Category: theatre

A Twin Cities theatre that offered free admission saw a steep rise in attendance, in the percentage of attendees under age 30 and in the percentage of people of color at its shows. Sure, it lost money by not selling tickets – but it’s going to do the same thing next year.

“At most English schools you have to study Shakespeare, and sometimes I didn’t understand a bloody word of it. It’s actually easier to understand in Scots. It really adds to a lot of excitement in the whole thing, it makes it more real, in a strange way.”

“Ken Gass, who has been back at the helm of the downtown theatre devoted to Canadian playwrights for the past 15 years, had his contract terminated Wednesday as a long-simmering dispute with the board over planned theatre renovations came to a head.”

“A desecrated statue of the Virgin Mary. A forebodingly steep outdoor staircase. A girl whose head twists all the way around her body and emits something thick, green and unpleasant from her mouth.” These are among the famous images we will not be seeing in playwright John Pielmeier’s stage adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel (and not William Friedkin’s film version).

“[The] truth is that pugilism and the American theater have been in bed together from the very beginning. The idea of these two areas of amusement being totally segregated from one another is far newer. The common birthplace of these estranged siblings was the 19th-century saloon.”

“Applications to drama courses for the coming academic year have fallen by as much as 14% following the tuition fee hike.”

“Richard Bean’s first new play since One Man, Two Guvnors has been indefinitely postponed by the National Theatre ‘to give the project some more development time’. The Count of Monte Cristo, Bean’s family-friendly adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s swashbuckling novel, had been scheduled to run in the National’s largest theatre, the Olivier, over the crucial Christmas period.”

“The full house erupted with possible solutions. One patron suggested that Rose herself read the role, script in hand, or have one of the other performers double the part. Another — perhaps knowing the theatergoing community a bit too well — asked if there was an actress in the house who could finish out the second act. No one wanted to leave, especially not after a very enjoyable 90-minute first half.”

“Dr Zhivago and An Officer and a Gentleman don’t sound as Australian as Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, yet all three were reborn in Sydney as musicals. What’s more, they will soon be joined by a host of sing-along siblings.” Australia’s largest city aims to be “where international producers and investors join forces with their Australian counterparts to develop new musicals that will use their premiere here as a launch pad to global success.”

Handspring Puppet Company, which created the equine puppets which have drawn raves on Broadway and the West End, “is taking on Crow, [Ted] Hughes’s signature sequence of poems from 1970, set in the natural world that was his creative habitat.”