Category: theatre

“Tired of the shouty voices from Westminster, [National Theatre director Rufus Norris] decided to turn away from London and start an in-depth listening project to try to understand the roots of the divide that had fractured the country. … He contacted 10 writers and directors from all over the country and asked them to start recording long interviews with people about their feelings about the vote.” Amelia Gentleman has the story of My Country: A Work in Progress, the resulting play.

“No one ever pretended that King Kong or Bruce the Shark in Jaws were real, but they were grounded in the physical world (often by the limitations of technology), whereas now Kong is a highly sophisticated piece of digital animation in the new Kong: Skull Island, and crappily rendered sharks fall from the sky every summer on SyFy. It’s especially important for theatre that this distinction be made, because if people come to accept and even believe that what they’re seeing on screen is reality, how can theatre compete without giving itself over to holograms?”

The playwright has four Tony nominations, including one win, as well as Drama Desk and Obie Awards. What led him to become a member of the tiny Gift Theater? Anne Spiselman called him and asked.

“The $2.5 million is the initial splash in what will plainly need to be a very deep bucket. The Power Plays, first announced in November, are new works focused on politics and power – one for each decade of America’s existence. The 10-year, 25-work series will be composed of five related cycles: Presidential Voices, African-American Voices, Insider Voices, Musical Theater Voices and Women’s Voices.”

“But first, it’s important to highlight the one thing we can’t learn: What really got him fired. … That said, there are plenty of important takeaways from the narrative about Isherwood’s firing.” Liane Davey offers four of them – and they may seem obvious, but people forget them all the time.

That Laura Collins-Hughes chose to think about Big River, and specifically the Black character of Jim, in the context of an America currently “plumbing its own soul over questions of privilege and belonging,” did not please Jack Viertel, the long-serving producer of Encores! In a hyperbolic, vitriolic response, Viertel characterised the review — which he acknowledged was positive — as “stunningly polarized, politicized, narrow-minded and unfailingly myopic.”

Producer Jack Viertel: “Mark Twain does not go in and out of style. Whatever one thinks of the specific success or failure of Big River’s efforts to translate The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the stage, it is faithful to Twain. I’m stunned to read, for instance, that Ms. Collins-Hughes is upset about the character of Jim being the only important black character in the piece.”

“The genre-busting, glitter-dusting performance artist … and his musical director, Matt Ray, have been named winners of the 2017 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History, for their 24-hour work, A 24-Decade History of Popular Music.”

New York magazine’s Boris Kachka investigates – and while there’s no definitive answer yet, the situation ain’t pretty.

It’s been a tough few years for the flagship of Philly’s nonprofit theaters: PTC nearly collapsed in 2014 and its new-ish home was foreclosed on the following year. Fortunately, the new producing artistic director, Paige Price, has already turned around Theatre Aspen, where she was performing as an actor in 2007 when suddenly found herself the boss. As David Patrick Stearns reports, “her Philadelphia appointment … means giving up spectacular Rocky Mountain scenery but having a near year-round, locally-based audience and a theater with running water.”