Category: theatre

“London’s Old Vic Theatre is to suspend one of its unpaid internship programmes after coming under pressure from unions and Arts Council England to pay participants the national minimum wage.”

“Convinced of Socrates’s particular relevance to contemporary Greece, the creators of a one-man theatrical performance of The Apology, Plato’s account of his teacher’s doomed but powerful trial defence, have brought the show to Athens.”

“I don’t want to knock stage designers; when they get it right, their work can be genuinely transformative and brilliant. But I don’t like it when they jump up and down behind the arras like Polonius in Hamlet, trying to distract my attention from the poor old actors.”

In Joe Penhall’s new play, Birthday, in which a man carries and gives birth to a baby, the audience was happily entertained by the lead actor’s prosthetic hairy breasts and swollen belly. But that body suit also included a fake penis, and – given the situation – viewers were so discomfited that the producers had to excise the member.

“As she says wryly in this conversation with former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, ‘Disney’s aesthetic and my aesthetic are not the same.’ What finally moved her to accept, she says, was the challenge of reimagining the Disney story in a stripped-down form. She wanted to figure out how to create a stampede, or a sunset, on a stage.”

Michael Billington: “Advertise an event that lasts the best part of a day and you will find the box office quickly besieged. Having sat through a couple of epics in the last fortnight – Gatz at the Noel Coward and Druid Murphy at the Hampstead – I not only have a new understanding of the phrase ‘putting in an eight-hour day’ but have come to several conclusions.”

“The decision to live-stream video from different parts of the building is part of a wider move by the east London theatre to make its redesigned website more ‘democratic.’ Theatre Royal artistic director Kerry Michael said the new video stream would act ‘like a shop window.'”

“The United States and England may be two countries separated by a common language, but the fact remains that theatrical literature flows fairly freely across the Atlantic, with Irish and the occasional Scottish work thrown in for good measure. If you use theatrical awards as any kind of a yardstick, it’s often hard to tell, based upon nominees and winners in any given year, whether you’re looking at results for The Tonys or The Oliviers. … But what of Canada?”

Not only does it exist, but it’s a long list. “As I sat down to write this I became totally overwhelmed with the sheer number of playwrights in Vancouver and want to apologize in advance for anyone I’ve forgotten.Every time I thought the list was done I thought of more people who should be on it, and I’m positive there are still more missing.”

Yes, it’s real. Gustav Klimt: Das Musical opens September 1 in Vienna.