“The news that Emma Rice would be leaving in April 2018 was accompanied by a commitment from the Globe’s board that it would return to more traditional practices following her tenure. The candidate brief for the new artistic director emphasises this, and claims that a review is currently being undertaken to ensure that the “mission, vision and values are better articulated and reflect more effectively [its] commitment to the unique architecture of the Globe”.
Category: theatre
Magnetic North Theatre Festival Cancels 2017 Edition, And Shuts Permanently
The 15-year-old theatre’s board announced it was shutting down immediately, with a debt of more than $224,000 (Canadian), one month after it hired a new managing director.
Theatre Isn’t Just Fun; It’s Work, And It’s Necessary
Harvey Fierstein: “I’ve heard that more tickets are sold on Broadway in a year than are sold to all the city’s major sports team events combined. Wouldn’t it be great if the last seven minutes of the news every night was dedicated to theater?”
This Actress Uses A Wheelchair And Is Playing Laura In ‘Glass Menagerie’ – Exploitation Or Progress?
Broadway audiences are used to perfectly abled bodies, as are reviewers, which might be why some reviewers are having a hard time with Madison Ferris’ Laura. But, despite a few Off-Broadway and other companies having better representation, on Broadway, actors with visible disabilities “remain a rare occurrence, and as a result Broadway remains unrepresentative of the full range of humanity.”
Elfriede Jelinek Is A Nobel Laureate – And Her Latest Play Takes On The Notoriously Thin-Skinned Current President Of The United States
The Austrian playwright and novelist wrote a new play (“an attack on the Trump aesthetic: the gold, the plush furniture”) for the times. It’s coming to NY, and here’s the description, from the play’s translator: “This seer with bleeding eyes sends Trump through a shattered looking glass where Jelinek examines him through the distorted mirrors of the heroes of Western culture: from Oedipus to Abraham, Isaac and Jesus, to Martin Heidegger, who attempted to lead the Führer.”
People In Theatre Say They Can’t Talk About Mental Health Issues, Or They’ll Lose Work
One director says that “The industry needs to begin addressing it very seriously, so that we all have decent guidelines, and so that performers who do have a history of mental health issues and may enter a crisis during the time they’re spending with you have some recourse.”
Looking For A Theatre Response In A Time Of Trump
“Since the election, I have been urgently seeking direction from dramatists in the way a cardiac patient might turn to nutrition and meditation after a heart attack. I have been thinking not just of Chekhov but of Harold Pinter, who is an even better guide to Trump’s brutal relativism and canny opportunism. Pinter’s plays throw into relief the territorial nature of human beings — the way reality, both present and past, is a turf war in which the will to dominate supersedes all other considerations.”
Carey Perloff To Retire From San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre After 25 Years
Perloff, who will leave after the end of next season, plans to write and direct on a freelance basis. One of the few women leaders in the still male-dominated American theater, the indefatigable Perloff first came to the 50-year-old ACT back in 1992 when the theater was in disarray both physically, in terms of the massive earthquake damage at the Geary, and in terms of its artistic reputation, which had stumbled in the wake of the volatile Bill Ball era.
An ‘Audience Manifesto’: This Theatre Asked Its Biggest Stakeholders What They Really Want, And Here’s What They Came Up With
The Director of Engagement at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester writes about how she and her colleagues developed their two-years-and-running project, You,The Audience.
NYT Adds Jesse Green As “Co-Chief” Theatre Critic, Hints At More Critics To Come
“With the addition of Jesse to the already formidable theater team led by theater editor Scott Heller, The Times continues its commitment to cultural criticism. In the last two years alone, the voices of Amanda Hess, Margaret Lyons, Wesley Morris, James Poniewozik and Jennifer Senior have joined The Times’s already unbeatable roster of full-time critics, which now counts 21 in total. Meanwhile, we continue to seek out new voices to bring into the fold, and hope to make further additions to our critical ranks this year.”