Category: theatre

“Mohammed Fahad Kamal, the funniest comedian in SUCQ, explained the unofficial rules of comedy in Qatar: you can make fun of only things that only you can make fun of. ‘Most of my material is about my family,’ Kamal said. ‘It’s about the tradition here and the culture. I’m trying to take it step by step. We’re not used to laughing at ourselves.'”

Douglas Day Stewart, screenwriter of the Oscar-winning film and co-writer of the stage show: “After four decades in this business I can tell you this was not a review by any standards. It was an ‘execution’ by someone clearly unable to feel human emotion, or to put it in a kinder way, by someone whose highbrow tastes do not represent you.”

Kander and Ebb were the legendary team who created Cabaret, Chicago and well over a dozen other musicals over five decades. Fred Ebb died in 2004, but composer John Kander, now 85, has a new lyricist partner: Greg Pierce, 34, “more earnest and less deadpan than Ebb, but just as determined and, lately, just as busy.”

Tod Machover’s MIT Media Lab has designed a souped-up face mask which adds extra material (including interactivity) to Punchdrunk’s now-famous immersive-theatre adaptation of Macbeth. Bravely, they invited a New York Times reporter to give the new device a test run.

Lyn Gardner: “[The] current belt-tightening climate… means that, when they are applying for money, many companies feel under pressure to prove just how cheaply they can make a piece of work. The risk is that they end up selling themselves and the show short.”

Deaf West Theatre, the company that in 2003 brought its spoken-and-signed production of the musical Big River to Broadway, has created an Internet-age adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac in which the hero, who is deaf, must court his beloved on behalf of his brother, an aging rocker.

Scott Brown identifies a few particular problems, but ultimately says: “Musicals today – mindful of long odds, high costs, and the general precariousness of the form – are, I think, resisting their inner madness, and that’s a little like hating one’s own flesh. What basis besides madness can there possibly be for a form that’s as shapeless, idiosyncratic, and painstakingly artisanal as the novel yet as vastly collaborative and consensus-dependent as a Hollywood film?”

“No longer middle managers of the syndicated variety, Australian producers are developing and staging significant commercial vehicles of their own: Dr Zhivago last year, Strictly Ballroom next. But where to put them? Sydney’s disgraceful record of pulling down, burning down or neglecting its historic theatres leaves it with a dearth of older-style venues to take these larger shows.”

“Paul O’Grady has spoken out for the first time about his experiences working on the ‘postponed’ musical Street of Dreams, labelling it ‘bedlam’ and calling on the show’s producers to pay all of the cast and crew involved immediately.” O’Grady, who plays the narrator of the show based on the long-running soap opera, called the show’s producers “incompetent, inept and unprofessional.”

“The ‘New Writing’ play, like the ‘Well Made Play’ before it, exists as some sort of ideal to which new writers are supposed to aspire. This sense of what makes a good play has crept into the way workshops are run, courses are structured, feedback is given and, most damaging, into the very heart of the relationship between producers and artists. In teaching narrative, characterisation and structure, we are teaching a very particular set of aesthetic values predicated on creating a very particular kind of play.”