Category: theatre

You can view a movie whenever you want, but it exists in a past that you cannot alter. Live theatre may be evanescent, but it is always of the moment; it routinely brings the past into the present, and it can be altered from production to production. What, then, is the responsibility of theatremakers towards live shows that either were created or are set in the past?

If, as Dostoevsky contends, ideas are demons, they are also nourishment that can forge collective bonds and reinvigorate human connectivity. Contemporary reality, in Poland and elsewhere, has flown off the rails. Click, rewind. Start again.

Most of the Will-Shakespeare-of-Stratford skeptics, such as Mark Rylance, seem convinced that no one from a 16th-century small-city artisan-marchant background could possibly have written such artful and erudite drama. That’s ridiculous because, points out Oxford historian Jonathan Healey, “many, perhaps most, of the greatest minds of the age were people of ‘middling’ origins.”

Five members of the board of directors of the prominent English touring company Out of Joint “have walked out in reaction to a range of issues, including the way Arts Council England treated the company following the departure of [founding artistic director Max] Stafford-Clark, who was accused of inappropriate behaviour by a number of former colleagues last year. … The members are also understood to have become increasingly unhappy with the way the company was being run by new artistic director Kate Wasserberg and executive producer Martin Derbyshire.”

“Last fall, … former Writers intern Tom Robson accused longtime Artistic Director Michael Halberstam of sexually harassing him both verbally and physically in 2003. … A few weeks later, [the Writers Theatre board] found that Halberstam had committed ‘inappropriate and insensitive comments in the workplace’ but had exhibited no other ‘inappropriate sexual behavior.'” Clyde Fitch Report managing editor Sean Douglass writes, “I don’t think Halberstam is a bad person, and I believe his apology is honest. I also don’t think he should be exiled from the Chicago theater community … But how does he still have his job there?”

Thirty Broadway productions were eligible for prizes, the smallest number in more than a decade. This year’s Tony Awards will take place on June 10 at Radio City Music Hall and will be broadcast on CBS.

Rock star Tim Howar, playing Freddy in a new revival of the ABBA/Tim Rice musical Chess, had to leave the theatre at the intermission of the first preview performance because his wife had gone into labor. “Understudy Cellen Chugg Jones stepped into the role despite never having completed a full cast rehearsal – winning a standing ovation and praise from co-stars Michael Ball and Alexandra Burke, who both said he ‘smashed it’. “

The power of theatrical visibility has the potential to create real change in society towards the acceptance of “othered” individuals, as we have seen from the power of queer characters onstage, which translated from the stage to movies and TV, and, finally, into the national vocabulary. But this progress has notably lagged when it comes to the representation of disability onstage.

Parliament had to intervene so the show could be produced in London – yes, it took an act of government to allow the actors to be naked onstage. Back on Broadway, during previews in 1968, show co-writer Gerome Ragni explained that the rules about nudity were flexible in the production: “Anybody who feels like it can take his clothes off. Everybody wants to now, even the stagehands. We turned them on.”

Warsaw just hosted a theatre festival with five women directors and a lot of young, fiery daring. One of the glass-ceiling-breaking women: “I’m trying to sound some kind of alarm—that we should be very careful not to let ideas possess our brains or our souls.”