does Dallas, Urinetown and the new Zanna, Don’t!” Some sample lyrics? “I feel I’ve lost my head,” sings young Bill. “Don’t look too hard for you will find it / Beneath my dress of red,” responds the siren.”

“The musical being performed when Chechen guerrillas seized a Moscow theater last October will close next month as audiences stay away for fear of a copy-cat attack, the play’s director said.”

This year’s offerings at the Humana Festival of new plays followed some common themes. “Bad endings in America? Mopey zeitgeist? Metaphorical navel-gazing? Armchair quarterbacking the philosophical arc of the Humana is the second-most-favorite pastime of the festival. (Relentless schmoozing is, of course, numero uno.) And because so many of this year’s scripts seemed not-quite-fully realized, there was plenty of room for interpretation.”

Has Michael Boyd just taken on the worst job in theatre? He says running the Royal Shakespeare Company is “tricky,” not bad. “Recently, it’s been very difficult to resist the feeling of the RSC being the largest machine in an entrepreneurial theatrical world, but what we’ve actually got to be is the alternative to the entrepreneurial world. We’ve got to be a bit of a bastion of idealism, a bastion of research and development. We need room to experiment with our work, not always feeling the need to programme conservatively. We do Shakespeare for goodness’ sake. That’s commercial enough in its own right.’ He wants to return the RSC to the cutting edge of British theatre.”