Category: theatre

“The Society of London Theatre has confirmed it will introduce a new voting system for the Olivier Awards in time for this year’s ceremony. The changes will mean that producers and theatre operators in the commercial West End and major subsidised theatres will be given the chance to vote on who wins in each category.”

While the South Park guys’ musical, a mega-hit in the US, has gotten one or two good notices since it opened in London, it seems most of the major critics are lukewarm or worse – and none of them agree on why it’s no good. One Brit who lives in the US says he’s figured out the problem.

“If the musical is dead, then its ghost hasn’t just turned up for dinner – it’s telling all the best stories, cracking the best jokes, paying everyone’s bill and then suggesting we all go on somewhere else for cocktails.”

Tom Sutcliffe argues that an Islamic setting of Measure for Measure – say, in a small Gulf state – “would make it less of a problem play than it usually is.”

“On Friday between 10am and midnight, a total of £2,107,972 was taken in ticket sales when an additional 150,000 tickets were made available.”

Is the audience more like morning dew, or is the theatre company more like a squid?

“Performance artists gravitate to Boston the way painters gravitate to New York, he says. Phelan knows plenty of performance artists who, after leaving Boston, ‘come to a complete stop pretty quickly,’ he says. ‘But here, there’s always a new place, a new activation.'”

“Details are fairly scarce. What is known is that it will be called The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable; that it is based on Georg Büchner’s unfinished masterpiece, Woyzeck; that it is a co-production with the National Theatre; and most remarkably that it will be staged in a secret, disused 19,000 sq metre venue … in central London.”

“The main cat understudy, Montie, a black-and-white male, has been fired for being, well, difficult. He didn’t follow stage directions. … Meanwhile the star cat, Vito Vincent, is now negotiating – through his owner – for a nightly car and driver.”

“You’ll see an upsurge in the most popular GCSE texts – there are quite a lot of Of Mice And Men knocking around – and a lot of popular [shows], a lot of spectacular. But not a great deal of new writing.”