Category: theatre

“Trey Parker and Matt Stone have confirmed … that they plan to adapt their Broadway hit The Book of Mormon for the big screen.” Says Parker, “Hopefully [the stage show] will have a big run and a big tour and then we can do the movie in several years.”

“Contemporary tinkering with a classic drama or musical — of the sort that Kahn’s company and others in Washington and elsewhere frequently undertake — has become so common that it took the theater world by surprise last month when the practice came under what amounted to an atomic attack.”

“The recently formed Utah chapter of the Dramatists Guild of America calls the prospective [2,500-seat] theater ‘an echoing and unrealistic, airplane-terminal of a building.’ The group … contend[s] the project will be dependent on a small number of touring Broadway shows, even as it ignores the needs of smaller theater companies.”

The controversial new version of the Gershwin-Heyward opera now playing in Cambridge, Mass – directed by Diane Paulus and starring Audra McDonald – has been approved by the Gershwin and Heyward estates, clearing the way for a New York transfer.

“Merlin Holland [says] that his grandfather did no more than devise a ‘minimal’ scenario – just a few paragraphs – for a drama called Constance, which Wilde jotted down in a letter of 1894. ‘He never wrote a word of the play'” that London’s King’s Head Theatre is presenting as “a genuine, brand new, Oscar Wilde play.”

“Ambassador Theatre Group has announced a new partnership with cinema advertising firm Pearl & Dean that will see ads for Gordon’s Gin projected onto safety curtains … immediately prior to performances across ATG’s portfolio of 39 theatres in London and across the UK.”

“It was, said the director, an Elizabethan atmosphere. People came and went throughout the play. There was chatter and laughter and crying babies. … Yet this was not the Globe theatre on the south bank of the Thames, but an open-air performance in the shadow of Israel’s concrete wall separating Bethlehem from Jerusalem.”

Cameroonian playwright Lydia Besong, who has written three plays during her five years in Britain, and her husband have had their asylum application denied.

“At its core, Titus Andronicus is a play about how good people can become unhinged and indeed overwhelmed by the need to avenge. It is about how powerful people surrender themselves to cycles of violence, how tribal and religious customs unequivocally demand retaliation, and how two tribes’ or two religions’ speaking past rather than with each other can lead to chaos.” Relevant to Afghanistan, perhaps?