Category: theatre

Advice from a critic: “You’ve paid a lot of money to attend the theater. Take a nap before you get there, or wait till you get home and fall asleep in front of the TV.”

Rush denied the allegations about harassment when he was starring as King Lear at the Sydney Theatre Company but said he stepped down to keep from tainting others in the industry.

Ariane Mnouchkine, a founder of the Théâtre du Soleil (the founders got the theatre’s acreage in 1970 by squatting at a building the army abandoned), lives her values, including getting ready to cancel a hugely expensive trip to the U.S. if three Afghanistan-born actors can’t get visas. “Among the 100 members of her troupe, 26 countries are represented and as many languages spoken. In an era of creeping nationalism and ambient xenophobia, Ms. Mnouchkine stands firmly opposed to reflexive demonization.”

Almost all of the women said they felt betrayed by a man they had considered a mentor. Israel Horovitz, “as the founding artistic director of Gloucester Stage, a respected regional theater that called itself a ‘safe harbor for playwrights,’ and as an Obie-winning writer whose work was produced frequently in New York and Paris, has had the power to offer roles, jobs or a helping hand to generations of actors.”

Jason Blake, chief theatre critic for the Herald since 2010, and his wife Elissa, a freelance arts journalist for that paper and its Sunday tabloid, The Sun-Herald, opened the Sydney-focused website Audrey Journal in November to help make up for reduced arts coverage in the print newspapers. Now the SMH has told the Blakes that their new venture, which is supported financially by several Sydney arts institutions, is a conflict of interest.

Teatro Oficina, part of the tropicalismo movement of the 1960s and ’70s and notorious for performances filled with nudity and onstage drug consumption, is headquartered in a unique, landmarked São Paulo building by architect Lina Bo Bardi with a huge window and retractable ceiling. Mogul and TV personality Silvio Santos owns the land around Teatro Oficina and wants to build three skyscrapers which would block the theatre’s light, and the country’s artistic community is rallying to fight Santos’s plan.

“The lack of diversity in theatre criticism not only does a disservice to the field and the readers, but also to the playwrights and productions. Certainly such artists as Suzan-Lori Parks and Ayad Akhtar, and others artists of color whose work speaks particularly to questions of identity, deserve to have their work scrutinized by a more diverse group of critics. In the age of Hamilton fanatics in New York, Chicago, London, and beyond, audiences have proven that there is not just space but a hunger for stories by and about people of color that work to rewrite, expand, or totally replace the white canon. So where are their peers in criticism?”