Category: theatre

The new play had an entertainingly over-the-top premise (elderly Mom booby-traps her apartment with Molotov cocktails to Sonny can’t send her to a nursing home), two skilled stage actors (Stephen Spinella and the 86-year-old Estelle Parsons), and excellent audience and critical response from its run at Arena Stage in D.C. Yet it closed after a month, despite a Tony nomination for Parsons.

“At home, we think nothing of looking at our phone for messages while watching television. But at home, you’re not surrounded by people who have paid for the privilege of what’s supposed to be a shared experience.”

“Noël Coward still remains the West End’s most represented playwright, with Blithe Spirit and the mind-bogglingly creaky Relative Values both currently playing. The latter would suggest that there is really not all that much difference between the theatre of the early 1950s and that of the 21st century.”

“The production won’t be a condensed run through the epic saga of the books, but rather a focus on Harry’s early years and the story of his parents, who are killed by Lord Voldemort when Harry is 15 months old.”

Co-adapter and -director Robert Icke: “[Orwell] thought that we would be reporting on ourselves, which is now obviously very true with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and the fact that our phones now know exactly where we are … We are all completely self-reporting, which prompted us to switch round the words ‘Big Brother is watching you’ into ‘Big Brother is you watching’, which we’ve incorporated into our script.”

“People who attend plays have a level of wellbeing equivalent to the amount of happiness derived from a £1,000 annual income increase, new research on the social impacts of culture has found.”

“Michael Blakemore, aged 85, is directing Angela Lansbury in … Blithe Spirit in the West End. Meanwhile the director Blanche McIntyre, 33, is staging Coward’s Tonight at 8.30, a series of nine one-act plays, on tour. Here, they swap ideas about his plays and his politics.”

“We don’t tell people what to write or how to write or even what style to write in. But we do teach and talk a lot about how musicals are put together.”

“Taking the form of a short text written by Tim Crouch,” Host, now being performed in Brighton, “works like this: You enter the bathing hut and somebody performs the text to you, and then you perform the text – reading from the script – to the next person.”

Evan as all too many well-reviewed musicals close early, Stephen Schwartz’s Wizard of Oz prequel keeps going and going and going. Mark Lawson tries to suss out the show’s secret.