Category: theatre

“Let’s not skip around this, there’s a dismayingly adolescent quality to the criticism of some mainstream media outlets that intensifies whenever the work under discussion involves sex or nudity. It might be 2017 but a flash of thigh still sets some critics sniggering, while two actors of different ethnic backgrounds playing siblings apparently still has the capacity to unsettle and baffle.”

Dominique Morisseau (Pipeline, Skeleton Crew) is seeing her work produced by the Detroit Public Theater, which is filling a gap in a city whose professional theater consists largely of touring Broadway shows. Company co-founder Courtney Burkett says that DPT “could not have existed 10 years ago. Now that the city’s stabilizing and even thriving in so many ways, our artists are also thriving and getting the attention they always deserved.”

She’s been working with composer Jeff Richmond (her husband), lyricist Nell Benjamin (Legally Blonde: The Musical), and director/choreographer Casey Nicholaw (Spamalot, The Book of Mormon), and the result begins its D.C. tryout next week, with the Broadway opening planned for next spring. Peter Marks looks in on a rehearsal.

“Roland Scahill, 42, confessed to a scheme that took place between October 2014 and August 2015, in which Mr. Scahill told associates that he had secured the rights to the life story of Kathleen Battle, the opera singer, and was going to produce a one-woman play called The Kathleen Battle Project with Lupita Nyong’o as its star.”

“Purpose-built by scenic painter Joseph Harker in 1904 to accommodate 40ft backdrops for West End theatres, Harkers [Studio] originally provided art for Henry Irving’s West End theatres – including the Lyceum and Drury Lane. It is … facing closure amid plans to convert the space into luxury flats.”

“There’s no artist I’ve learned more from than Tony, and what I’ve learned is a kind of fearless grandiosity. Angels was an immense act of arrogance — to write a seven-hour play about gay people when you were a completely unknown writer whose one show was at best a succès d’estime. So there came a moment where it became clear to me that the Eureka Theatre did not have the resources to do Angels in America.And at that point, I’d have to say, ‘Thank you very much for writing this, but you’re two years late, it’s still a huge mess, and I have a theater to run.’ But I did the opposite. I said, ‘That show is so good that I believe in it more than I believe in my theater company.’ And I left the Eureka and went to Los Angeles to produce Angels in America. I spent six years total with Angels.”

“Renowned director Max Stafford-Clark – the former artistic director of London’s Royal Court theatre – was forced out of the Out of Joint theatre company after a formal complaint that he made lewd comments to a member of staff. … A spokesperson for Stafford-Clark said the director had suffered from pseudobulbar palsy and ‘occasional disinhibition’ since a stroke and brain injury in 2006.”

The statement comes after allegations of sexual misconduct by the US film producer Harvey Weinstein prompted a blizzard of related claims on both sides of the Atlantic. On Friday the Guardian revealed one of the most influential directors in British theatre, Max Stafford-Clark, was forced to stand down from the company he founded after being accused of inappropriate, sexualised behaviour.

Is it working? Yes, but in a different way than they’d hoped – one artistic director says, “It’s really instructive and inspiring to have regular contact with my colleagues, and that’s sharpening our artistic processes and our work” – and without nearly as much money as they’d wanted.