Category: theatre

Elia Kazan forced Tennessee Williams to provide a whole new, tamer last act for the Broadway premiere, and the Paul Newman-Elizabeth Taylor movie version was famously bowdlerized. The play’s early history in England was worse; its first London audiences had to pretend to join a private club.

Yes. And theatre in rural and other underserved areas is good for democracy, too.

But hey! The project will be designed by Frank Gehry, so it’s all good. (Patrons of The Princess of Wales Theatre may disagree.)

Lyn Gardner: “Classic is a tag that should signal liberation, not a padlock. If Shakespeare really is our contemporary, why are so many revivals so timid and reverential?” (And not just Shakespeare – the rest of the classics as well.)

“A little semiprofessional theater amid the farmland of Hammonton, N.J., has become the beneficiary of more than a half-million dollars in grants and low-interest loans from a most unlikely arts angel: the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Eagle Theatre, in the center of what’s known as the blueberry capital of the world, is wasting no time spending that money.”

“A $100,000 theater award, recognizing a play or musical inspired by American history, is being established at Columbia University in honor of the Senator Edward M. Kennedy [by] the university and one of Mr. Kennedy’s sisters, Jean Kennedy Smith.”

Helga Davis: “That was the hardest part for me. There’s nothing for you to grab on to in the way that we need logic to communicate. There’s nothing. It was maddening. … [But] when we got into rehearsal, the language got attached to movement, and suddenly I didn’t have any problem at all. Connecting the text to the body was the key.”

“The producers of the troubled Broadway musical Rebecca notified cast members on Wednesday that rehearsals would begin on Monday morning, yet it remained unclear if the producers had closed the $4.5 million gap in the show’s $12 million budget that they had deemed necessary for rehearsals to start.”

“The Philadelphia Theatre Company and Wilma Theater are the big winners of this year’s Barrymore Awards, in what may be the final curtain for the theater honors that recognize work on the region’s stages.”

“Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 24 books, has written his first play, and it spins off of his research into the history of nuclear weapons. … Reykjavik is a dramatic reconstruction of the two-day summit during which the world leaders almost reached agreement on the total abolition of their countries’ nuclear weapons.”