Category: theatre

“Yeah, this is embarrassing. And the Broadway ego takes a shellacking every time a list like this gets published. How are we supposed to uphold our reputation as being the biggest and best producer of live theater if other countries are beating us to the market? The UK and Canada are exporting and distributing better than we are!”

Michael Billington: “Brook himself hates looking back over his career … [but] the rest of us are entitled to put his 70-year-long career in perspective and the stock idea is that it falls into two distinct parts” – the British period and the internationalist period. “It’s a neat division but, to me, Brook’s career is far more unified than it seems.”

In an excerpt from his prize-winning biography, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, John Lahr recalls the atmosphere in New York and the rest of America at the time of the play’s Broadway success – the close of World Wat II.

This “theatrical installation” at a laundromat in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, “is the first for families ever produced by Soho Rep, the venerable downtown institution that has won 18 Obie Awards over the past decade.”

In the 2013-2014 season, Broadway shows touring across North America drew 13.8 million attendances. Broadway saw only 8.52 million attendees. The Road Audience is almost 2x the size of the Broadway Audience. Now do you see how important The Road is?

“The bare dialogue and stage directions give no sense of the unsettling and innovative spectacle that the work becomes in the theatre. Someone … who read the text without seeing it would be in the position of an archaeologist asked to guess the personality of a skeleton.”

“None has a name, but their [well-known] identities emerge from the tales they tell. Each narrates a monologue, never acknowledging the others. But they have common memories – of childhood, of war – and when their stories cross, one stops and another picks up the thread. They cook as they speak, each in her own kitchen corner, chopping, cutting, mixing … This is Hamhavaie (acclimatising), … which is now being prepared for Europe and possibly the United States.”

Rupert Christiansen: “The glut of hugely successful shows – Mamma Mia!, Let It Be, Thriller, Jersey Boys, The Commitments – which effectively trade on nostalgia is rather depressing. Even more significant is the undeniable truth that the scores of the more recent crop of successful ‘original’ musicals – The Lion King, Billy Elliot, The Book of Mormon, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, Wicked – are their weakest element. Has one of them yielded a single song which has passed into the general consciousness?” (Maybe “Hakuna Matata”?)

Alan Bennett (The Madness of George III, Talking Heads, The History Boys): “To a playwright, what immediately commends him is the amount of work he puts in. Directing can be quite a lazy profession with the play once roughed out and in preview left to coast along or settle down. Not with Nick; he never lets up.”

Composer Alan Menken: “We never thought of the movie as something meant for the stage. But there was such a hunger for that to happen for a generation of kids because they loved it so much. We felt the need to turn it into a worthwhile meal.”