Category: theatre

“‘This is literally a bloody business,’ says John Molloy, as he surveys a crimson-splattered table. ‘I don’t know why it comes down to wardrobe to make blood. Everyone who works in costuming hates blood. It’s almost uncontrollable.'”

“Ambassador Theatre Group is to be sold to private equity investor Providence Equity … with ATG’s current principal investor Exponent retaining an 18% stake in the company. All management … will retain their stakes.”

“Television and film have made realist theatre unpalatable: it’s difficult to sit in the same space as a group of actors, suspending your disbelief, when you’re used to being in thrall to the TV screen. One way round that would be to get rid of the TV news – and instead have Shakespearean actors perform a daily news update at the National, acting out world events in real time. That would be a chance to return to the empathetic, cathartic traditions of Greek tragedy: rather than watching the news as if it was an objective description of an event occurring beyond our personal reach, we’d have a true physiological response.”

Last year “The Lion King” surpassed “The Phantom of the Opera” as the highest grossing show in Broadway history. As of Sunday, “Phantom” has earned $928.9 million in ticket sales on Broadway.

“It was 12 years ago when the first Siminovitch Prize for Theatre was awarded to director Daniel Brooks and he named Chris Abraham as his protégé. On Monday night, Abraham was picked as the latest winner of the most lucrative prize in Canadian performing arts ($75,000 to the winner, $25,000 to the protégé).”

“The thing I am proudest of – and I am still not home free – is that the place has stayed buoyant and I haven’t been responsible for it sliding down the pan.”

There was a time when it felt as if regional theatres all wanted to have an aspirational “national” in their tag lines, as if local were somehow a dirty word. It’s not.

“How good TV has become at doing a certain kind of character-driven long-form storytelling really throws down a gauntlet for playwrights and challenges them to answer the question, with their work: What can only theater do? What can’t we get anywhere else? And there’s no one answer to that, but it challenges every playwright to try to come up with theirs.”

“The play about Ozark life staged every year since 1960 is described as a drama, love story, and mystery mixed with some comedy and religion. Its sprawling cast includes dozens of actors and actresses, 30 horses, five mules, and a flock of sheep.”

“Mark Shenton, a critic and member of the theatre judging panel, said the successes recognised in the awards were in the teeth of a sharply deteriorating financial climate for regional theatres.