Category: theatre

The long-forgotten Wilton’s Music Hall first returned to our attention – still in a very derelict state – in 1997 with the celebrated Deborah Warner-Fiona Shaw staging of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Other stagings in the venue followed over the years – as did a capital campaign. Now Wilton’s is ready for full-time use – still looking worn, but with up-to-date theatre infrastructure.

After parting ways with SHN, a producing firm that brought touring Broadway shows to the city, Carole Shorenstein Hays has taken over the Curran and begun restoration work. Work on the 1,650-seat house should be complete in 2017; meanwhile, Shorenstein Hays will present a series of non-traditional works in the building.

American Theatre looked at 2,159 productions at 386 theatres. The gender breakdown on this list is 15 men, 4 women. Just 3 playwrights—Ayad Akhtar, August Wilson, and Dominique Morisseau—are non-white. Compared to last year’s Top 20 list—with 3 women to 17 men, and 4 playwrights of color—the trend lines are staying consistent, for better or worse).

The company W!ld Rice was by no means the first to cast a man as Lady Bracknell, but Gwendolyn and Cicely were played by men, too – and not in drag. “The play was transformed into a homoromantic comedy – a love letter to same-sex marriage.” This fell afoul of section 377A of Singapore’s penal code – the same “gross indecency” law under which Oscar Wilde himself was sent to prison.

“There will be no further Tweets from @Heddathruaglass where, over the last two years, Katherine Tozer has been tweeting every day in character charting Hedda’s life, latterly on her extended honeymoon with her husband in Europe. Over the last few days, the daily tweet has brought Hedda closer and closer to home and the point where Ibsen’s play begins.”

“It’s too expensive for a start. And, the audience seems to be complicit in the dullness. It’s like going to a fancy meal in a fancy restaurant with the attitude that, I’m here and I’ve paid the money so I’m going to enjoy it even though it tastes like shite. … To be honest, I have no desire to go out and see a play. The whole nature of that experience just puts me off.”

#falsaboda (yes, it’s a hashtag) is “a fake wedding where the bride, groom, and officiant are actors and the guests are there to party rather than celebrate a new marriage. The party-goers, usually young and single, pay between $43 and $65 for tickets, which are in high demand. The faux-wedding-goers receive a video that tells the backstory of the ‘couple,’ and they’re usually in for some kind of drama.”

“Where have been the remarkable new plays which have women as the driving engine as opposed to the adjunct for what is always, and inevitably, a male engine-driver? That hasn’t changed. That is what is deeply, deeply depressing. It was exactly the same when I was still earning my living in the theatre and I have seen no improvement in that area at all. … Why don’t creative people find women interesting?”

Bill Rauch: “We hope that people will find plays that both reaffirm values they already hold and provoke new ways of looking at the world in each portion of the season. So when choosing which eleven plays to produce in a season, we must not only look at the merits of the individual plays themselves, but how they resonate with others that will be playing right next door or even in the same space later that same day.”

“We know that the retrograde attitude toward opportunity for female playwrights and directors is replicated for women in many other lines of work, in and out of the arts. But the lack of urgency over the disparity is especially irksome in a field such as the theater, which has long fancied itself the artistic refuge for those denied a rightful voice in the culture.”