Category: theatre

“As the budgets of Broadway shows have grown — $10 million to $15 million is standard these days — so too has the financial incentive to fix flops. And a show’s second shot at success isn’t limited to the United States, where touring and regional productions can offer a backup market. Germany, the Netherlands and Japan are among the countries that have demonstrated an appetite in recent years for American musicals.”

“Plans to excavate the remaining third of the Rose Theatre on London’s Bankside and develop the site into a permanent exhibition and performance space have been dealt a blow after its bid for a £2.1 million Lottery grant was rejected.”

NT associate director Ben Power: “There’s a certain energy that comes from knowing that a space that was built and used as something else is being inhabited by a particular performance. That both performers and audience are interlopers or invaders in someone else’s space. The idea that the space will revert to another use after the final show.”

“Wilton’s Music Hall will stay open after a public campaign raised enough money for the organisation to start the urgent repairs needed to keep the 19th-century building in working condition.”

Rehearsal space has always been desperately scarce in Manhattan. So when the city opened the New 42nd Street Studios in the heart of the Broadway district, the building filled up fast.

“The British star, who established herself as a household name in America in the 1980s,” will star in Stephen Poliakoff’s My City, “about two 30-year-olds going back to meet up with their teachers” in inner-city London.

Laura Barnett on watching Miss Julie in French at the Avignon Festival: “I was much more aware of the production as a whole – the white-box set, the dancers writhing away in the background – and of the actors’ incredible physicality. In shifting my attention away from the language, the experience of watching the play became even more intense.”

“Call it an alternate-reality game played in primary reality. Call it avant-garde performance art. Call it whatever you want. … Red Cloud Rising is theater outside the theater. It unfolds like real life, especially in the way we deal with people these days, not just in person but through phone calls, texts and e-mails.”

“They used to look for their sources from Scarborough and from Willy Russell in Liverpool and so on and so on, and West End producers would zoom up the motorway and have a look at a new play in Sheffield or Leeds or Manchester or wherever. … But, normally speaking, that ready source of plays [in the regions] has dried up.”

“Scotland’s oldest working theatre, the Theatre Royal in Dumfries built in 1792, has been saved from closure with support from the local charitable Holywood Trust.”