Category: theatre

“The curtains will stay up at the national theatre of Ireland after it announced plans to stay at its famous Dublin inner city site.”

The Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, PA is producing the show in cooperation with two corporate powerhouses, Warner Bros. and Castle Rock Entertainment, and a Broadway-based creative team. (Now if only they can convince Kathy Bates to play Annie Wilkes again.)

“Alan Hollinghurst – the novelist celebrated for taking the lid off modern gay life in exquisitely graceful prose which won him the Man Booker Prize in 2004 – has another sort of mission: he wants to prove that the 17th-century French tragedian Jean Racine can be made one of us.”

“Start with a rich investor unknown to clubby Broadway insiders – a mystery man named Paul Abrams. Go on to the astounding sum he is said to have promised to raise for Rebecca: $4.5 million … Then: Reports in August of his sudden death in Britain of malaria – yet no obituaries, no death notices. A representative for the Abrams estate surfaces … who refuses to speak by phone and uses an e-mail address created just last month.”

Wayne Ingram of Tap the Table Theatre: “Most theatre companies are looking to create social change – they make work that reflects society and try to communicate messages they hope will make a difference. But for many theatre companies it’s all about putting on a show, and social change is often a by-product. What we do differently is make social change the sole driving force behind what we do.”

Want people to come to your (rather expensive) show? Start them out with a warm welcome from staff, a clean bar – and soap in the toilets.

Mark Lawson had his epiphany after seeing Robert Wilson’s Walking: “With the zeal of any convert, I now see that the power of this form is that the viewer is in control of the narrative … and that the story takes on ambiguities unlikely in a traditional venue.”

“For the most part, dramatized lives of the artists – on film as well as on stage – are flat-out embarrassing when our hero is shown in the Act of Creation. This usually involves some tortured-looking actor staring at a blank surface … eyes aflame and brow furrowed like a freshly plowed field.” But sometimes, writes Ben Brantley, folks get it right.

The theatre “has introduced a pricing system offering tickets that are cheaper the earlier they are bought. Under what the Southwark venue is calling its ‘dynamic pricing structure’, the theatre is also offering higher priced ‘premier seats’ located in the centre of the auditorium.”

“The Palestinian militant turned theatre director Zakaria Zubeidi has resumed a total hunger strike in protest at his continued detention without charge by Palestinian security forces, and his supporters say he could die within days.”