Category: theatre

“In a complaint filed Tuesday in federal court in Alabama, the estate argued that Mr. Sorkin’s adaptation deviates too much from the novel, and violates a contract, between Ms. Lee and the producers, which stipulates that the characters and plot must remain faithful to the spirit of the book.”

For all the attention that’s now being paid to correcting the longstanding obstacles that women and minorities face in the field, a number of British theater workers (both onstage and backstage) argue that the barriers against the working class in a thoroughly middle- and upper-middle-class industry are worse. Lyn Gardner talks to a number of those workers about the class problem – and about what they’re doing to fix it.

“It’s not [Nicholas Hytner’s] fault that during his 12-year tenure at the National Theatre he wildly discombobulated expectations of what artistic directors could do. But that is what happened, because … in the wake of Hytner, it’s assumed that a single figure can be as brilliant directing as they are a chief executive, ultimately responsible for everything.” Steven Atkinson, himself artistic director of a theatre company, argues that it’s high time that the demands and expectations of the job be rethought.

“The Ivey Awards have been celebrating theatre in the Twin Cities for the past 13 years. But on Feb. 28, the organization announced that it will discontinue producing the annual awards event due to difficulty raising funds.” Allison Considine looks at the history of the prizes and reaction to their disappearance.

“We are in an interesting cultural moment in the United States as I write this; scandals about the abuse of power through sexual manipulation and assault proliferate in social media. … #MeToo ripples through our awareness, even as older women and men face the reality that their careers, their ambitions, and their visibility have already been impacted by that power for decades. Mine certainly has been. … I don’t know if I will ever again write a play that connects with such a wide demographic of audience members.”

The Tony-winning director (A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder) will step down as artistic director when his contract expires at the end of the 2018-19 season. He has also served as artistic director of San Diego’s Old Globe Shakespeare Festival and directed the Broadway production of Anastasia; he makes his Metropolitan Opera this fall with Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila, which will open the house’s season.

Balich also has to convince Italy’s traditionally skeptical art conservators that he’s not out to circumvent visits to the real chapel with a glitzy concoction that includes theater, ballet and many, many bells and whistles. “Italy has all these very conservative art critics, and they are against the idea of ‘spettacolarizzazione,’” he said, using an Italian expression for putting on a big show.

Though his music may often sound as if it were written by a man locked in the basement of the Paris opera—hearing late-nineteenth-century music, muffled, from a couple of floors down—he turns out to be very much a boy of the Monty Python generation, his ears full of rock and British comedy.

The first season of his new company is all white men, and last week, the former director of the National Theatre got mad at those who suggested it should be more diverse – and of course the hit out at quotas. But, says one theatre scholar, Quotas are not about “compromising quality. We are not virtue signalling, ticking boxes, doing fiddly, pointless maths. We are recognizing that centuries of bias have just made it easier to see the worth in the work of white men and have given them readier access to the qualifications and awards and opportunities that serve as shorthand for skill. We are saying that since everyone says they’re committed to diversity but it still isn’t happening, maybe we need some simple rubrics to hold everyone accountable.”

Whew, what? The theatre teacher was fired after he made fake Facebook profiles to try to get into Facebook groups where parents – whose kids apparently weren’t even into, or in, theatre – were possibly maligning him. That came when the school was in the middle of rehearsals for As You Like It – so the teacher’s wife carried on as director. And the kids are very, verrrrrrry unhappy with their school. “This issue became all consuming. Some kids weren’t coming to school. There were arguments, and it was distracting from their learning, it was very disruptive.”