Category: theatre

“The team behind the Olympic opening ceremony, led by director Danny Boyle, was honoured at the Evening Standard theatre awards on Sunday night, winning the second Beyond Theatre award … Elsewhere, it was [National Theatre director] Nicholas Hytner’s night.”

Read on – they’ll tell you.

“Ousted Toronto theatre director Ken Gass has unveiled plans for relaunching his long-dormant Canadian Rep Theatre with productions of plays pulled from the Factory Theatre during a boycott. The Factory Theatre fired Gass last summer in a dispute over renovations to its downtown building.”

“The grandiose reconstruction of the Bolshoi Theater has negatively affected its neighbor, the Maly Theater, causing the building to sink faster into the earth … Both theaters, built on the city’s Teatralnaya Ploshchad, had the same problem connected with ground waters flowing through the area.”

Nicholas Hytner: “For the length of my directorship of the National, it has been by and large properly funded. I know that a lot of other London theatres don’t have it so good and theatres outside London have it even worse. Now we are being told to expect less funding and this is completely nuts. It makes no economic sense whatsoever.”

“Nothing quite like this has been built on the North Shore, and it’s likely to change the architectural and cultural face of Glencoe. The building alone, it seems reasonable to predict, would attract cultural tourists.”

Want to receive texts from a SuperFan about the show long before the show opens? Want to wear a mask with a beak? Theatres want to engage audiences – and it seems the audiences want to be engaged.

“It works because it’s in period and it’s done absolutely straight. It’s not knowing or camp.”

Lyn Gardner: “But most regional theatres couldn’t afford to operate in that way and neither would they want to: programmers and audiences want a far broader range of work that would have been seen in the rep-style theatres of 73-year-old [Ian] McKellen’s youth.”

“[With a cast] headed by Harriet Walter as Brutus and directed by Phyllida Lloyd (of Mamma Mia! fame), it opens at the Donmar Warehouse, London, later this month. They are creating, says Lloyd, ‘new music’ by having female voices speak the words of some of Shakespeare’s most bellicose men.”