Category: theatre

“This month the New End theatre in Hampstead, north London, is conducting an ambitious experiment. For the duration of the four-week run of Where’s Your Mama Gone?, every ticket will be sold on a ‘pay what you can’ basis” (Recommended price: £15) “[T]hese tickets are also bookable in advance and available to anyone, regardless of their circumstances.”

Actor Tim Crouch: “The introduction of Shakespeare to young people is often advocated out of a sense of reactionary paranoia about a slipping of standards or an eroding of national identity: Shakespeare as warm beer or red phone boxes. … [But a] child knows when they are on the receiving end of a didactic exercise.”

“In all kinds of shows, it’s fascinating to watch how actors convince us they are not actors and, in some cases, how they give themselves away. Sometimes all it takes is a bare-faced lie.”

“There is only one show at this year’s festival … that invites members of the audience to come on stage and shred their banknotes. And the surprise of it is, people do it.”

“The Shaw Festival, in Ontario Canada, for the first time in its 51-year history, will not be presenting a play by Bernard Shaw in its flagship Festival Theatre during the 2012 season.”

“These days, to support themselves between gigs, or simply keep plying their craft, actors are auditioning at hospitals and medical schools to portray sick people—’standardized patients’ in med school terms—who help aspiring doctors learn their craft.”

The musical theatre mogul’s “charitable foundation is to fund a new theatre for some of the UK’s most socially disadvantaged youngsters. The youth theatre will be in Inverclyde, Scotland where, long after the demise of its shipbuilding industry, unemployment is at 24%.”

“Once a train arrives, the two typically enter through opposite ends of a car, scouting for promising captive audiences. While one leans nonchalantly against a pole, just another rider, the other bursts forcefully into character (complete with fake beard, plastic eyeballs and rubber mask when called for), startling passengers.”

“Why do we look forward to seeing one of the legendary Broadway musicals more than, say, the new stage version of Shrek or the latest play at the National Theatre? All musical theatre activity, even today, is still referred back to that period of about 15 years after the Second World War when the Broadway musical was at its peak, on both sides of the Atlantic.”

“A few comedies aside, it has remained a mostly sober-toned place for the serious Chicago theatergoer; a broad-shouldered theater uncommonly comfortable with centrality and power, increasingly disinclined to worry much about outside criticism, and remarkably assured of the tested wisdom of its own aesthetic and managerial direction.”