Category: theatre

The great Dame is once again incarnating the Queen, this time on the West End in Peter Morgan’s The Audience. Her canine colleague was sacked after failing to cross the stage upon royal command at 16 consecutive preview performances.

“Stratford, whose attendance has seen a pretty constant decline for a decade now, hasn’t seen lows this low for a quarter-century.” But how should the newish artistic director solve the problem – or is it even a problem?

“In every generation young producers and artists seem to find a way to launch new initiatives that build access and support for artists of color, either on their own accord or within ‘mainstream’ institutions. The warning from this quick stroll through history is to stay clear of absolutes, for in each debate or conflict great contradictions arise.”

“What came out of the discussion was the need for greater visibility; for East Asian actors to make their own opportunities through writing and production; for an end to tokenistic typecasting of East Asian actors as foreigners or Chinese takeaway servers and finally for greater access to training.”

“What’s the point of seeing a theatrical work when, because of politics, people are dying every day?”

A look at Mies Julie, Cape Town director Yael Farber’s extraordinary translation of the Swedish playwright’s tale of a 19th-century battle between mistress and servant to a present-day farmstead on the veld.

Artistic director Guillermo Aviles-Rodriguez’s top project, a subway-based site-specific series called Meet Me @Metro “became a sore spot for the theater’s board of directors” – who changed the company’s mission statement to rule the project out, leading Aviles-Rodriguez to resign.

With the legendary experimental company leaving the theater it had called home since 2007, and with company co-founder Judith Malina leaving her apartment atop the space for an assisted-living facility for actors, reports began circulating that the Living Theater was closing. On the contrary, says executive producer Brad Burgess. (And Malina is working on two new plays.)

“Victory Gardens Theater has announced a truncated schedule for 2013-’14, dropping from its usual five productions to just three. The announcement didn’t include an explanation for the shrinkage, but it’s not hard to guess what the challenges are.”