Category: theatre

The Phoenix Theatre: “Once you build a big machine and have to keep feeding it, then you’ve made a decision that’s going to impact every area of the organizations, not the least of which is the artistic. But we never want to be so beholden to chasing dollars that that becomes our major pursuit… At the end of the day, the business operation is there to enable the art.”

The playwright was one week into rehearsals for Describe the Night this past August when the storm flooded Houston and did $15 million worth of damage to the Alley Theater. He wondered if it was even appropriate for the show to continue – hell, he wondered if his vocation as a playwright was of any use to the world at all – yet, as he writes in this essay, both he himself and the Houston community had deeper resources than he had known.

Michael Ball uses bay rum for Sweeney Todd and a cheap old perfume of his mother’s for Edna Turnblad (Hairspray). Fenella Woolgar deployed Chanel No. 5 (with an extra spritz) for a 1950s snob. David Greig sniffed canned mackereal to put him in mind of the chilly mountains of Scotland. Before playing a homeless man, Arthur McBain sniffed a paper coffee cup after the coffee was finished. David Jays explores the use of aromas, and the emotions they trigger, with these and other actors as well as a ballet star and a perfumer.

“The piece particularly draws on the experience of Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova, who served 16 months of a two-year sentence for hooliganism … Recreating the humiliation, intimidation and forced labour of a Russian gulag might seem like the ultimate in misery porn – especially when it’s taking place in the Saatchi Gallery, just a stone’s throw from Sloane Square.”

“We fought to be on the stage. We should reclaim that word: I don’t know where it came from, this fucking notion that putting ‘ess’ on the end makes us weak. I would be no less afraid of a lioness than a lion.”

The show, which satirizes Lin-Manuel Miranda and Hamilton, started a limited-engagement run in July of 2016 and has since moved near the show it skewers (in an affectionate, smart way that had even Miranda laughing and applauding). Along with the U.S. tour, a London production may also be in the works.

Stuart Emmerich: “My only experiences of gay theater had been plays like The Boys in the Band, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, Tea and Sympathy and Streamers — plays where the gay character was either closeted or bitter or suicidal, and usually all three. It was a shock to see Mr. Fierstein, as Arnold, strutting around his apartment in his floppy rabbit slippers, cracking jokes, sharing affection with both his lover and his foster son, and going ferociously head-to-head with his disapproving mother, played by Estelle Getty, then unknown.”

The organization acts as a producer and manager all in one, from mapping out a show’s tour route to managing it on the road. “We view ourselves as being in service to the artists and the work, and we also view ourselves as being in service to our colleagues who will be our client.”

Lyn Gardner: “If the anniversary of the Russian revolution offers one reason for the current glut of Chekhov revivals, the other may well be the way the plays speak so directly to a world in flux, where the characters cannot comprehend or adjust to the cultural, social and political earthquakes that engulf them.”