Category: theatre

Take haunted houses (some of which employ 50 actors for each performance): “After doing a performance every two minutes in front of hundreds of rowdy audiences each night, it will take a pretty hard-core film shoot or audition situation to faze you.”

Nica Burns of Britain’s Nimax Theatres: “I do think critics tend to live in a bubble of their own. They are often very thinskinned and slightly nervous about the reaction they may find from those they criticise, and are actually far more gentle people than we actually need to have because we [the industry] do accept that [criticism] as part of the process.”

According to its annual report, the NT’s £87 million incme was £7 million higher than the previous year. “Of this total, 59% was from box office receipts from both its South Bank base and its tours and West End transfers. Funding from Arts Council England represented 20%..”

“We felt like if we could prove that taking a show from a nonprofit, just like they do in New York, capitalizing it, enhancing it, bringing it to a larger space–if we could prove that you can do that and make money, maybe we could start that kind of community here in Chicago. And since nobody was doing it, it felt like a really good opportunity.”

Simon Levy, director of a new production at L.A.’s Fountain Theatre: “In the mid-’80s, it was completely agitprop. It was all about anger, about the city’s lack of response, the government’s lack of response. It was all about getting our voices heard. It’s been 30 years; people now look at the play and go, ‘Oh my God, this is a really good play’.”

Baker, author of 2010 Obie and Drama Desk winner Circle Mirror Transformation, and Joseph, who wrote 2010 Pulitzer finalist Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, will receive Steinberg Playwright Awards (“Mimis”), in New York on Nov. 18.

“Playwrights are not, by nature, necessarily the world’s greatest storytellers. I don’t think that’s what playwriting’s about. I do think narrative is enormously important in film, and he’s one of the world’s great storytellers.”

“Running the National Theatre famously drove him to thoughts of suicide, but Richard Eyre has said that the theatre’s next artistic director has a harder task than most, namely to ‘redefine the function and practice’ of the venue.”

“Whether for a Broadway show or a nonprofit-theater production, company and general managers cobble together a wide variety of options, including corporate housing, rental buildings with flexible landlords, and furnished apartments found through brokers who specialize in short-term leases.”

“Theater companies and stage productions around the country are often obliged to house actors, directors and others from out of town. In some instances, it is a union obligation. In others, it is just the cost of doing business with a bright star. In New York City, it also means that a life in the arms of the theater can include elbowing around in a fraught and expensive market for real estate.”