Marianne Weems: “When we first started a lot of people would say, ‘Is this theater?’ — Producers, presenters and audience members alike. And our response at the time was, ‘Well it is taking place in the theater,’ and obviously all that has changed.”
Category: theatre
What Makes A Playwright Qualified To Tell Someone Else’s Story?
“Plays are stories—fairy tales and fictions, historical and magical. They are not documentaries or history lessons. To think they are such would be myopic.”
UK Regional Theatre Bosses Warn Of A Tough Year Ahead
“The economic climate is still tough, particularly in the regions, which is a major part of our business. I think it’s going to be little by little that we see these things turn around and audiences coming back.”
Oprah Plans Her Broadway Debut
“Oprah Winfrey is in talks to make her Broadway debut in a revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play ‘night, Mother, starring opposite Tony-Award winner Audra McDonald as a mother struggling to stop her daughter from killing herself.”
Watching ‘The Lion King’ As a Blind Person Would
A visually-impaired patron and her reporter companion take in the Disney/Julie Taymor spectacular with the help of D-Scriptive, a service that “translates the visual language of raised eyebrows, waist-high leg kicks and soft kisses into the language of sound.”
A Warning About What Funding Cuts Will Do To UK Theatre Community
“The theatre world will slowly become smaller and smaller, and populated by the same people, who are the sons and daughters of the same people, because nobody else can afford to do it.”
I Am a Medical Actor
“[The scripts outline] not just what hurts but how to express it. They tell us how much to give away, and when. … The scripts dig deep into our fictive lives: the ages of our children and the diseases of our parents, the names of our husbands’ real-estate and graphic-design firms, the amount of weight we’ve lost in the past year, the amount of alcohol we drink each week.”
‘Emotionally, It’s a Demolition Job’: What It’s Like to Play Miss Julie
Louise Brealey (Sherlock): “This kitchen is a very dangerous place. What happens between John and Julie is horrifying – something putatively domestic suddenly feels like Greek tragedy.”
What Do Theatre Audiences Want? Are Theatres Afraid to Ask?
A former chief of the Royal Shakespeare Company says “she and others had [at one point] been keen to organise large meetings of RSC audiences in Stratford and London and simply ask them what they wanted. The meetings never took place, because fear intervened. What if the audience wanted something that the RSC’s artistic team did not want to give them?”
Will Live Theatre Cinemacasts Help Local Playhouses or Displace Them?
One producer wonders if there’s a risk that cash-strapped regional arts centres might simply decide that the National Theatre’s broadcasts would constitute its (much cheaper) theatre programme.