Category: theatre

Louisville’s six-week Humana Festival – America’s biggest festival for new plays, is winding up. “In stylistically diverse ways, playwrights featured in the 27th annual Humana Festival of New American Plays tapped into our national post-9/11 angst and let the fear flow through their funny, sobering, provocative works.”

Themes of this year’s Humana Festival? “Terrorism. School violence. The dangers of human cloning. They spoke in a diversity of voices, yet the writers shared a common theme: We are afraid of our world.”

Shakespeare and hip hop – a natural fit, don’t you think? “It was only a matter of time before an American stage production put us in touch with Shakespeare’s inner hip hop. The all-male, cross-dressing The Bomb-itty of Errors, a critically acclaimed sell-out on the Edinburgh Fringe last year, is now bound for the West End after a six-city tour. The marriage of hip hop and early Shakespearean comedy is by no means a shotgun one: they share a musicality of language, rhyming couplets, tongue-twisting obsession with wordplay and a taste for bawdiness.”

Directing the down-and-out Royal Shakespeare Company is called the toughest job in theatre. And Michael Boyd now has the job. Big changes are ahead he says. “At present, the RSC is ‘too big for anyone to run’ and ‘too big for people to identify us’. He presides over an antiquated corporate structure, with 30 governors, 12 of whom are on the board. It is imperative, according to at least one governor I spoke to, that the RSC reorganise itself structurally and that creative and commercial genius coincide. Arts Council support depends on the ability to generate income by other means. Boyd has taken this on board, telling me that he and Christopher Foy, the company’s managing director, will ‘work seamlessly together to try and close the cultural divide between art and management’.”

“All along the Broadway are shows about the miracle of shows, from “The Producers” (about a pair of feckless producers) to ’42nd Street’ (about some gutsy dancers), to the current revival of the classic musical ‘Gypsy’ (about vaudeville, stage mothers and the historical efficacy of gimmicks). While ‘Cabaret’ and ‘Chicago’ aren’t specifically about Broadway, they both celebrate the seedy glamour of song and dance. All this self-awareness does raise the question of whether the audience, a good percentage of which probably consists of tourists, are as entranced by show themes as show people are.”

Stephen Sondheim, John Weidman and Harold Prince are New York theatre legends. And they have a new show. It’s opening in Chicago. And they don’t want New York critics to come see it. “The three Broadway bigwigs are trying to keep the national theater press away from their new musical, ‘Bounce,’ which will have its world premiere June 30 at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. They have instructed the theater not to invite – or make press seats available to – any critic or reporter outside the Chicago area. Nice try, boys, but no dice.”

“While it hasn’t yet shaken the stage-driven foundation of traditional theatre and dance, site-specific theatre is certainly rousing a state of artistic excitement on Canada’s West Coast. The charge is being led by innovative young companies that all agree site-specific theatre should involve more than just plunking a script into an offbeat locale.”

Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theatre is laying off employees in an attempt to shore up the theatre’s budget. “The layoffs, combined with voluntary resignations, union wage concessions and hiring freezes, could save about $3 million and will help the theater reach its $17 million budget.”

“It cannot be a coincidence that the three greatest eras in theatre – which I would define as Athenian drama, Elizabethan drama, and 19th Century Italian opera – existed in those rare moments when all classes attended the theatre together. The dramatists had to find a way to create works that spoke across classes of people rather than flattered one particular group. So I believe we must aim high in quality and as broadly as possible in terms of audience. Anything less would be unworthy of a great public agency.”

The plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival can be surprising, but “perhaps the strangest spectacle of all is an overflowing international crowd of press, theatre pros, alumni, locals, and just-plain theatre junkies who descend on a city block of this courtly, urbane Kentucky city to binge on eight programs of nothing but new plays by living American writers.”