Category: theatre

“The way forward for rock ‘n’ roll is to grow the fuck up and take action in the form; that is to say, act!”

“Some shows – particularly new and experimental work – attract no publicity and others are surrounded by such hype that journalists are prepared to break embargoes and bend their own rules to be the first with an opinion.”

“It was all about finding the employees — the actors, stagehands, electricians, etc. — to ensure that the show could go on because many of them were without power. And so we spent all day finding that out and almost every single show did come back up today.”

“The Stratford Festival is returning to its previous name – removing the ‘Shakespeare’ added just a few years ago – as longtime executive Antoni Cimolino begins his run as artistic director. … The festival had rebranded itself the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in November 2007. It had previously dropped ‘Shakespeare’ from its name in the 1970s.”

Adapter Yael Farber: “[The play] lacks teeth in today’s society, … [but] I saw that the spine of the narrative had an extraordinarily potent potential to speak about ownership through the domination of the body, and how this dynamic gets unlocked over a single night in one kitchen, in the heat of the kitchen.”

“What constitutes a truthful performance of Chekhov? The question arises because [an] in-your-face [Three Sisters] production – which is playing to full houses in London – precedes a contrasting pair of Uncle Vanyas in the West End.” One will have a traditional look; the other, by Moscow’s Vakhtangov Theatre, promises a notable lack of inhibition.

This year the theater received nine Ovation Award nominations, including one for Best Season. It had a 90 percent subscriber renewal rate, but director Barbara Beckley said that the 10 percent attrition was bleeding their finances. “What we didn’t get was new subscribers to replace that 10 percent attrition,” she said.

“A legal settlement has still not been signed in the court fight between the producers of the Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark and their former director, Julie Taymor, despite a late-October deadline set by a federal judge overseeing the case.”

James Fenton: “The Orphan of Zhao, which I have been adapting for the RSC, survives in various versions, going back to what is no more than the lyrics for a set of arias whose music can only be guessed at. A play with songs, its earliest versions date back to the 13th century; the events it describes date back two millennia before that, between 800BC and 600BC.”

“The jeopardy is that if we start to affect the quality of our work and we don’t live up to audience expectations, then people will stop wanting to buy tickets. That’s the real tipping point and we’re getting closer and closer to that point.”