Category: theatre

Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theatre has revised plans for the $125 million new home it is trying to build. Whether it will be built is still in question. The Guthrie has only raised $63 million for the project so far, and has been unsuccessful prying money out of the state government. Governor Jesse Ventura vetoed a $24 million appropriation for the project last year.

Nicholas Hytner on his qualifications for running London’s National Theatre: “Of course I’ve never run a theatre, but I’ve always felt a bit of an impresario. I’m a director who’s whored around, kicked around for the right offer – and I’m not talking money. If an affair has looked exciting, I’ve leapt in. Some of my best times have been at the National, going back to the days when I worked here when Richard [Eyre] was director. It’s a good stage of life to be working hard. I’m hungry enough and confident enough to take it on.”

How about this for a plan? It works for airline tickets – People who buy their theatre tickets well in advance get big discounts. The founder of EasyJet, the discount airline, says: “I am sure that going to the theatre is as price-elastic as going to the movies. If you reduce the price, more people will go. Someone should try it with the theatre some day.”

Is casting Hollywood celebrities in plays a good thing beyond goosing up the box office? “On the whole, I think the impact of these star performances on London theatre has been overwhelmingly positive. It creates a buzz, it attracts new audiences, it gets theatre talked about. Of course, you do have to make a distinction between what I would call celebrity casting – where you just take some minor celeb and try to use the name to sell tickets – and real star casting, where you’re featuring people whose fame has to do with their quality as actors.” So maybe it would help revive Scottish theatre?

Director Dominic Hill was invited to Iran with his production of Shakespeare. It’s been 25 years since the Bard was performed in Tehran. “This reverent attitude towards our national playwright was to crop up again and again during the many interviews I had with journalists and critics. The Persians, as they call themselves, are a cultured, strongly opinioned, passionate people – one mention that I had a degree in English literature and I was treated to a 30-minute lecture on the great Persian poets. Shakespeare is up there with them, and therefore to produce him in modern dress seemed, to the intellectuals and directors I spoke to, incomprehensible, insulting and doomed to failure.”

Last week’s grosses for several high-profile Broadway shows weren’t just disappointing, they were abysmal. The extended cold snap blanketing the Northeast isn’t helping what was already shaping up as a dismal season on the Great White Way, and buzz around the industry now has several big-money productions ready to fold in the coming weeks and months.

Nicholas Hytner’s ambitious plans for London’s National Theatre, anounced last week, are a big hit. “Doing stripped-down productions, ‘with big, bold, simple strokes’ and a minimum of costumes and scenery, is a way not just of bringing down prices and attracting new audiences, but ensuring that great plays are freshly considered in one of the world’s most exciting theatrical spaces. Nor is he merely after the elusive ‘yoof’ to which our arts commisars are so enslaved.”

After February 17th, cars entering downtown London on weekdays will have to pay a £5 “congestion” charge designed to help alleviate serious car gridlock in the capital. But this is likely to have an impact on theatre goers in the West End. Will the charge discourage lower-income theatre-goers from coming in for a show?

Minneapolis’ Children’s Theatre Company announced it was expanding last year. But financial help approved by the state legislature was vetoed by Governor Jesse Ventura. And the theatre has only raised $11.5 million of the $24 million needed. On top of it all, costs for the project as designed last year went up. So the company has scaled back the building by 25 percent to keep it on track.

“In what are expected to be the most bitter contract talks on the Great White Way in recent history, show producers are pushing to eliminate a longstanding union rule that compels Broadway theaters to hire a minimum number of musicians, currently 3 to 26, depending on the size of the venue. And vowing that the shows must go on in the event of a strike, producers are turning to a high-tech offshoot of taped music known as virtual orchestras, capable of simulating the subtle variations of tempo and tone in live music.”