Category: theatre

“Apparently, being the youngest person in television history to host her own talk show wasn’t enough. Actress Keke Palmer will be making history yet again when she takes the Broadway stage in the title role of Rogers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella,” beginning Sept. 9.

The Coconut Grove Playhouse shut down in 2006 during its 50th anniversary season. It was $4 million in debt. The county has a plan for a small theatre to replace it. But Mike Eidson has a bigger idea: “a civic center dedicated to great theater in a modern playhouse complex would be a tremendous amenity and asset. . . . It sends a powerful and indisputable message to people who want to live and invest here that we are a serious, maturing city.”

“The one-million square foot facility, which will include a theater and production facilities and is to be completed by 2017, will develop musicals that can run in Beijing and other cities nationwide, as well as promote the theater industry there.”

Washington, D.C.’s Landless Theatre Company managed to persuade the famously exacting composer to approve a prog-metal arrangement of the <em>Sweeney</em> score for electric guitar and keyboards, bass and drums. Auditions for this version were “not traditional in any sense.”

“This play, this theatre, this audience will never make it into a national study about ‘diversity in theatre.’ Their productions, audience, playwrights, existence are not considered important enough to include because of the size of their budget. Their work, like the work of indie theatres all over the country, is invisible. But those audiences are having an intense, emotional, moving, unique, life-changing theatre experience. It’s not happening in New York, and it’s not happening in a 20 million dollar a year LORT, but it IS happening.”

On the other hand: “Of the 36% who do read reviews, around 80% said they accurately represent the performance, the research added.”

“Alfresco settings have their advantages – the fireflies, the moon, the breeze – and their complications, too: the bicyclists, the boomboxes, the gaze of raccoons that live just below the Delacorte’s stage and often scamper on. The Times asked performers, producers and directors to talk about the perils and pleasures of acting under the sky.”

“The hip-hop opera is presented by a company that receives money from the Israeli government which campaigners said made it legitimate to boycott, particularly due to the current situation in Gaza.”

“Death is easy, but for a good eye-gouge, Broadway directors call Rick Sordelet. … A top purveyor of staged mayhem, Mr. Sordelet has created fistfights, sword duels, stabbings and gunplay for some 60 Broadway productions – as well as Hollywood films, the Metropolitan Opera, the 1995 Super Bowl halftime show, and Ben Hur Live.”

“In 2012/13 more than 22 million people went to a London theatre performance and £618.5m was taken at the box office. London cinema admissions totalled 43 million, meaning the average ticket price would need to be more than £14.40 – which it is not – for cinema to have a bigger box office figure than theatre.”