Category: theatre

“Theatres in England have experienced no decrease in attendances from audience members living near cinemas that screen NT Live shows since NT Live was launched in 2009, data from research charity Nesta and consultancy organisation the Audience Agency has shown.”

Jesse Green: “Theater critics thus have the opportunity – provided almost entirely by Shakespeare, since contemporary drama is notably short on gore – to watch hundreds of people die horribly each season. … Rarely do I see the plays done well enough to justify the awfulness they ask us to witness. And if they’re not properly awful, what’s the point? Do Much Ado and be done with it.”

“We thought the point of 50-50 in 2020 for women playwrights was to force the industry into a tacit affirmative action plan. (50-50 in 2020 meant 50 percent of new plays produced would be by women by the year 2020.) We thought it was born of that boiling ’00s moment in which Emily Glassberg Sands made public her research on gender inequality on new-play production, fitting neatly with the larger national conversation about gender parity in American life, especially in business.”

An article in The New Yorker misreporting my “Master Class” conversation about censorship in our schools with seventeen teachers from the Academy for Teachers a couple of weeks ago has created some false impressions about my collaboration with the Disney Studio on the film version of “Into the Woods.”

After last week’s New Yorker post, Sondheim has released a statement saying that the article “has created some false impressions about my collaboration with the Disney Studio … The fact is that James [Lapine, who wrote both the show and the movie] and I worked out every change from stage to screen with the producers and … director.”

“If Broadway shows can disappear after their first and only production, why would a nightclub show have any afterlife? … And back in 1928, Cole Porter was nothing. He was lucky he got the job.”

“The firm sent the cease-and-desist letter Friday, the day that reviews of the show appeared online and revealed the company’s casting decision — a decision that the company went to unusual lengths to keep hidden before opening curtain.”

“More plays and musicals are also telling stories from Asian viewpoints, a long-held goal of Asian-American artists. And increasingly, Asians are landing roles that traditionally go to non-Asian actors.”

“While the appetite for theater, including Western-style spoken drama, as it is known in Chinese, has been growing, particularly among the young, the rise in foreign productions is a relatively recent phenomenon.”

“As soon as I read that I was like, ‘I get a nap? That’s part of it? This is great!’ And there’s a science behind it. That doesn’t mean it’s less difficult, but it means at least you’re working with your brain instead of against it.”