Category: theatre

The all-time highs in revenue happened at regional theatres as well as in London in 2016 – despite the fact that companies were suffering from huge cuts in funding from local governments.

“Just as it is inaccurate and unfair to dismiss all Broadway shows as escapist (as some serious theatremakers who don’t go to Broadway sometimes do), so there are no easy assumptions to make about plays versus musicals. Not all musicals are escapist fare; and not all escapist shows are musicals. Not all straight plays are socially engaged. Not all socially engaged shows are straight plays. It’s true that all four of the Best Play Tony nominees this year are socially conscious, but three of the four Best Musical nominees also have socially conscious elements.”

“[Robert] Kelley built TheatreWorks from a single scrappy youth theater production, Popcorn, to a community theater, then to a semiprofessional company, then to a major regional theater with an $8 million budget, 40 full-time staff members and 8,000 subscribers.”

It wasn’t exactly an insult from the jury of the one-dollar-in-damages type, but after a strange trial about an even stranger case of fraud, the plaintiffs were awarded less than 1% of the amount they sought.

Comparing the London Times‘s outrage-inducing review of Benedict Cumberbatch’s first preview performance as Hamlet with The Telegraph‘s “news reports” on early previews of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Angels in America, Time Out London theatre editor Andrzej Lukowski declares, “If you’re going to be a dick about it, do it in style.”

With the appointment of Katori Hall – author of The Mountaintop (about the last night of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life) and now working on a bio-musical of Tina Turner – as artistic director as well as a new stage and headquarters, the Hattiloo Theatre “is making a shift to be a main if not the main player in black theater in the country,” says company founder and CEO Ekundayo Bandele, who relinquished his artistic director title in order to hire Hall.

While the idea of a lost Shakespeare play is devastating to many, it’s not the only play believed to have existed by the Bard that we no longer have access to, and the two “known” lost plays may not be the only ones out there.

Just ask Anastasia and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. (Or rather, ask their producers, who are happy that kids and their parents say things like, “It’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory! How do you not come?”

Broadway this season has pure escapism, like “Hello, Dolly,” and socially engaged theatre, exemplified by Lynn Nottage’s “Sweat.” The problem isn’t either one, argues critic Jonathan Mandell. “Escapist fare is most irksome not when it focuses on something other than the world’s concerns, but when it demonstrates an active indifference to those concerns.”