Category: theatre

A controversial play about the relationship between whites and Indigenous peoples will finally be presented after previously being cancelled following criticism of content judged culturally insensitive. The Paris-based Theatre du Soleil says in a statement it will put on Quebec playwright Robert Lepage’s Kanata this December.

A shift in the Regional Arts Commission’s funding philosophy, as reflected in its most recent round of grants, has raised concerns in the St. Louis arts community, with some applicants receiving zero funding, including theater companies like New Line that have consistently been supported.

“Lovers of drama, comedy and green onion cakes flocked to the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival in record numbers this year. … Patrons purchased a record 133,276 tickets to more than 1,600 shows, generating $1.46 million in box office revenue, an increase of 10 per cent from last year.”

“[The STC] has reached across the Atlantic and tapped British director Simon Godwin as its new artistic director effective next August, signaling a commitment to large-scale classics on its two downtown Washington stages.”

Mark Shenton: “As welcome as all this activity is, it is also slightly worrying that the deluge of productions arriving simultaneously could dissipate the audience. Yes, musical aficionados will want to see them all; but a wider public may not have the funds or inclination to do so. It will also be an added challenge for producers to establish their shows in such a crowded marketplace.”

We can’t help making presumptions about their bank accounts, as if acting is less a career than a ticket to dreamland. Perhaps it’s time to stop differentiating what kind of work we think is “real”—whether it’s acting, bagging groceries, writing (hi!), governing a state, or tilling the fields—and start valuing hard work in whatever form it comes.

It’s been a difficult beginning for the new hip-hop musical Sylvia at the London theatre. Sept. 3 was to have been the first preview performance of the show about suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, but the previous day, director Matthew Warchus, worried about the readiness of the production, rebranded the evening as an open dress rehearsal. Then, just after the second act began, the lead actress, Genesis Lynea, became ill and the performance was stopped.

Rufus Norris stepped in for ailing lead actor Richard Harrington in last Friday’s sold-out performance of Laura Wade’s Home, I’m Darling. “It’s a last-resort situation,” he said, “But it was only a few days before the show finishes and we couldn’t add an extra date. We had a full house who wouldn’t be able to see it again.”

Lyn Gardner, in a post-Edinburgh column, considers plays that “have a fractured messiness that upends some of the traditional ways we tell stories on stage. … We need to recognise that what might once have been considered failings are in fact their strength. It is theatre that is as much about disrupting the traditional form as telling stories about women that are different from those traditionally told, if they have been told at all.”

Matt Trueman’s list includes an Austrian who has actors lip-sync amid candy-colored stage designs, a Frenchman who stages marathon adaptations of great novels, an Austrian who creates devised theatre with ethnic minority and refugee casts, a Vietnamese-Frenchwoman who draws from both literature and post-colonial experience, and a Croatian whose ferociously confrontational work regularly attracts death threats.