Category: theatre

A disco bioplay of Imelda Marcos, Here Lies Love took five Lucille Lortel Awards, including for director and lead actress, while lesbian-and-gay-themed musical memoir (and South Carolina lightning rod) Fun Home won the best musical prize and two acting awards. Lisa Kron, who wrote the book for Fun Home, took honors of her own for best featured actress in a play.

When that designer is Dmitry Krymov, you get colliding grand pianos, a pram that materializes out of a projection and spills children’s shoes, or skaters acting out the death of Tolstoy and the Sputnik launch. (You also get utterly chaotic rehearsals.)

“A platform collapsed during an aerial hair-hanging stunt at a circus performance Sunday, sending eight entertainers plummeting to the ground. Nine were seriously injured in the fall, including a dancer below.”

“‘I burned your name in a fire at New Year’s,’ the playwright and director confessed in a pre-interview phone call to suss out my intentions.”

“The idea is to make the theater more accessible to more people. There are all kinds of cool new technologies we could be looking at and exploring. We’re just experimenting to see what we can do.”

“One theatre-goer, who watched the show’s opening night, said there had been ‘quite a few droppers’ in the audience, who fainted upon seeing so much blood. Another reported he had ‘almost puked’ by the interval.”

Director Luk Perceval examines “the war to end all wars” from German, Flemish, British and French perspectives in what he describes as a “polyphony in four languages” titled Front.

Company co-founders Natalia Kaliada, Nicolai Khalezin and Vladimir Shcherban may be political refugees in London, but they’re still working via the Web with their colleagues back in Minsk – who have to give performances deep in the forest, and who had to give up their tumble-down garage headquarters after authorities threatened to bulldoze it. (Naturally they’ve all been jailed and beaten up.)

Terry Gross interviews the show’s lyricist, Sheldon Harnick, about writing songs with and without Jerry Bock – and about the big Shabbos number with which they were going to open what became their most popular musical. (audio)

In his 11th play, Carl Djerassi – now 90 and irked that most people have no idea that he’s done anything since he developed the oral contraceptive at age 28 – depicts Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt investigating what was in the famous briefcase Walter Benjamin carried across the Pyrenees. The answer: porn.