Category: theatre

“Theater, after all, is no longer a central part of the American cultural conversation, the way it was when Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams walked the earth.” Even Tony Kushner can’t support himself just from writing for the theater. But Terry Teachout “can think of one excellent reason: You meet the nicest people.”

It is the ninth longest-running musical currently playing in London and the 18th longest-running musical of all time in Theatreland. According to Michael McCabe, executive producer for Wicked in the UK, 58% of audience members are under the age of 35. “And they’re not all teenage girls – it is still very much couples in the their 20s and early 30s,” he said.

“When I see musicals in New York today, I usually don’t know if I’m watching American Idol or a Broadway performance. It should be as precise as an operatic aria.”

“L.A.’s Antaeus Company will write a new, belated chapter in Coward’s artistic history on these shores: On Oct. 20 it will open Peace in Our Time, a 65-year-old drama that had not been staged in America until now.”

“British debuts from the national theatre companies of China, Israel, Bitola and Armenia are planned as part of the Globe to Globe festival next year, during which each of Shakespeare’s plays will be performed in a different language.”

“Melbourne Theatre Company, ordered in 2009 to address a gender imbalance in its productions, is to make King Lear a woman. Robyn Nevin, the great senior actress of the Australian stage, will play Shakespeare’s befuddled monarch at MTC next year.”

“NYC and London-based Supervision Media and New York’s Broadway Worldwide have signed an exclusive multi-year licensing arrangement to bring four hit Broadway musicals to cinema screens across the globe.”

“Glib or not, the project” – Hacked, a series of ten-minute plays based on volunteers’ voice-mail messages – “probes how it feels to discover that you’ve been hacked, and where the boundaries between public and private lie. The writers have taken these one-sided conversations and embroidered them to their own ends: the volunteers, in contrast, have no voice, nor right of reply.”

For all the grumbling and sniping aimed at McAnuff’s commitments outside the Stratford Festival and at his showy Broadway-bound transfers, “both McAnuff’s fans and his detractors love the way he has transformed the near-monochromatic company into something far more multicultural” – and ended the festival’s relative isolation from the wider theatrical world both within and outside Canada.

“Ireland in 1907 saw itself as ready for self-rule and it expected its artists to promote the image of a steady, sober, self-reliant people. Instead, with The Playboy of the Western World,, Synge gave them a play in which a village loon splits his father’s head open … and is promptly installed as a hero by excitable women and drunken men.”