Category: theatre

“The props list for [Punchdrunk’s] show Sleep No More, an environmental, stylized mash-up of Shakespearean drama and Hitchcockian noir, reads like the contents of a madman’s shopping cart: plastic teeth, animal eyes, hair samples, several kinds of blood, caramel spray.”

“If a show opens on Broadway and it’s not a Spidery spectacle, will anyone care? … The $70 million production has dominated the limelight for months. And last week’s replacement of director Julie Taymor with a new artistic team, along with the show’s sixth opening-night delay, only intensified public appetite for news about the troubled show.”

Deb Margolin’s Imagining Madoff, “a freewheeling inquiry into the mind and morality of Bernard Madoff that invented a booze-soaked encounter between the disgraced financier and the humanitarian icon Elie Wiesel – was derailed after Wiesel threatened legal action against the theater.” A new version with a fictionalized character will run in Washington next fall.

“[The] real inequality is between the funding that pours into London, and that which goes to the rest of the country. Out of £325m distributed by ACE, £168m goes to London. Put simply, the founding vision of JM Keynes for the Arts Council ‘to decentralise and disperse the dramatic and musical and artistic life of this country’ has not materialised.”

“In art we’ve seen the emergence of writing, using language along the lines of scripts and live recitals, and we feel that now’s the moment to put it together with the discipline of theatre and see what happens,” explains the director of London’s Whitechapel Gallery, where the likes of Sally Hawkins and Jonathan Pryce will perform scripts by half a dozen prominent artists.

“Don’t shy away from politics, religion or other tinderboxes. In my experience, theater people will forgive a noble flop, but perfunctory dullness is an unpardonable sin.”

Michael Billington: “I came to Berlin eager to learn about the current issues. What impact is the national obsession with immigration having on theatre? How is drama surviving in the current economic climate? And to what extent is theatre still director-dominated?” (But first he had to go see The Blue Angel.)

“Though The Tempest has been long acknowledged as William Shakespeare’s final work, in the last several decades many scholars have accepted that he collaborated with John Fletcher on at least three plays.” The last of them, Cardenio, believed lost for almost four centuries, “has reappeared, in a much-disputed form, at [New York’s] Classic Stage Company.”

“As James Shapiro’s new book rehearses the loony arguments about our greatest playwright, Robert McCrum asks some of today’s finest Shakespearean actors and directors their thoughts on the authorship question.”

“Cut the geek chorus. Cut the female spider. Beef up the roles of the bad guys (currently wasted in a fashion show).” “Beef up the Green Goblin and other villains. They need to be evil and scary.” “Stop rushing in new actors. Build safer set design with more padding and rubber.”