Category: theatre

“Perhaps we’ll learn if Broadway shows can become a renewable, low-cost resource for Off Broadway, and not just for the more expensive tours and London runs.”

“The Lion King,” now in its 14th year, took in $1,534,779 for the week ending Sunday. “Wicked,” the show about the witches in “The Wizard of Oz,” was next with $1,526,036, and the much-delayed “Spider-Man” musical took third place with $1,476,828 in eight preview performances.

After a six-month international search, the Melbourne Theatre Company has tapped Melbourne Festival director Brett Sheehy as its new artistic director.

Actor’s Express, the highly regarded 23-year-old theater, sent an e-mail plea to supporters on Wednesday afternoon that terms its situation “a true life or death moment.”

Britain’s Royal Mail has launched a new set of stamps celebrating seven decades of UK stage musicals.

The production, which opens one day before the Tony Awards’ deadline, “has its roots in an acclaimed staged reading of the play in October on Broadway, at the Walter Kerr Theater, which raised $150,000 for charity.”

The company is “testing the market in Russia with Zarkana, a highly acrobatic show geared to a country where people love the circus. The $57 million that Cirque du Soleil will invest in the production in the Kremlin, Russia’s seat of power, is the most the company has invested in a non-permanent show.”

“[The] story has remained a quintessentially English one, located in Dickens’s own Victorian London with its stiff, inhospitable social hierarchies and its murky backstreets and bywaters upon which the orphaned Pip and criminal Magwitch roam. So the idea to take the Dickensian tale and recast it in Imperial Calcutta appears daring at best and rather impudent at worst.”

“Our goal isn’t to tear down Julie Taymor or parody her production,” said composer and improv comedian Justin Moran of his new show, The Spidey Project: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility, which opens one day before Taymor’s ill-starred colossus. “Our goal is to do what she should have done in the first place, and that’s just make a really good musical.”

“Some clever people may be making fortunes out of the West End, but those in charge have a lot to worry about – not least soaring running costs, the difficulty of keeping straight plays afloat, and the prospect of more theatres given over to juke-box musicals that lower the West End’s reputation.”