Category: theatre

This spring in Manhattan’s Noho neighborhood, the Catholic archdiocese will open a two-theater, four-studio complex named after Archbishop Fulton Sheen. Says the Sheen Center’s director, “We had been thinking that we wanted a place to showcase Christian humanism – the true, the good and the beautiful.”

“The balance of Shakespeare to non-Shakespeare, and of “traditional” to contemporary staging, will always be a matter of conflict in Ashland, because the interested parties, from directors and actors to the audiences who keep the place alive, have such differing likes and dislikes and opinions about what’s important and what is ultimately fleeting and trivial.”

“While other shows also employ this so-called dynamic pricing system to raise seat prices during tourist-heavy holiday weeks, only Disney has reached the level of sophistication achieved in the airline and hotel industries by continually using its algorithm to calibrate prices based on demand and ticket purchasing patterns.”

“The play about unemployed steelworkers who turn to stripping opened at the Noel Coward Theatre in London on February 25 and will stage its last performance on March 29. It had been due to run until mid-June.”

“Young women — surrounded in every other part of their lives by women who talk just like they do — are increasingly responding to mentors, teachers, and bosses who try to help them overcome these vocal habits by, as Ratner did, arguing that they shouldn’t have to change for society. Society should change for them. People should learn that asking questions and using uptalk is a sign of caring what the other person thinks, not of submissiveness.”

“What it does do is give the listener—as well as actors and directors—a snapshot of what the play sounded like when it was new. Such snapshots can serve as invaluable points of departure for the present-day performer, a benchmark against which to measure subsequent interpretative developments.”

That statement pretty much sums up the famously confrontational Belgian theatre troupe Ontroerend Goed. You’ll love how they got their start: “Suddenly we were told that what we made was theatre, and given money to make more.”

Matt Osman, author of The Boy Who Cried: “My mind hit on werewolves, the original lunatics. I would create a world where it was depression that was the myth and werewolves were treated by the state as a common occurrence to be quietly put away.”

“While raw talent and rigorous training are clearly vital, recent research suggests the importance of an even more fundamental factor: The level of testosterone the budding thespian was exposed to in his or her mother’s womb.”

Jon Fosse is “perhaps Europe’s most-performed living dramatist, translated into 40-odd languages. In 2010, he won the biggest prize in global theatre, the £275,000 Ibsen award,” and last year he was thought to be a frontrunner for the literature Nobel. Why does the English-speaking world know so little of him?