Category: theatre

“Musicians who were made redundant from the National Theatre’s West End production of War Horse have failed to secure an interim injunction which they had hoped would allow them to return to work.”

The birangona (Bengali for “brave woman” or “war heroine”) were ordinary Bengalis, hundreds of thousands of them, who were abducted and raped by Pakistani soldiers during the Bangladeshi War of Independence – only to be rejected by their families and communities afterward. Leesa Gazi has used their testimony to create a theatre piece now touring England.

“The theaters’ fates appear to be turning around, having bounced off rock bottom and ridden (and contributed to) a wave of revitalization in the heart of the country’s second largest city. Perhaps the most promising re-launch is the United Artists Theater, which has been incorporated into the recently opened Ace Hotel.”

A three-hour play “drama that prompted an abundance of head-scratching and some audience walkouts during its off-Broadway run last year,” The Flick “follows the employees of a single-screen movie theater as they clean, converse and otherwise pass the time silently in front of the big screen.”

“Commercial theatre and subsidised theatre feed each other to a mutual advantage. You can’t have one without the other. If subsidised theatre actually dwindled overnight you would find a very depleted commercial theatre.”

“The history play, it is believed, derived from the medieval morality play, and one of the welcome features of its popular return is the instructive example it provides an age badly in need of the long view.”

“The 220-seat Shed auditorium at the National Theatre opened last April and perches jauntily on the river front like an upside-down red wooden cow. What was meant to be a one-off, one-year project has now been granted a three-year stay of execution, taking it until spring 2017.”

“He’s trying to operate under the radar, so he has to appear like everybody else, like he could fill any post at any time. … There’s nothing remarkable about him.”

“There is something emancipating about doing a show outside the West End where you don’t think you have to hit the jackpot every time. You’re not panicking about whether you can fill the theatre and there’s not a hysterical pressure there sometimes is when you do a show in the West End and there’s a lot of cash and reputation hanging on it.”

“That hot four-star show? Those incredible performances? Surely, those actors are getting paid, right? Usually not. Or if they are, it is a flat-fee stipend of a couple hundred dollars for the entire run (rates vary among theaters) that might average out to $30 or $40 a week. That’s not including all those weeks of rehearsal, which come with no wages at all.”