Category: theatre

Warchus, who is credited with having directed more than 70 shows in London and on Broadway, said he was honoured to be following Spacey’s “galvanising tenure”.

“Theatre for children and young people has changed a great deal in recent years. It tackles many subjects traditionally considered too weighty for a young audience. These range from death … to the environment … We even tackled the banking crisis in 2013’s Bank On It, a show about economics for five to 10-year-olds.”

“Without his hands-on approach, acumen and flair, which first started reaping immense rewards with Cats in 1981, the British-led musical would be far less of a global force to be reckoned with. But the West End can’t thrive on hits spawned 30 years or so ago indefinitely, can it?”

Eric Bass says that they are “the myth that the puppeteer controls the puppet” and “the myth that we manipulate the puppet with our hands”.

“It’s like, we worked so hard to get careers beyond it, to get to this stage, and now we’re being dragged back again. … It’s harder to do comedy now anyway: we’re older, we’ve become the Establishment we took the piss out of.”

‘Fun Home’, the musical based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, won two prizes, for musical theater and for its ten-year-old co-star, Sydney Lucas. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins earned best new American play honors for two different scripts, and the 86-year-old Parsons took home a Lifetime Achievement award.

“We need to get an idea of what works and what doesn’t. We can create beautiful captions that happen exactly on time, but if you’re spending 90% of the time looking at a tablet and not at the show it’s pointless.”

“Eager audiences expect to dance, dine, drink and exchange secrets and titillation with performers, sometimes for hours at a time. Now a new breed of experience seeks to stretch that artistic dynamic further, drawing spectators not just for lively participation but also to share their REM cycles and reveries.”

“There had been no curtain call but the thing that really fascinated me: if they thought it might be over, they can’t have known what happens at the end of the play. Did they think Romeo and Juliet had a happy ending?”

“It turned out that the return of this ambitious, sung-through musical, which tells the story of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly transposed to the Vietnam War, with its melodious, some might say soupy, love songs, and its bitter depiction of an urban underworld where desperate West meets impoverished East, was the most eagerly anticipated in theatreland. If this is a surprise, it shouldn’t be.”