Category: theatre

• Bernadette Peters. She and Victor Garber, who’s replacing David Hyde Pierce in the role of Horace Vandergelder, begin performances on Jan. 20, a week after Bette Midler and Pierce leave the production.

“Though all Shakespearean characters may bleed, at [DC’s] Shakespeare Theatre Company, they don’t all bleed the same blood – or at least, not the same fake blood. Chris Young, the theater’s properties director, mixes a unique version of the vital fluid for every gory scene in every show. No ketchup or red food dye here: Young’s complex recipes vary depending on the color and fabric of the actor’s clothes, the nature of the stage lighting and the type of theatrical injury at hand (or leg, or heart).”

Tim Carroll is “preaching the gospel of ‘two-way theatre'” – expanding the company’s repertoire well beyond George Bernard Shaw and plays that debuted during his lifetime, presenting $5 late-night shows, doing “Secret Theatre” pop-up performances to which audiences are alerted by email on short notice.

The theatre will become one of the most important cultural venues in the country. And the history of the Stratford Festival shows just how profoundly a place – and a building – can shape culture.

What starts off as a sensation of the nose and throat soon turns into a full-body experience — a dizzying mixture of rotting wood, rotting paper, infested carpet, swamp-soaked chairs, sewage, bacteria and humidity. The lobby had been entirely submerged in slimy, green-blue-black water since Sunday, allowing the walls and ceilings to soften and melt. Pinch your nose and you can still smell the rot through your mouth. “As a managing director, you always think of the worst possible thing that can happen,” Gladden says. “This is the worst possible thing.”

Terry Teachout: “Surprisingly few people outside Wisconsin know of APT’s existence, yet it is America’s finest classical theater festival, unrivaled for the unfailing excellence of its productions. Nowhere else—not even in New York or Chicago—will you see such plays done more stylishly or excitingly.”

“As in most cities, Houston’s small to mid-sized companies often don’t own their own spaces; they are itinerant or rent spaces. The effects of cancelled shows and evacuations will likely take their toll on these organizations, especially ones that are still emerging such as Shunya Theatre, Gravity Players, Rogue Productions, and Rec Room Arts. While each of these companies faces a different set of circumstances, they demonstrate just how much small theatre companies hang on by a thread and will need to rely on the greater Houston community for their continued survival.”

“The leadership of the American theatre is at a crossroads like it hasn’t seen since the birth of the regional movement in the 1960s. … There are more than 20 artistic director vacancies at major theatre companies across the country, along with a handful of high-profile executive and managing director positions. One way or the other, the new guard will alter the leadership landscape in the American theatre for decades. The question is: how?”

Joseph Haj, artistic director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis: “A 2015 study … of 74 LORT theatres … found that there were zero managing or executive directors of color and, on the artistic side, just six people of color. Since then the figures have worsened. … That same study also found that women made up 59 percent of managerial staff presumably next in line for leadership positions (associate artistic directors, general managers, finance directors, development managers, etc.). But women have historically never held more than 27 percent of leadership positions in the American theatre, and the needle on that percentage hasn’t budged in 30 years.”

As the Brexit vote and the US. presidential election proceeded last year, the director and the company of Oslo made a decision that, “as it became more tumultuous in our political world, we would get further and deeper into 1993 and try less to make associations with now.” Audiences can – and do – make those associations on their own.