Category: theatre

“[Jeff] Dunham is no children’s entertainer. His puppets are dysfunctional, foul-mouthed and unashamedly stereotypical, from Seamus the drunken Irish baby to José the Mexican immigrant and Achmed the jihadi suicide bomber. Spurning all accusations of racism, sexism and homophobia, Dunham has become a comic phenomenon. He doesn’t just hold the Guinness World Record for most tickets sold for a standup comedy tour – 2m across 386 venues – he is also ranked by Forbes as one the highest paid comedians on the planet, up there with Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock and Amy Schumer.”

Professional deputy stage manager Katie Jackson: “In theory, this should be quite a simple task; the actor dries, they ask me to read out their line to them, I do so and then they repeat it and carry on with the scene. However, ask any DSM and they will say that it can be one of the most stressful parts of the job. Every actor has a different way of telling you that they want to be prompted, … [and,] unfortunately, it is very rare for actors to tell you their particular way of acknowledging the need for a prompt.”

“Originally called The Bold Knights of Britain, The Ununited Kingdom was being produced by theatre company Silent Uproar and was intended to shine a light on the rise of the far right in Britain, by focusing on a teenage girl who joins a gang with racist tendencies. … It was pulled after just two previews at Hull Truck and ahead of a planned run in London.” (And the whole business was even messier that that sounds.)

“Gardner’s contract, which ends on June 1, includes 130 reviews a year and 28,000 words of features. The critic and journalist, who is also associate editor at The Stage, was told the contract was being discontinued because the newspaper had decided she was not part of their long-term plans for theatre coverage.”

The musical KPOP, for one, while the clash for Best Play ended in a tie.

“Some of the features will be visceral (an opportunity to look down the barrel of a gun alongside a reconstruction of the Weehawken, N.J., dueling grounds), and others will be academic (an explanation of the debates over Hamilton’s financial policy ideas.) There will be artifacts — mostly replica letters, documents and objects as well as a scale model of New York in 1773, a walkway between military barracks, video, and, yes, music from the show.”

Not brilliantly. Or rather, some shows are doing pretty well with acknowledging what their audiences know, and how times have changed since the show first started, and some … are not.

Uh: “A Springvale variety show recalling ‘a pretty, gallant world … a time of knights and ladies, slaves and masters’ has been canceled following accusations that it promotes racism.”

Judy Hegarty Lovett, director of Beckett specialists the Gare St. Lazare Players Ireland: “The challenge is both daunting and promising. When we first staged Beckett’s novel Molloy in 1996, there were fewer questions about why we wanted to take it from page to stage. We knew Beckett himself had staged elements of his prose works in a one-man show performed by Jack McGowan. If the author himself had attempted to do it, surely it was possible. In the intervening years, I’ve come to see the staging of his prose as a convergence of form and content similar to that of the written works, where the very means of communication is in doubt.”

Marko Stojanovic, co-founder and president of the World Mime Organization, writes about what made mime popular in the periods it was and the state of the art around the world today.