Category: theatre

Theater is a fragile medium. What doesn’t first work can if the spark is there and if attitudes can be changed. Julie Taymor may have pulled it off adapting “The Lion King” to the Broadway stage, but “Spider-Man” disastrously collided with Broadway’s corporate culture.

“The head of a Shakespeare troupe in Berlin said Thursday he has been forced to auction off on eBay a life-sized replica of the famed Globe Theatre used in a film by Hollywood director Roland Emmerich.”

“The theater company W!ld Rice has always tried to push the Singapore theater scene’s boundaries by mounting plays that tackle – often humorously – themes regarded as sensitive in the local context, such as homosexuality, religion and politics.”

As a (cautionary) example, the current London revival of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, starring Kristin Scott Thomas, cost £350,000 (about $565,000) to mount, with weekly running costs of £65,000 ($105,000). Producer Sonia Friedman estimates that a Broadway transfer would cost $2.8 million to mount, plus $260,000 or so to run each week.

“Luckily for aspiring musical theater performers in New York, it’s not unusual for big Broadway names to offer encouraging, tough-love-based 10-minute apprenticeships to singers who don’t mind looking silly in front of strangers.”

As if the great avant-garde ballet star weren’t a complex enough character himself, playwright Nicholas Wright has written a script about the messy circumstances (including threats of blackmail by Nijinsky’s widow) surrounding Terence Rattigan’s aborted radio play about the dancer.

The three award-winning American playwrights, along with four British colleagues and well-known historian Simon Schama, are the writers ” collaborating with director Rupert Goold on Decade, a theatrical response into the legacy of 9/11 that will begin performances at London’s St. Katharine Docks Sept. 1.”

“Their lineage extends to the Restoration, when acting troupes took over empty dining rooms above pubs to perform plays of lewd material that went well with a pint. Later the Victorian-era music halls – a wildly popular amusement for the working classes – got their start in saloon bars.”

Joey McKneely, dance director for the show’s recent Broadway revival: “West Side Story cannot be done without [Jerone Robbins’s] original choreography: It’s part of the structure … So this manual was created so that anybody who wanted to license West Side Story had a reference tool, with diagrams and choreography written out, in basic layman’s terms.”

“Finding Neverland, a planned stage musical based on the popular 2004 movie, has been officially grounded. … The La Jolla Playhouse said Finding Neverland was canceled because Weinstein Co. withdrew from the project.”