Category: theatre

“We need to get to a stage in our theatre when a woman can be allowed to tell her own story, without translation – in all its complexity, and grotesqueness, and ugliness, and non-conformity, and sometimes conformity, and sometimes subversion. Not as a feminist statement. But just ‘coz. Because we are women theatre makers and this is how we see the world, and our view is just as valid as the culturally predominant male lens we’ve spent so much time translating.”

“There will be a dramatist’s perspective in the center of these plays for the first time in 400 years. Typically, we rely on information about the plays from actors, directors, dramaturgs, designers, and scholars. I’m asking the writers to go into the plays (I keep joking about giving them coal miners’ hats) and see what they discover about how the plays work from within their structure. Compressing the length of the project to three years also was strategic. I just wanted a snapshot of ‘now,’ how we think about Shakespeare now.”

It has long been assumed that Shakespeare’s father was a small-town glover and dealer in hides and wool, who went from riches to rags. The new research suggests that, far from going bust, John Shakespeare was reinvesting in wool and making even more money than ever, some of it via shady deals. It was also wool, not the theatre, that prompted William to leave Stratford-upon-Avon for London in 1585, where he could act as the family’s business representative.

Broadway and Times Square today would not be recognizable to those who last saw it in the mid-’70s or, for that matter, in the late ’20s. Broadway musicals are as popular as ever, but much of the grit and seediness has been washed clean, and the area is now more akin to a family-friendly theme park than a bawdy vaudeville enclave.

“I literally have had my play stolen from me,” Tommy Smith said in an email sent to colleagues and the press this week.

Known for his slimmed-down productions of Sweeney Todd and Company in which the actors doubled as instrumentalists, Doyle will become artistic director of Classic Stage Company next July.

“For years it was a struggle just to be taken seriously for doing professional work for young people. I wanted to prove you don’t have to do pratfalls and butt jokes to get children’s attention.” But her most visible achievement is the spacious Seattle Center playhouse, which opened in 1995. Linda Hartzell says it’s the first building in the U.S. built expressly to house a professional children’s theater.

What “political correctness,” in its most positive sense, means for me is correcting, or rectifying, past abuses of stereotypes. It’s a balancing process that calls out for some extremes in making those corrections. It is the time we live in. We may — oh, may it happen — reach a moment where such abuses are so long behind us, that we’ll feel a bit more comfortable when something like “The Mikado” is staged.

Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of London’s Royal Court Theatre: “We haven’t seen a female King Lear, we haven’t seen a female Willy Loman, we haven’t seen a female Hamlet. People haven’t written those plays yet. And when they do write them, or when they try …, people don’t receive the play very positively.”

“Does Vicky Featherstone speak for us all when she says ‘we don’t know whether we’re very good yet at watching a female narrative’? Audiences who queued up for and gave standing ovations to Gillian Anderson’s Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, Imelda Staunton in Gypsy, or Kristin Scott Thomas’s Electra might disagree.”