Category: theatre

“Net spend on ‘theatres and public entertainment’ has dropped by more than £10 million (6.3%) and spending on arts development and support has dropped by nearly £18 million (14.7%).”

“The demise of The Anarchist raises questions about the theater business. Did the lead producers’ devotion to Mr. Mamet – and the hope of a lucrative Glengarry revival – mean staging a new work that wasn’t right, or ready, for Broadway? … And does Mr. Mamet, whose brawny, expletive-filled early plays remain stage mainstays decades after their debuts, still have something to say to a contemporary audience?”

“[The] obvious justification for the production is that Shakespeare’s plays were originally experiments with gender. … If Shakespearean acting began with males pretending to be female, then why shouldn’t women take male parts?”

The boost was largely due to rising ticket prices, as admissions were down from 12.53 million to 12.33 million.

Iris, the company’s Los Angeles show which is closing in January, “isn’t the company’s only high-profile bust. The show joins a list of flops that have tarnished the global Cirque brand in recent years” – including Viva Elvis in Las Vegas, Zaia in Macao (which had been planned, like Iris, for a ten-year run), Zed in Tokyo and the touring show Banana Shpeel.

“The new study, based on audience questionnaires passed out at 81 individual performances of 31 different productions between June 2011 and June 2012, showed that tourists accounted for 63.4 percent of Broadway ticket sales, up from 61.7 percent in the 2010-11 season. Foreign visitors accounted for a full 18.4 percent of tickets.”

Charles Isherwood: “Al Pacino is back on Broadway, or so I hear. I wouldn’t know from firsthand experience. … [It] seems to me that the case of Glengarry is an even more egregious attempt [than Spider-Man] to avoid critical scrutiny for mercenary reasons.”

The 78-year-old Oscar- and Emmy-winner will play Carrie Watts in a revival of Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful. While it will not ba an all-black cast, all members of the Watts family will be played by African-American actors.

“Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones will reunite on stage next year in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing at London’s Old Vic. The actors will star as reluctant lovers Beatrice and Benedick for the first time in their long careers. The play is being directed by Mark Rylance, actor and former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe.”

Scholar David Shulman writes of experiencing the performance of a 130-hour epic kudiyattam – “a living tradition of classical Sanskrit drama that has survived intact for more than one thousand years” in the southwest Indian state of Kerala.