Category: theatre

When asked what he looks for in the people he entrusts to interpret his work, Stephen Sondheim said In London This week: “Mostly it’s the directors you have to be careful of. Many, many directors, particularly in musicals, are more interested in serving themselves rather than serving the text, because musicals invite a lot of invention. Even if that director is inventive, he or she should be serving the piece, and you don’t always get that. That’s the thing I look for.”

In his 27-page complaint filed today in Los Angeles Superior Court (read it here), Randall Arney who was the theater’s artistic director for 17 years before leaving in February, claims that Geffen Playhouse board co-chairs Pamela Henderson and Martha Robinson “abruptly and without explanation changed the terms of his employment” shortly after he turned 55 in 2012, “presenting him with a contract limiting his employment to two years” with a Geffen option for a third.

This Playbill list was gathered from actor bios published within Playbill Magazine and Schools of the Stars at the beginning of the 2017-2018 season, and is reflective of its August 21st, 2017, publication date.

“As one of the most labor-intensive industries in the city, Broadway production is a union shop for actors, stage hands, musicians, directors and choreographers, authors and others. The casting directors, who are seeking to negotiate a union contract as members of Teamsters Local 817, have had no luck so far getting the League’s labor committee to sit down with them.”

As the state’s only member of the elite-tier League of Resident Theatres, with a $7 million budget and audiences in both Tucson and Phoenix, Arizona Theatre Company is better equipped than any other Valley company to be a leader on the issues of equity and representation for women and people of color — which, ironically enough, makes Ivers, who formerly led the Utah Shakespeare Festival, something of a “great white hope” for theater diversity here.

Yes, seriously: “A nationwide survey on access to toilets in theatres has been launched. The Association of British Theatre Technicians, which is running the survey, hopes it will help to address ‘issues of accessibility and inclusivity.'”

The man who produced and/or directed more than 21 Broadway musicals and brought now-classics to the Great White Way had some issues getting his own story to the stage. “A shortage of investors was at one point an issue, astonishingly – or perhaps not so, given the proliferation of jukebox musicals and movie and brand adaptations that have attracted latter-day Broadway producers. Prince, now 89, was never fazed. ‘So many of the shows I’ve done were met with cynicism, initially,’ he says.”

Michelle Terry isn’t feuding with Emma Rice, won’t direct any plays, wants children to fall for Shakespeare through their kinetic experience at the Globe – and the plays will be “gender-blind, race-blind, disability-blind.”