Category: theatre

Last Sunday, the actress-playwright-documentarian gave her first sermon as artist-in-residence at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco; she presents a new play on the theme of grace next weekend. “Both Ms. Smith and the Very Rev. Jane Shaw, who became the cathedral’s dean last year, share a vision of bringing together art and religion, historically-linked pursuits that are sometimes at odds in modern America.”

A cynic might assume that writer David Seidler wanted to adapt his screenplay for the stage just to cash in on the film’s enormous success. As it happens, Seidler wrote the piece for live theatre.

“[Write] a scene that would be impossible to stage. That was the first gauntlet Paula Vogel threw down to the 30 participants in her latest roving ‘boot camp’ on playwriting.”

Intiman intends to now operate on a pay-as-you-go model, with a shorter season, a smaller staff and strict financial accounting. “Our budget used to be five or six million dollars a year,” noted Jones. “Clearly we could not sustain that and needed to dial it back.”

“It’s not often that I take my seat at a restaurant out of breath and disoriented but the Secret Restaurant prides itself on the punter’s total immersion into the setting – on the night I visited, that was Vienna, 1946. Having whispered a password in a Frenchman’s ear and been led a scrambling chase through tunnels, over duckboards and up flight after flight of freezing stairs, the diner finally finds themselves [sic] in a candlelit loft.”

“After 11 months of performances on Broadway, The Book Of Mormon reached a milestone last week in its extraordinary box office success fueled by premium ticket pricing: The musical beat the long-running blockbusters Wicked and The Lion King to become the top-grossing show in a single week for the first time, even though Mormon had hundreds of fewer seats to sell to each performance than those two other commercial hits.”

“Where the dramatic urgency of Raisin and the first act of Clybourne” – both set in the same African-American neighborhood – “is driven by blacks and whites fighting to do the right (or wrong) thing in 1959, by 2009 the crises of action have been replaced by a comedy of manners. The issue is no longer what we should do but what we should say and how we should say it.”

“Stephen Eich, who played a leading role in helping the Pasadena Playhouse survive a financial near-death experience during more than 2½ years as its executive director, has resigned, saying he feels ‘a great sense of satisfaction in what I’ve accomplished’ as he moves on to other ventures, including independent theater production.”

“Carrie was such a critical and financial flop (at $8 million) that, afterward, its three creators refused to allow another professional production anywhere in the world … But this winter MCC Theater, a respected Off Broadway company, is trying to reclaim Carrie from contempt. The creators have rewritten the story into a modern-day tale of bullying, with mean girls mocking notions of ‘equality’.”

“The New York run of [the Pulitzer-winning play], which has been widely viewed as a top contender for the 2012 Tony Award for best play, was threatened this week after one of the lead producers, Scott Rudin, left the project” following an unrelated dispute with playwright Bruce Norris. Now the owner of the theater where Clybourne Park is to run has assured the cast (currently performing in Los Angeles) that the transfer will proceed.