Category: theatre

“Coming up on its five-year anniversary, ‘Bye Bye Liver’ has major producing savvy behind it. It is run like a business and is among the most profitable open-runs currently in Chicago, selling out nearly every weekend.”

“From the moment he arrived at Stratford, people either loved or hated him, with the fans cheering his audience-pleasing productions, while the detractors mocked his excesses with the phrase, ‘Is it McAnuff for you?’ But even the most hard-core haters would have to concede that, under his leadership, the acting company had grown stronger, the guest directors improved almost exponentially and the physical standard of production hit new heights.”

“There’s an independent wrestling scene, but the WWE [World Wrestling Entertainment] is essentially a monopoly. … If you’re a playwright who doesn’t want to do people-on-a-couch plays, there are not a lot of avenues. You can go and do television, or you can stay and fight with organizations that aren’t really equipped to support work by people of color or experiment with form.”

“It was a great challenge to translate your play,” Ms. Khaikin said, “because the language is so specific to the South, and the expressions that the characters use are so vivid and so true to that dialect. To make it alive in Russian was very hard.”

Prospero: magician and singer-songwriter? A British researcher says that Shakespeare wrote a musical, and that he “should have shared credit for the play with Robert Johnson, a composer and lute player.”

“Podcasts offer the earbud-intimacy of a stand-up routine with the listen-anywhere reach and convenience of radio — minus the language and content restrictions of commercially driven, FCC-regulated broadcasts.”

“The show, which features a score by John Kander and Fred Ebb and a book by Ebb and Bob Fosse, will play its 6,138th performance on August 27, passing A Chorus Line for the fourth spot on the all-time Broadway longevity list and making it the longest-running American musical in Broadway history.”

“What’s really striking, when watching a downsized musical, is the transformative effect these compact venues have on the crowd-pleasing but often distant ensemble numbers. … What would West Side Story become if it was no longer the Jets versus the Sharks, but a small number of colourful characters playing Russian roulette with their lives?”

Katori Hall, author of The Mountaintop: “Perhaps it was because of my previous visit” – when she experienced the particular Russian style of racism – “that I felt even more determined that a play about Dr. King, a man who preached about a colorblind world, would resonate loudly in the white, snowy streets of Russia. I was on a mission.”

Terry Teachout: “New York’s Lincoln Center Festival and Washington’s Kennedy Center are both capable of making it happen. Wouldn’t you love to see a matinee performance of Othello at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, then stroll next door to the Metropolitan Opera House and hear Otello?”