Category: theatre

“In the wake of the announcement that Fort Collins’ Nonesuch Theater will close on April 9, owner Nick Turner is mulling a big and compelling question: “Why do we as a society place more value on nonprofit theater than for-profit theater?””

“You could make the case that among the area’s larger resident theaters, Lewis has displayed the most consistent appetite for challenge. Where the cluttered Washington theater scene is driven by niche programming (classical, musical, silent, etc.), Lewis’s Center Stage is the dominant figure on Baltimore’s landscape, and for 20 years Lewis has made sure it has played the field in a serious way.”

“Now the producers of the Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” are offering $60 goodie bags to people who serve in focus groups that will respond to several performances.”

“None of the accidents cited in the violations involved sequences in which actors flew over audience members, but rather happened on stage. The sling-shot technique, which catapults performers from the back of the stage to its lip, caused one performer to break both of his wrists and another to injure his feet.”

“The Intiman Theatre, one of Seattle’s flagship drama companies and a Tony Award honoree, must raise $1 million by September, in addition to its planned annual goal of $1.75 million, or it cannot meet its production expenses for the season.”

“The “Spider-Man” issue is a reminder that theaters can’t treat their preview audiences like chopped liver… The moral for producers of this whole thing is that while most people accept that previews are part of the process, the real place for rehearsals, technical or otherwise, is when you’re either cutting the ticket price or still in rehearsal.”

“Actors will read the King James Bible from cover to cover on stage as part of the 400th anniversary of its publication. The Bible will be read by five teams of four actors at Shakespeare’s Globe in London over 69 hours in eight days.”

“When something goes so wrong – usually a result of human error, but sometimes an act of fate – that the illusion of the specific, self-contained reality that has been created so carefully on stage falls apart before your eyes. And regardless of what the actors on stage are wearing, you feel as if they’ve all been caught in public dressed in nothing but their shabbiest underwear.”

“Why is it left to a few individuals and a poker website to explore this new medium’s creative possibilities, when an art form that spends its time commissioning writers, generating stories and creating characters to tell them, is instead using it to tell us when we can catch the open dress rehearsal?”

“Great sets can be simple [or intricate], but they must fulfil two basic functions: relevance and ease. … Great sets, however traditional or disruptive, often seem to somehow spring from the play organically; we forget that the actors are not simply conjuring the imaginative world in which they play.”