Category: theatre

City of London financier Johathan Ruffer “is the main backer of something called Kynren, an all-singing, all-dancing history of Britain from the Romans to the second world war, which will be put on by about 1,000 volunteers in the investor’s rolling backyard” near Durham. “Billed as the biggest live event in the UK since the 2012 Olympics, it features a Viking longboat levitating out of a lake, horses charging into battle, a volley of flaming arrows and and plenty of pyrotechnics.”

Four shows flopped this spring at a total loss to their investors. Here, based on interviews with a variety of Broadway figures, is an autopsy report of sorts for “American Psycho,” “Disaster!” and “Tuck Everlasting,” all of which closed in recent weeks, and “Bright Star,” which wraps up on Sunday.

“There is a growing perception among publications of all kinds that it is no longer necessary to have full-time or professional or paid theater journalists (be it critics, reporters, or feature writers). Full-time writers are replaced with freelancers, and freelancers are replaced with interns, or no one at all.”

Today, the idea that a work written for the theater could “save” a nation—for this was what Aristophanes’ word polis, “city,” really meant; Athens, for the Athenians, was their country—seems odd, even as a joke. For us, popular theater and politics are two distinct realms. In the contemporary theatrical landscape, overtly political dramas that seize the public’s imagination (Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, say, with its thinly veiled parable about McCarthyism, or Tony Kushner’s AIDS epic Angels in America) tend to be the exception rather than the rule.

“I read quite a lot of theatre reviews, and while the best are all sorts of stimulating, I kind of think: we all bloody sound like each other, don’t we? I mean, there’s some textural variety: Susannah Clapp is poetic; Michael Billington does puns; Quentin Letts hates theatre. But, as a rule, it’s difficult to see exactly how theatre criticism has stylistically shifted since Tynan’s time – or before that, even: for Ben Brantley, the most powerful theatre critic in the world, it is forever 1851.”

Javier Muñoz has been Lin-Manuel Miranda’s understudy and alternate from the beginning of Hamilton‘s development, and – except for the ten weeks he spent recovering from surgery and radiation therapy – he’s been playing Hamilton on Sundays and Miranda’s days off since the show opened. Muñoz even got to perform the role for both First Couples.

“Whether you train at say, East 15 or Rose Bruford as an actor, do a maths degree at Oxford, or read history at Durham, the fees are the same. Student loan entitlement, extended in a limited form to postgraduate courses from this autumn, applies to all first degrees. It’s financially no harder for drama students that it is for any university undergraduate.”

“Yes, the actors will be paid for that gig but it doesn’t take into account the unpaid work that went into creating the show and getting the gig in the first place. On paper everything looks hunky dory, fulfilling the safeguards put in place by unions and funders. The reality is rather different.”

Laura Collins-Hughes: “I have always hated The Taming of the Shrew. Of all of Shakespeare’s plays, it’s the only one that upsets me just to think about.” But Julie Taymor loves the piece, and Phyllida Lloyd and Tina Packer are but two of numerous female directors who try to come to terms with it.

“Producer Paul Taylor-Mills has claimed he was forced to wind up his production company after being financially crippled by a duty to pay actors … consistent with [Equity’s] fringe guidelines.”