Category: theatre

“Dynamic pricing — otherwise known as revenue management, progressive pricing or the computerized art of changing a ticket price over time based on actual supply and demand — has arrived with a vengeance in the nonprofit world.”

The weirdest story in recent Broadway history continues.

“I do not scream at the theater. … I laugh, I cry, I might even gasp. Scream? Almost never. It is, however, that ‘almost’ that I am thinking of just now, as Halloween creeps up on us. For there have been a few, isolated occasions when I have been scared out of my cucumber-cool skin by what was happening on a stage.”

David West Read, author of the upcoming comedy The Performers: “Since the script was already written … the primary purpose of the trip was to gather information for scenic and costume design. This meant that as scantily-clad performers paraded around the hotel, we were the weirdos taking pictures of the walls. … At times we struggled to maintain straight faces; at other times, our innocence.”

“Bruce Norris, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Clybourne Park, … withdrew rights to the production [at the Deutsches Theater] after learning that the staging would feature a white actor wearing makeup for the role of an African American character.”

“David Cecil, 34, faces two years in jail over a production of The River and the Mountain, … about a gay businessman killed by his employees.” He says, “We were warned, but since the play is not politically motivated, nor does it in any way promote homosexuality or criticise the government, we were not remotely worried. … It is a comedy drama, not an advocacy piece.”

“We go to plays not just to be entertained,” he said, “but to learn, and, most deeply, to learn about ourselves. We’re leveraging that by making explicit connections with our classes.”

Barry Edelstein comes to the Old Globe from New York’s Public Theater, where he was director of the Shakespeare Initiative, which included overseeing the popular Shakespeare in the Park series. And from “1998 to 2003, [he] was artistic director of New York’s Classic Stage Company, an off-Broadway house that won six Obie Awards during his tenure.”

Suspension of disbelief by the producers, that is. “They relied on a stranger, a nattily dressed Long Island stockbroker with no history in theater, to come up with $4.5 million … They continued to believe in him even after the stockbroker, Mark C. Hotton, announced that his lead investor had died, of malaria contracted in Africa, before he could write a $2 million check.”

Lyn Gardner: “Why does it happen at a live show but not at a filmed one? American lyricist Alan Jay Lerner may have been right when he suggested that ‘coughing in the theatre is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism.'”