Category: theatre

The theater on Thursday set off a social-media firestorm over the casting of its upcoming production of “The Nightingale.” Although the Hans Christian Andersen tale is set in Feudal China, the cast contains few Asian actors.

“Research suggests actors may be both unusually self-aware–and unusually vulnerable to psychological distress.”

“The Rose Theatre, one of the few surviving Elizabethan theatres in London, could be fully excavated and restored to a playhouse in time for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.”

“It’s hard to imagine the writings of Charles Bukowski, the dyspeptic poet of drink and loneliness, being set to a jaunty musical theater score” – much less one by Stephen Sondheim. But that’s just what California Repertory Company director Joanne Gordon proposes to do in B.S.: Bukowski.Sondheim.

“Judge Richard Leon determined the issue should be tried in a D.C. Superior Court. He said the ‘battle’ between the STC and the Lansburgh ‘has all the trappings of an epic one.'” The Lansburgh Theater – the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s landlord and supporting organization – raised the rent by 700 percent in mid-June.

“Front row seats in the Olivier at the National Theatre are no longer available to buy on the day of a performance, a move that one patron has described as ‘desperately sad.'” What’s the big deal? Retired and elderly people travel from out of town to queue up for hours for those seats.

Maybe – if we let go of the idea of what makes a play.

Earlier this year, the falsehoods in Daisey’s hit one-man show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs – a piece which was basically presented as non-fiction – were revealed in a spectacularly humiliating fashion. “[The] most pressing question is the simplest: Why is Daisey still performing a play that brought him so much disgrace?”

“Since its formation in 2003 13P has produced shows that feature Kleenex-carrying Nazis, a talking bird statue, … intergenerational lesbian seduction and Monica Lewinsky. The group came together with a deceptively simple goal: to offer a full production to each of its 13 associates, most of them unknown at the time of the group’s founding. Its pithy (if slightly snippy) motto: ‘We don’t develop plays. (We do them.)'”

Ben Brantley: “Have you heard from the members of the chorus lately? Sure you have. They’re the ones who huddle in the office cafeteria, speculating on how long that arrogant new boss will last. Who sit before giant screens in sports bars lamenting the fall of a once mighty pitcher. … They have also been hanging out on amphitheater and proscenium stages for 2000 years or so … [and they] are still very much with us in the theater, though they don’t always identify themselves as such.”