Category: theatre

This year let’s make fewer prescriptive lists that perpetuate thumbs up/thumbs down approaches to theater. These lists kill off the idea of abundance and suggest the beauty of theater rests in simple notions of good and bad.

Classicist Charlotte Eagar writes about her project, with her husband and a Syrian director, to stage the antiwar Greek tragedy in Arabic translation with a cast of women who have fled their homeland’s vicious civil war for neighboring Jordan.

“Records set over the Christmas period included a best-ever week for a straight play on Broadway when the Barrymore Theatre’s revival of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal starring Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz and Rafe Spall earned $1.4 million (£845,000).”

“Spider-Man” had 1,268 performances in all, a healthy run by Broadway standards – but not nearly enough to come close to earning back the original $75 million capitalization to create and stage the musical.

“I special order blood, build pneumatic delivery systems, cobble together elaborate systems of bags and tubes and valves from medical, veterinary, cooking, and industrial parts to solve simple stage moments that need to look effortless but are exceptionally complicated theatrical moments.”

“It’s not a reconstruction of one particular theatre – it’s an archetype of the kind of indoor spaces in which the late romances of Shakespeare, the dark revenge plays of John Webster and the satirical city comedies of Ben Jonson would have been performed.”

Dramaturgs “do anything from mundane script management to researching a play’s historical background, from suggesting changes in a play’s structure to arranging post-show discussions with the audience.”

“Why aren’t more high schools producing David Mamet plays, or Neil LaBute, Yasmina Reza, John Logan, or Rajiv Joseph, and thereby exposing the students and the school community to new works? Because they’re too busy with Beauty and the Beast, Seussical, and The Wizard of Oz.”