Category: theatre

“Some smaller theaters are heeding the sage words of the old-time baseball player ‘Wee Willie’Keeler, whose advice to batters was ‘Hit ’em where they ain’t.”’

Will new playhouses create new activity and help regenerate their neighborhoods and towns? Will they just be yet more parties in the never-ending scramble for public and private funding? Lyn Gardner starts the discussion.

“I asked her whether I had missed something during the very pointed announcements to please turn off your phones, perhaps a special exemption granted for her. She suggested that I should mind my own business.”

“Attendance at touring Broadway shows nationwide dropped for the second straight season, according to a newly released report from the Broadway League. … The attendance for touring shows is the lowest since the 2003-04 season. In the last 10 years, attendance peaked at 15.9 million in 2009-10.”

Yael Farber, who adapted Strindberg’s mistress/servant drama into a powerful piece about post-apartheid South Africa, is leading an all-Indian cast in developing Nirbhaya, a new theatre piece inspired by the rape and fatal beating of a 23-year-old student by six men on a bus in Delhi last December.

“Theatre Royal, Drury Lane has completed a multi-million pound restoration to improve its rotunda, royal staircases and Grand Saloon in the year of its 350th anniversary. The upgraded areas, which date back to 1812 when the current theatre at the site was built, have been refurbished to fit its Georgian style.”

Khaled Hosseini’s novel and its film adaptation have become emblems of present-day Afghanistan. “Now it has been adapted for stage – and the cast and crew are, unsurprisingly, feeling the weight of expectation.”

“‘Bury this terrorist on U.S. soil and we will unbury him.’ So ran the bitter slogan on one of the signs borne last week by enraged protesters” at the funeral home keeping the body of the Boston Marathon bomber – “a cadaver seemingly so morally polluted that his own widow would not claim it, that no funeral director would touch it, that no cemetery would bury it.” Sophocles, of course, wrote about a similar situation.

Oscar-winner Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) follows Michael Grandage, Marianne Elliott and Dominic Cooke in ruling out the artistic directorship of Great Britain’s flagship playhouse.

“Elizabeth Berkley played the lead role with such vulgarity that it parodied itself; to outdo her requires an inventory of something deeper and more manic. April Kidwell has that in her” – and the theatrical spoof of the notorious film flop “has become an unlikely form of personal redemption for her.”