Category: theatre

“What happens when you take a Stephen Sondheim chamber piece – Sunday in the Park With George – and produce it operatically, quadrupling the size of the orchestra?” That’s what they’ve done at Paris’s Théâtre du Châtelet.

Director Mike Bradwell has criticised the ‘predominance of Oxbridge tossers’ running venues in the theatre industry, claiming the sector has been ‘annexed entirely by the middle class’ … [and] is dominated by ‘half a dozen floppy haired men’ who have no real understanding of acting.”

The company Digital Theatre “has partnered with film producers CinemaLive and will present its first series of screenings in September 2013. Titles have not yet been announced, but the focus will initially be on commercial West End productions, some newly recorded and some from Digital Theatre’s archive.”

“The songwriting team of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, Tony Award winners for Ragtime, will collaborate with the Tony-winning director Susan Stroman (The Producers) on the world premiere of the new musical Little Dancer in October 2014″ at the Kennedy Center.

“Comedy Store: Raw & Uncut sounds like a galaxy far, far away from anything you’d normally see at the movies – and not especially alluring. But that’s what they said before Met Live, National Theatre Live and their numerous imitators trounced the doubters.”

He’s playing virtually all of the script’s roles on Broadway, and he says he’s not scared. His producers, though, don’t want to take chances.

“Theatre attendance in Nigeria’s economic capital, Lagos, is dwindling as “Nollywood” – the country’s prolific film industry – surges in popularity.”

The play, “about a corporate lawyer who has hidden his Pakistani Muslim heritage … was produced last year by Lincoln Center Theater in New York, with Comedy Central’s The Daily Show veteran Aasif Mandvi in the lead role. The play had its world premiere in January 2012 at Chicago’s American Theater Company.”

“Then, the first visit to Europe of the Peking Circus revealed that in the lightness and speed of anonymous bodies performing astonishing acrobatics without exhibitionism, it was pure spirit that appeared. This was a pointer to go beyond illustration to evocation.”

“Rather than arriving with a paternalist message to preach,” Community-Based Theatre “invites villages to determine what their primary problem is, and then to write and perform a play that illustrates it. … ‘It is not about the problems of the NGOs. People are working for their own rights, in their own way’.”