Category: theatre

“People sometimes interpret the play as saying, ‘You have to live life every moment.’ I don’t know that I agree with that. It says that every moment is pretty stunning if you look at it, but you can’t live like that.”

“Few recent Broadway seasons have had as much estate-driven handiwork as this one, a reflection of the rising entrepreneurship of heirs and the affection of audiences for song standards. Heirs are increasingly hands-on in trying to wrest moneymaking shows out of their ancestral trunks.”

“The pilot programs are in cities including Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Houston, Nashville, Tenn., and Seattle, with specific schools to be announced Jan. 15, NBC said.”

“Having a point doesn’t seem to be important in today’s text-as-you-view entertainment scene. It’s all about the experience and the moment.” And how many people are just playing Angry Birds, anyway?

Kate Wenner used to reach millions of people every night by producing ’20/20.’ Now she’s a playwright with a play about war veterans that draws maybe 99 people a performance. And that’s OK with her.

“In The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir, Toni Bentley predicted that, if her book was ever turned into a play, it would probably only reach ‘Off-Off-Off Broadway.’ It might end up being staged ‘in some dark performance space down some little-traveled back alley’.” Actually, it’s having a successful run in Madrid’s top alternative theater.

After 25 years, No Fit State Circus (yes, that’s what it’s called) “can justly claim to be one of the world’s leading exponents of contemporary circus. … You can hear the miked-up breath of the performers, smell their sweat, look into their eyes, touch the hem of their raggedy garments. It’s very consciously the opposite of the antiseptic enormo-shows put on by the globe-stomping Cirque du Soleil.”

“The Broadway League reported Tuesday that Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark took in a whopping $2,941,790 over nine performances last week, which is the highest single-week gross of any show in Broadway history.”

“The very structure of farce, with its preposterous scenarios and incomprehensible plots, echoes our own lives with uncanny exactness. The old rule may be that farce punctures respectability, but in today’s world it seems to be mirroring it, as the real-life people in power endlessly slip on banana skins, from MPs’ expenses to the pratfalls of the eurozone.”

“The easy bit of prices management is to rack up the prices when demand is strong – the more challenging aspect is to lower the price-points. There’s quite a prize for the theatre industry in getting that right.”