Ironically, this idea of shows presented by consumer product companies, while relatively rare for theatre, harks back to the days of radio and the early years of television, when brands were often intimately involved in sponsoring programming as part of their marketing efforts. It wasn’t surprising to hear that such and such a series was “brought to you by” a single sponsor – and sometimes those sponsors held sway over the content of the shows as well, sometimes resulting, as we later learned, in meddling and outright censorship.
Category: theatre
Australian Theatre Producer Tackles Broadway, The West End And Sydney WIth Four Big Musicals
The financial risks, which the company shares with investors in the productions, are considerable. The four productions are expected to cost about $75 million to mount — “King Kong” alone is budgeted for up to $36.5 million, and “Moulin Rouge!” for up to $28 million, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Inside The Jimmy Awards: A Week With America’s Most Gifted High School Theatre Nerds
“For a certain group of musical theater fans, Christmas comes in June. This Christmas has everything yours does. It has beloved songs. It has lights. It has pageantry. It bestows gifts. It involves pilgrimages across great distances. It is the Jimmy Awards, and it is the most wonderful time of the year. ‘What are the Jimmy Awards?’ you ask, like an innocent child. Short answer? They are the high-school Tonys.”
Australian RV Mogul Aims To Be Global Musical-Theatre Titan
“Manufacturing campers made Gerry Ryan a very wealthy man, one of the richest people in Australia. … Now he is placing a bold bet on musical theater. Global Creatures, the Sydney-based company he founded and chairs, is producing its first four musicals. On three continents. At the same time.”
Meet The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Head Voice Coach
“[Kate Godfrey studied] anatomy, ‘from the nose down to the pubic bone’. She studied phonetics to be able to teach dialects. And she knows Shakespeare backwards, going through the plays in detail, looking up obscure words, picking up on a particular character’s repeated use of imagery – ‘usually animals, birds or death’ – and teasing out rhetorical devices such as antithesis and alliteration. It’s that last element of the three strands of voice work – parsing the text in the way that makes it sound rhythmical and comprehensible to an audience – that Godfrey says can be the most difficult.”
Robert Lepage’s Latest Theatre Piece Uses White Women To Play Black Slaves. Now Protests Have Shut It Down
Slav, which premiered last week at the Montreal International Jazz Festival, “bills itself as a ‘theatrical odyssey’ inspired by ‘traditional African-American slave and work songs.’ It also features a nearly all-white cast performing the music. Its director, Mr. Lepage, is white, as is its star Betty Bonifassi. … On Wednesday, the storm proved too much, and the jazz festival and Ms. Bonifassi canceled the show after only two performances.”
Why Working Classes Don’t Go To Theatre
“If my family want entertainment, they are more likely to spend their money on a motorised ride-on esky scooter than a subscription to Sydney Theatre Company. My school friends only ever come to the theatre to see me. Other times, they feel alienated and unsafe in arts institutions, if they can ever afford to go. Some of them say theatre is for people more educated, but mostly they just think it’s boring. I want to tell them that they’d love it if they went. That it’s their stories on stage, their culture. But most of the time, I’d be lying. Its middle-class stories about middle-class problems. This would bore them.”
The First Feminist Comedy Club Is Now Open On Sunset Boulevard
“On Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard, a street bursting with comedy clubs and live acts, lies a small theater devoted to a new kind of entertainment: inclusive comedy. The Ruby is a self-described comedy theater and school ‘openly founded on the ideals of intersectional feminism.'” But is it funny? Rina Raphael pays a visit.
Theatre Producer Disrupts Taylor Mac’s ’24-Decade History Of Popular Music’ With ‘Feminist’ Outburst
Producer and curator Becky Burchall yelled several times at Taylor Mac during the performance at the Barbican in London and also tweeted out, “wondering why these men dressed as women are continuing to speak for the experience of women??” After taking a severe drubbing on social media, Burchall apologized the following morning, blaming “too much wine & not enough thought.”
Should Theatre Come With Trigger Warnings? Cue The Debate
The debate about if and when to use them has the theatre community deeply divided. These new type of audience advisories warn of specific plot points that may provoke psychological trauma in some audience members. But some theatre professionals worry these warnings strip theatre of its power to provoke an emotional reaction and are a form of self-censorship.