Category: theatre

So you think making a mess onstage is easy? Well, maybe if you live in a rundown theatre. For a theatre in posher digs, grunginess costs more money. Here’s how two theatres of different economic means went about making a mess…

Richmond Virginia’s only professional theatre – the 47-year-old TheatreVirginia – is going out of business after failing to clear a persistent $500,000 debt. The theater’s subscriber base has shrunk from more than 11,000 in 1990 to between 2,500 and 3,000 this season.

Baltimore television station WMAR is pulling the plug on a playwriting competition it has sponsored for the past two decades. The competition was organized by the Arena Players, which solicited scripts from black playwrights, and picked one each year to be rehearsed, performed, and broadcast on WMAR. Station officials cited lack of corporate sponsorship as the major reason for their pullout.

All this energy that goes into finding and developing new plays. Then what – they go into some box somewhere, never to be seen again? A Cabadian playwright wondering why Canada has been unable to develop a real theatrical canon, proposes a repository of plays that can be revisited an restaged. “The idea is not new, but it is eminently worthwhile. It’s a question of how it’s structured . . . You don’t want to create a museum of Canadian plays.”

A year ago, Broadway was empty, shows were closing, and emergency aid was needed. “But now shoppers pack stores, hotels have raised their prices, and New York theaters, in the midst of the busiest December of openings in decades, have begun to deal with post-terrorist angst with something other than escapism.”

“Dance of the Vampires” had some of the worst reviews in recent Broadway history when it opened last week. So who’s responsible for the mess? “A producer who bought an opera then decided he wanted a musical comedy. A temperamental star who wrote his own jokes – then cut all of his co-star’s. A choreographer who couldn’t choreograph, and a composer who refused to attend his own opening night…”

Some theatre people believe that some of the most adventurous plays these days are coming out of children’s theatre. And some of the best children’s theatre in North America is coming out of Canada (“although we still lag behind Europe”). “Unfortunately in Canada, the public perception about plays for young people places it in a state of awkward adolescence.”

This could be Broadway’s strongest year at the box office and onstage in five years. “By Dec. 31, the 2002-03 season will have seen 21 openings, an unusually high figure for this point in the calendar.” There’s even a chance for a record box-office year in the season produces another hit…

George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a biting critique of Communism. China is a Communist country with a highly-developed censorious streak. “This is subversive stuff. China’s media, including its theatre and films, are still heavily censored, so how on earth did Animal Farm get past them and onto the stage?”

Baz Luhrmann, fresh off his hit opening of La Boheme on Broadway, says that he plans to make stage versions of his movies “Moulin Rouge” and “Strictly Ballroom” He’s looking at putting “Moulin Rouge” ina Las Vegas casino and “Strictly Ballroom” to go into a ballroom space.