Category: theatre

The Utah Shakespeare Festival won this year’s Best Regional Theatre Tony Award a few months ago. The theatre “was virtually unknown in New York until the Tonys but well known among a Shakespeare underground in the heartland. As many as 155,000 theatergoers, mostly young families and older people from the Midwest and Far West, surge into this sedate mountain town in the southwestern corner of Utah each summer for afternoons and evenings of professional theatrical productions.” – New York Times

Canada’s summer theatres are booming. “The Ontario festivals are tourism fat-cats who feast on private dollars. During a decade when government funding of the arts has been steadily shrinking, the festivals’ incomes and expenditures have steadily grown. Stratford is the largest performing-arts organization in the country, and its $35-million budget has increased almost 50% in the last five years. With smaller theatres and fewer seats to fill, Shaw’s growth has been less spectacular but is certainly healthy.” – The Globe and Mail (Canada)

Tod Machover and MIT’s thinky Media Lab have set up shop in Ireland. “They believe Dublin will host the creation of an entirely new, large-scale art form that combines a variety of media. ‘We need to figure out what comes after theatre, what comes after cinema,’ Machover says. ‘We’re hoping to develop a large part of it in Ireland.’ ” – Irish Times

New York’s Roundabout Theatre was almost bankrupt a few years ago. Tonight it moves into a new $25 million home and has money in the bank. “To some extent, the journey of this one nonprofit theater – from basement to Broadway, from bankruptcy to becoming the country’s second-largest nonprofit theater with an annual budget of $20 million – stands as a powerful example of how much the world of nonprofit theater has changed.” – New York Times

American actor Kevin Spacey has started a new company that he hopes will raise more than £1 million to fund new UK theatre venues and productions. “One of his ideas for boosting theatre attendance is to introduce film shows so that places like the Old Vic don’t just ‘rest on tradition’.” – BBC

While audience numbers for Israeli theater are up, intellectuals are increasingly staying away.  Says one disheartened theater-goer, “theater had started to become as gray and unappealing as an office, that everything had become technical, that everything I was seeing in the theater was losing its spark of creativity, that it had become a musty bureaucratic mechanism, that the theater was a place where nothing real was happening anymore.” – Haaretz (Israel)

“With more than 100 theaters in Moscow alone – and another 400 in the rest of the country – Russian theater has survived, in large part because Russians refuse to let it die. There were several times when Russian theater should have fallen flat on its face, but it has survived every crisis with flying colors.” Many deem director Kama Ginkas largely responsible – as Moscow’s busiest and most successful director, he saw five of his plays staged last season alone, each one in its own way a hit. – New York Times

A Canadian play “Shakespeare’s Dog” has been closed in Boston because, the theatre company says, the Boston festival found the play “too raunchy.” – CBC

The Roundabout Theatre sold its name to American Airlines. The Winter Garden almost had “Cadillac” above the marquee. The arts love those corporate dollars. But at what price? – Newsday

Chicago’s Goodman Theatre is moving into a long-awaited new $46 million home this November. So why does the upcoming opening “seem so remarkably lackluster just four months prior to ribbon cutting? And why does the initial season for what is clearly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity seem like an afterthought?” – Chicago Sun-Times