Category: theatre

Hoo boy, don’t ask her about the BBC. “Often I want to shout out, ‘Will you say that again because I can’t hear!’ It is an apathy – laziness.”

The deal: “I want a contemporary colour palette. I want the people of the world that I see around me to be telling those stories. That homogenous world that I see onstage [traditionally]? It’s just not my world. I don’t recognize that.”

David Cote: “Nobody seems able to answer the question of how you can make theatre criticism more appealing, more clickworthy. One answer is to be a goddamn flamethrower every week, be a bomb thrower, to write scorched-earth reviews. Just be completely hedonistic and ego-driven in your criticism, become a master stylist, and treat everything in front of you onstage as fodder for your most delicious and vicious language. That’s one road. And people may enjoy your writing. The thing that’s sacrificed is any sense of a larger responsibility, and any aesthetic consistency.”

The five “key creatives” for five shows up for best musical dish about the process. “The [studio-driven musical] is just a very different world. It’s a stable of people with properties that are trying to figure out what to do with them. Many of the ideas are very possible. And some of them are idiotic. I listen to what everyone here is saying about all the ideas they could come up with from scratch and think: ‘It must be lovely.’ It’s like I’m watching a zoo.”

“Cite the numbers, and the problem instantly becomes too vast to grasp: More than 33,000 people killed and upward of 78,000 wounded by firearms each year in the United States … This is where the stealthy power of theater has an advantage, at least theoretically. … News reports arrive after the fact, but theater can meddle with time and dimension, showing us the before, the during, the yet to come.” Laura Collins-Hughes surveys the plays that have been exploring the issue.

Roland Scahill claimed to have purchased the rights to soprano Kathleen Battle’s life story and that he was producing a one-woman show starring Lupita Nyong’o about Battle’s firing from the Metropolitan Opera.

An indefatigable, unstinting and intellectually voracious artistic director who reinvented Chicago’s most audacious and aggressive theater for a new era, Martha Lavey wrestled the Steppenwolf Theatre Company — kicking and screaming — into the 21st century. And in her cajoling, bullying, flattering, outwitting and otherwise leading its hugely talented but famously passionate and opinionated ensemble of tightknit actors toward reinvention and expansion for changed times, this artistic director of more than 20 years became one of the most important figures in the illustrious history of the Chicago theater.

Of course, the dangers were rather greater than they are for the cast of Saturday Night Live, or even Bassem Youssef, and more immediate than even for the Belarus Free Theatre.

“The time for reckoning is over. It’s time for action. And for action to be effective, we need inspiration. Doomsday scenarios won’t galvanize us; we need hope and a capacity to imagine the future we want to create. In short, we need new narratives. And who better to provide those than writers?”