“Scarcely past midday on a Monday lunchtime, a full 45 minutes before curtain up, the queue for the box office is already snaking on to the road. Inside Òran Mór, a spacious pub-cum-performance venue in Glasgow’s West End, the line of ticket holders is even longer. They are here for A Play, a Pie and a Pint, a lunchtime series launched by David MacLennan in 2004 and not so much a success as a phenomenon.”
Category: theatre
Theatre Talkbacks – Popular With Audiences, Not Always With Playwrights
“For theaters, the talkback can connect the venue to its audience, deepen understanding of the work and make the audience feel more like a participant and not merely an observer. Skeptics, however, fear that talkbacks can oversimplify the art onstage or discourage personal interpretation — the stage equivalent of didactic wall text telling museum visitors what to think about a painting.”
Keeping Count: What Plays (And By Whom) Are Being Produced
“These last stats can be spun positively: In the new-play world, male playwrights are down to just nearly half of all production credits, with women slowly but surely catching up. The glass-half-empty take, though, is that at this rate we won’t see gender parity (or women cracking the 50-percent ceiling, at least) in the new-play sector until roughly 2021.”
Legendary Samurai ‘Macbeth’ Production Returns After More Than Three Decades
“When it visited the Edinburgh Festival in 1985, this Macbeth” – staged by the revered Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa with his company, Saitama Arts Theater – “was declared an ‘overnight legend’, with critics praising its bold gestures and painterly beauty.” Saitama has now prepared a touring revival, which is coming to Britain next month, and, writes Andrew Dickson, it “still makes much homegrown Shakespeare look pallid.”
How Philadelphia’s Best Theatre Company Helped Turn Around The City’s Oldest Neighborhood
The Arden Theatre Company, launched 30 years ago by a couple of young Northwestern grads, started out in the little upstairs space at America’s oldest theatre (the Walnut Street). In 1994 they bought a 50,000-square-foot building a couple of blocks from the old waterfront, more or less under the Ben Franklin Bridge. Subscribers started going there – and eating dinner beforehand. Now the Old City neighborhood is Philly’s nightlife capital, and Arden has three stages and an apprentice program, and regularly wins critical acclaim and awards.
Ayad Akhtar And Lucas Hnath Win $50K Steinberg Playwright Awards
“Akhtar, whose work largely centers around the Muslim-American experience, earned a 2013 Pulitzer Prize for his drama Disgraced, which came to Broadway in 2014 and earned a 2015 Tony nomination for Best Play. Akhtar’s other plays include The Who & the What, The Invisible Hand, and Junk, coming to Broadway [next month]. … Hnath made his Broadway debut last season with A Doll’s House, Part 2, earning a 2017 Tony nomination for Best Play. His other work includes Hillary and Clinton, Red Speedo, [and] The Christians.”
A New Theatre Magazine To Launch
“Part of the calculus behind The X is TodayTix’s customer base—3.5 million people across 11 cities, with an average age of 29—which gives the magazine a considerable audience and opportunity for monetization right out of the gate.”
How To Be Successful In Theatre? Maybe Take Risks?
Chad Bauman argues: “Change is hard. I’ll admit it sometimes scares me. There are no guarantees. But how is that different from anything else in the theatre? It does surprise me when theatres elect to stick with a failing business model that is most certainly destined to lead to disastrous results over the long term rather than risking throwing it out the window for a shot at success.”
The BBC’s Drama Programming Is Built On The Back Of Theatre, So It Should Damn Well Provide Decent Theatre Coverage
Lyn Gardner: “At a time when newspapers are facing financial disaster and theatre coverage is one of the first casualties, the BBC should step up to the plate in a way it has neglected in the past. … If Radio 5 Live can have sports news every half-hour, why can’t it have a few minutes of arts news too? Just as many people would be interested to know about the casting of Follies or National Theatre Wales’ plans to make a show about the NHS as would want to know who is in the England cricket team.”
London’s Young Vic Theatre Names New Artistic Director (And He’s Coming From Baltimore)
“The London theatre has been in the process of appointing a successor to David Lan since he announced his departure in June, after 17 years at the helm. [Kwame] Kwei-Armah, a writer, director and actor is currently artistic director of Center Stage in Baltimore, Maryland. He is already set to leave that post in June 2018.”