Category: theatre

“How do you put on new work, in the main house, while also keeping your audience? Familiar stories, brands and characters reinvented for the stage can seem like a smart way forward.”

The trend started as a way to increase box office income and get some new people inside the building, but now companies in both the U.S. and Europe are proudly mounting full-scale productions of Rodgers & Hammerstein, Sondheim and even Andrew Lloyd Webber. (Don’t worry, they’re not going to do Mamma Mia!.)

“Tessa Ross, the Film4 controller whose credits include the Oscar-winning 12 Years A Slave and Slumdog Millionaire, is leaving Channel 4 to become chief executive of the National Theatre.”

The creators of The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland may not transform the mental health professions, but they’re trying to convey to the rest of us what the actual experience of psychosis – the hallucinations and delusions – is like.

“Being a trailblazer in both radio and the stage, Welles adapted many of his stage productions for the wireless. The Internet Archive has posted many of these recordings online, which you can listen to for free. The selection includes performances of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, Macbeth and, of course, Julius Caesar, among others. In most cases, these recordings – along with a few set photos – are the only documents left of Welles’s groundbreaking productions.”

“A black box stage. A shiny piano-black floor. To the strains of ‘Blue Danube’, eight performers – women in garishly bright dresses, men in elegant black tailcoats – are picked out in the lights. Moving in slow motion, they look like puppets slowly coming to life.”

Part of the auditorium ceiling at the Apollo Theatre in London’s West End fell in med-performance in December. Staff of a BBC Radio 4 programme “has seen a letter from Westminster City Council saying hessian wadding embedded in the ceiling was getting weaker over time.”

Assistant fight choreographer Patrick McCollum: “It’s about working on developing boxing technique with the actors, and then we also created ways that the actors can safely impact on each other in the show so it looks like a real fight. It is essentially a real fight.”

“As soon as we could use things like radio-controlled servos, we started using them. As soon as we could use computers to help perform our creatures, we used them.”

First step: Get the RSC performing more work by female playwrights – and consider how to talk about gender and theatre without going directly to Issue Of The Day 101.