As Chris Rock puts it, “If you think you don’t have room to make mistakes, it’s going to lead to safer, gooier standup. You can’t think the thoughts you want to think if you think you’re being watched.” Brian Logan observes, “And, let’s face it, they are being watched – by which I mean (and he means) recorded, and apt to be broadcast – out of context, probably, and whether or not their material is ready.”
Category: theatre
RSC to Begin on Restoration of Swan Wing at Stratford-Upon-Avon
“The Swan Wing, which contains the Swan Theatre, is the only remaining part of the original 1879 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, which burnt down in 1926. It originally housed a library, reading room and picture gallery, and it currently includes the façade and entrance, hallway, bar area, staircase, Ferguson exhibition room and the bridge that links it to the Swan Theatre auditorium.”
Who Inspires Today’s Artists? Justice Scalia (Here’s The Proliferating Evidence)
“Justice Scalias are appearing in a stage play, an opera and a puppet show, to name three. The actual Justice Scalia ascribes his proliferating stage presence to the media culture of the modern age.”
Theatre Critics – Theatres Miss Them, Now That They’re Disappearing
Tim Walker: “‘Another day, yet another newspaper critic in @ThatTimWalker faces the axe,’ the Tricycle Theatre in north London tweeted recently, when it was announced the curtain was coming down on my run as the Sunday Telegraph‘s chief theatre critic. ‘What’s going on? Theatre will be the poorer without these voices.'” Many professionals, not least the director Michael Grandage, “retweeted this howl of despair – and one can well understand it.”
Philadelphia Theatre Company Edges Away From The Brink
“With the help of former Kennedy Center president Michael M. Kaiser, the financially beleaguered Philadelphia Theatre Company has bought itself some time, buoying hopes for its survival.”
To Avoid High Ticket Taxes, This Theater Group Started Selling Porn Mags With Free Tickets Inside
When the Spanish government raised the sales tax on movie and performance tickets from 8% to 21%, the Madrid theatre company Primas de Riesgo (“risk premium”, as in the extra interest charged for junk bonds) thought it would have to swallow the expense – until it realized that magazines, including porn, have a sales tax of 4%.
“Scottsboro Boys”, “Here Lies Love”, Gillian Anderson Take London Evening Standard Theatre Awards
The Scottsboro Boys, the controversial Kander & Ebb musical that treats a notorious 1931 Alabama criminal case in the style of a minstrel show, edged out the Imelda Marcos disco show Here Lies Love, which received a special award for “pushing the boundaries of the musical.” Anderson took Best Actress honors for her Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Evening Standard Theatre Awards: The Judges Speak
“A one-man war machine, a doe-eyed Blanche DuBois and two trips to Eighties New York – our judges on the performances and productions that triumphed at the London Evening Standard Theatre Awards.”
Confession: I Bail Out After The First Act Of Plays – All The Time
Joanne Kaufman: “I’m embarrassed by how unembarrassed I am to admit [it] … Don’t ask me what happened during the second acts of Matilda, Kinky Boots, Pippin and, reaching back a few seasons, Boeing-Boeing and Billy Elliott. Really, I have no idea. But I am nothing if not cosmopolitan in my tastes, or distastes.”
A 24-Year Theater Project Begins (And It Includes Naked Dance Parties)
“The spectacle – exhilaration and humiliation all muddled together, on stage as in life – [debuts this week] in the form of The Sincerity Project. Then, if all goes as planned, it will return with the same cast every few years for the next 24 years – like a live-theater version of the Up documentary films that have tracked a dozen British children since 1964 from age 7 to 56.”