Category: theatre

“If they were TV shows we’d probably turn them off and do something else, but because we’ve forked out £40 (or more) and are stuck in the middle of a row, we stick it out and clap politely at the end.”

Sometimes, very bad things, as two midsize Portland theatres recently discovered.

There’s “an extraordinary reservoir of acting talent in Italian prisons — 110 theater groups have sprung up behind bars — which has overshadowed the country’s professional thespians even as prison conditions plummet amid overcrowding and underfunding.”

“Following its premiere at the York Theatre Royal in June, Nick Bagnall’s touring production will stop of at the four battle sites of the period: Tewkesbury, St Albans, Barnet and Towton.”

“A six-storey theatre and cafe will be built above the remains of the what was known to the Bard as simply “The Theatre”. Visitors will be able to peer down to the foundations through glass panels in the ground floor.”

Theatres are becoming more “risk averse” when commissioning new writing due to cuts to art funding, leading theatre directors have warned.

“The first-ever autism-friendly performance of the Broadway hit Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark will take off this spring and tickets go on sale Thursday.”

“Today if I’m directing The Ring of Wagner, Shakespeare’s King Lear or The Threepenny Opera, I still start directing the work silently. … That means Brünnhilde will stand in one position for five minutes where she will later be singing, so she begins to understand what it’s like in terms of the physicality of doing the role and what the visual image is like. We begin to listen to the silences and how they are structured, and later I add text and music.”

“Hollywood stars like [Scarlett] Johansson and Al Pacino have become so essential to Broadway – both for attracting investors and selling tickets – that they are calling the shots as never before, bringing back plays that were seen on Broadway only a few years earlier and sometimes edging out new works.”

“The credit would grant up to $3 million to a production that plays in Massachusetts before opening in New York or to a touring show that starts here, reimbursing up to 35 percent of its state labor costs. Advo­cates of the proposal say the credits would create hundreds of jobs and drive millions of dollars of business into Massachusetts.”