Category: theatre

“The circus is traditionally a populist form attracting performers who have been marginalized by society. ‘It’s a language that can speak to all kinds of people on all kinds of levels,’ Miller says. ‘And I certainly knew that postmodern dance wasn’t going to hold them in the parks.'”

“The playwrights wondered whether, as fans, they had some responsibility to the players — and to the future of football itself.”

“What gets lost in this story is how many people actually wound up loving the show. … For a lot of people, because it was Spider-Man, it was their first musical ever, and for some it was kind of a gateway drug. They were turned on to Broadway musicals in a way they hadn’t been before.”

“There does seem something odd about ACE’s long-standing tradition of hurling ever more money at buildings and organisations that lurch from crisis to crisis. There are plenty of small, nimble organisations with absolutely no desire to empire-build by adding another auditorium or indeed any auditorium at all, but who get by on very little funding; who with a little bit more, they could be real power houses, despite, or perhaps because of, their diminutive size.”

“I think this new crowd have found ways of producing, ways of finding spaces and turning them into theatres that is unprecedented. They’ve got lots of things to say, they say it in all sorts of different ways, and they find all sorts of ways of saying it.”

“The survey, which was open to everyone in the sector and completed by more than 5,000 people, found that 46% of those who answered a question about the state of their mental health described it as either poor or average, and that 20% had actively sought help about their mental well-being.”

“I think we are in a slight time of shift, in that the sung through musical perhaps is now receding, and the book musical is starting to come back. It’s delicate…you have to have a theme which engages as much as you need glorious music.”

“The important thing is: what do we do about that? Because otherwise we lose all these interesting characters like Richard Burton and Richard Harris, and playwrights like John Osborne who were writing working-class stories. What happens to that? Does that just go? Or do we go back to the 30s when you had incredibly posh people trying to do cockney accents?”

“The split generally falls along professional lines. If most of a show’s performers are Equity (union) actors, that’s a Hayes show. If they aren’t, it’s a Helen, regardless of theater. Got it? … Illustrating how the ‘Helen’ and ‘Hayes’ distinctions really go show by show, not theater by theater, is the case of Arena Stage.”

“The town is so crowded … that even voices from the small independent sector have begun to wonder aloud whether the city is oversaturated. Washington also teems with competition for audiences increasingly lured by a burgeoning restaurant scene and the cyber circus of online diversions. All this adds to the special pressure faced by big troupes: They have the most seats to sell, night after night.”