As Rebecca Mead reports, the manuscript of The Shadow of a Doubt wasn’t hidden in a trove of papers in some remote attic; it was right there in a collection of theater manuscripts at a well-known research library.
Category: theatre
How Hedwig Finds The Newly Annoying Neighborhood In Every City She Visits
Hedwig and the Angry Inch, now nearing the end of its national tour, always works in local references. Erik Piepenburg finds out how those references get chosen and offers a few choice examples.
Bette Midler May Not Be Singing At The Tonys: Report
Not having the biggest star from the season’s biggest musical appear on the show that’s Broadway’s biggest chance to market itself to America – well, that could be a problem. But it looks like that’s what will happen, thanks to an “an impasse [in negotiations] over the conditions under which Ms. Midler would sing.”
Russian Law Enforcement Targets A Controversial Theatre Director
This does not look good. “At the storm’s center is Kirill Serebrennikov, the virtuoso Russian stage director behind Moscow’s innovative, and often controversial, Gogol Center theater. … With the company’s actors still detained by masked officers in the theater on Tuesday, hundreds of supporters from artist and journalist circles began gathering outside, among them former members of the punk protest band Pussy Riot and loyalist film directors like Fyodr Bandarchuk.”
How A Great Berlin Theatre Is Stepping Away From Great Theatre
“The stage of spoken-word theatre is indebted to a sense of the world that is centred on the human. On the stage of the 21st century, however, we find a new distribution of power, a new dynamic of creatures, ghosts, machines, objects. The things we once invented to define identities or let them manifest themselves on stage have lost all traction. The [human] subject – is that even a topic anymore these days?”
‘A Doll’s House, Part 2’: How Playwright Lucas Hnath Put Together The Script
It was by no means a matter of presenting a finished piece to the director and cast: in fact, the actors – especially Chris Cooper, who’s used to working in film – were astonished at how much they were allowed to shape their characters’ lines. Peter Marks reports on the process, which leaned heavily on what Hnath calls “scraps.”
Playwright Threatens Theatre If It Holds Audience Discussions After Performances
During Outvisible’s run of Oleanna, which closed in early April, the creative team (as they apparently do with all of their productions) wanted to host talk back sessions with the audience, who had just seen the show. That was until they received contact from a Dramatists representative, who holds the license to Oleanna, on behalf of David Mamet himself. According to sources they were notified that if they proceeded to have these talk back sessions or ” anything like it were to happen within two hours after the performance, that we would be charged/fined $25,000.”
Broadway Box Office Take Sets Another Record (Thanks To Insane Ticket Prices)
“Box-office grosses, which have been climbing since 2013, rose 5.5 percent, to $1.449 billion, a new high, according to figures released on Tuesday by the Broadway League … There are bargains available for all but the buzziest shows, but still: The average price paid for a Broadway ticket during the 2016-17 season was a record $109, up from $103 the previous season.”
Police Raid Moscow’s Leading Avant-Garde Theatre, Detain Director
Kirill Serebrennikov, famous in Russia as both a stage director and a filmmaker, was taken into custody and held for interrogation following a raid of the Gogol Center (of which he’s artistic director), his apartment, and 15 other addresses. (He was released late in the day and said he was questioned as a witness.) Authorities claim that the issue is suspected embezzlement of state arts funding at the Gogol, but Serebrennikov is a well-known critic of the Kremlin’s policies on freedom of expression, LGBT rights, and Crimea, and several of the theatre’s more controversial stagings have been investigated for violating morals laws.
Theatre, Race, And The Albee Estate – Whose Wishes Should Rule?
News broke last week that Edward Albee’s estate had denied permission for the casting of a black actor as Nick in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, reigniting yet again the debates on non-traditional casting. Alexis Soloski looks at the good-faith issues in the debate: “Part of the difficulty has to do with whether we perceive theater as a collaborative form in which a play is made new each time a director and actors put it on, or whether plays exist as blueprints for a single ideal staging that each production will realize to greater and lesser extent.”