Category: theatre

The company is giving three full-length Shakespeare plays one performance each with a start time of 11:59pm. The shows are aimed at fellow theatre professionals, who can come and watch after their own performances that evening are finished.

Though the actual trial of the director’s lawsuit against the producers of the Broadway musical from which she was fired is scheduled to begin next year, “a judge presided over a two-hour preliminary hearing on Friday during which lawyers for both sides spelled out their cases.”

“[A]nyone can direct Shakespeare’s plays, yet few can get an array of adults and kids to engage with the Bard. But beginning 25 years ago, the diminutive Barbara Gaines, Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s founder and artistic director, found the way. How does she do it? ‘I have no idea,’ she says.”

“In the ruckus surrounding the Mariinsky production of Boris Godunov, Russians seem to have forgotten that the subject of protest has been taken on by some of the most prominent Moscow theatres for years. Many provocative productions have been staged by a young, punkish director named Kirill Serebrennikov.”

“The stakes are so high for these productions that some major Off Broadway companies schedule more previews than the so-called regular performances that follow opening night. And the theater companies, which are nonprofit organizations, do so at a financial cost: Many seats at previews are discounted, and production costs are often higher during previews because the creative team and crew are on hand — and drawing salaries — to incorporate script or technical changes before critics come.”

Actor/director Samuel West happened to be in the audience during a Saturday matinee when one of his actors had to leave the stage after a fall from a ladder. Naturally, he stepped in.

“After years in which the Tony category for best play had difficulty finding four credible nominees, this season has given us something resembling a crowded competition. No one would call it an open race, but neither would anyone deem it a cakewalk. And that may not even be the biggest shocker.”

While the actual performances of The Merchant of Venice by Habima at the Globe to Globe festival suffered only quick, minor disruptions, the controversy and calls for a boycott beforehand were loud and vehement. Members of the Habima company give their side of the story.

54 Below – in the space below what used to be the nightclub Studio 54 – opens next week with with a fortnight of shows by Broadway royalty Patti LuPone. “[The club’s] aim is to tilt the axis of the city’s unpredictably evolving cabaret world” away from the old jazz standards and toward modern musical theater.

“Designed by London studio Aberrant Architecture, the Tiny Travelling Theatre” – a red metal box with organ-pipe-style skylights and recessed seating along three walls – is “[i]nspired by small one-to-one spaces, such as a confessional booth or a peepshow.”