Category: theatre

Shakespeare’s “A Winter’s Tale” took a bow in Tehran this week as the Dundee Repertory Theatre Company played as “part of an initiative by the British Council to open hearts and minds in the Muslim world.” The play was “performed to a sold-out theatre packed with university students, academics and artists hungry for more cultural contact with the west. ‘Opportunities like this come so rarely. We only see foreign theatre productions once a year and to get the chance to see Shakespeare performed by a British cast is just incredible’.”

A writer goes through the boxes of papers left by “Rent” author Jonathan Larson. “The cynic in me knows that Larson’s tragic death on the day before his long-labored-over Rent was about to go into previews fueled the hype that made the show ‘the breakthrough musical for the ’90s,’ as Newsweek wrote. But having been an eyewitness to the paper trail left by Larson’s perspiration and inspiration, I also know he deserved the Pulitzer and the Tonys. And the long career he never got.” Did Larson “reinvent” musical theatre? And these new musicals on Broadway merely rip-offs of Larson’s ideas?

Since Chekhov died almost a century ago, “the West has heard almost nothing from Russian stage writers. Their fame lies buried beneath the cultural glaciers of the 20th century’s big totalitarian chill. Now, though, a new wave of Russian writers is emerging…”

Faced with a $500,000 deficit, Seattle’s A Contemporary Theatre reduces staff, shifts its schedule out of the summer, and cuts its budget from $5.9 million to $4.9 million. “Our revenues are being outpaced by expenses. We decided to take really decisive action. We want to make ACT a center for new plays, and the next five months will be a really important time for us to solidify this mission.”

Three months ago Robert Egan moved to Seattle to be artistic director at ACT. “In what he calls ‘a shocking disclosure,’ Egan says he learned two weeks ago that ACT’s big fall fund-raising push had fizzled amid a flagging economy in the Pacific Northwest.
Annual donations totaled $1.8 million instead of the budgeted $2.4 million. Had he known then what he knows now, would Egan have taken the job? ‘That’s a very good question,’ he says. ‘I don’t know’.”

How can small theatres afford to mount shows that are beyond their financial resources? Joint productions. “The deal works like this: Great Lakes and St. Louis Rep split the upfront costs of the show, about $330,000. That covers the designers’ fees, the cost of sets and costumes, the director’s salary and wages for the cast and stage managers to rehearse four weeks. Then each theater pays for the run of the show at its own theater.”

Will big Broadway American musicals find an audience in Moscow? Results so far have been mixed. “These shows represent the risky yet enticing prospect of introducing blockbuster American musicals to the land of Stanislavski and Meyerhold. But the results have been so different that no one can really say whether it has been a good idea or not.”

Boston has plenty of small theatres. But fewer tenants to fill them in a down economy. “The economics of producing plays means theater companies have to be creative, not only in their choice of work, but in their venues and the way they attract an audience. How this ripples down to the works audiences will see in the future remains to be seen.”

The big names on Broadway this season aren’t Stephen Sondheim and Neil Simon, but Baz Luhrmann and Billy Joel and Russell Simmons. Musicals and dramas are out; poperas, dance-icals, and poetrash are in. This is neither nothing new nor the end of Western civilization.” It is “a grand convergence of pop art and high art. After all, even in the best of Broadway times, when was the last time the Great White Way played host to poetry, opera, and ballet simultaneously? For that matter, when was the last time the Great White Way was so welcoming to other skin and hair colors? Such concerns, though, are more archeological than critical.”

When the George Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey found out that the New York Times was sending a critic to review a preview performance for its new show, the director decided to cancel the performance. The theater’s staff contacted all 166 ticket holders for the performance to tell them of the cancellation. Says the director: “When it became clear to me that the artistic process was going to be violated and that trust between the press and the theater was going to be violated, I had to put a stop to it. I had no recourse. I could not turn this individual critic away from the performance; that would be discrimination. But I could stop the performance.”