Category: theatre

New York’s Playwrights Horizons is trying it. Says the theater’s managing director, “The combined cost of theatre tickets and childcare is the factor most often cited by people with young children as the reason they rarely attend the theatre.”

After appearing in the city annually for 33 years, the company has “scrapped this year’s dates – as a direct result of the cuts in RSC funding, at a time when the new theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon is increasing their costs.”

“Paul Coxwell, the young producer who was jailed for £500,000 of VAT fraud in 2009, has re-entered the theatre industry, working under the name of Paul Parker … Parker is named as chief executive of StageLive in a press release for the company, the new venue operator behind the Broadway Theatre in Peterborough.”

“As any elementary school principal … will tell you, many substitutes are called, but few choose substituting as a life’s work. Tom Santopietro, 56, has. He has made a near-career on Broadway, not as an understudy, but as a substitute for house managers and company managers.”

“Long consigned to the dustbin of historical-society meetings and elementary school classrooms, Twain impersonators are now selling out shows, entertaining at fancy parties, presenting at conferences, making real money and adding new members to their ranks.” They have Twain’s newly-published “unexpurgated” autobiography to thank.

“Theatre 20, an artist-run collective that includes stars such as Louise Pitre (Mamma Mia!), Colm Wilkinson (Les Misérables) and Ma-Anne Dionisio (Miss Saigon), aims to increase opportunities for Canadian talent close to home so artists don’t have to always head to the U.S. to continue working.”

“Given the nature of this top-down quest to make a Broadway-style musical, many works were overcapitalised and overblown before they had a first showing. Works such as Petrov and Paris (one of Jon English’s dogged projects) were dead on arrival.”

“The apparent cultural disaster of the moment is Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, and I have to admit I’d love to see it. Some of my fondest memories are watching expensive, ill-conceived shows that improbably made it to Broadway.”

The British theatre company Fuel has begun a monthly series of plays written specifically for podcast. “The first podcast features Kazuko Hohki’s The Hole, which is designed to be listened to while lying in the bath in the evening.” Future pieces will be intended to be heard while lying in bed, doing your cleaning and standing on a bridge at midnight.

Charles McNulty: “This high-flying Taylor extravaganza, in which actors have been regularly commuting from the theater to the hospital and preview audiences have been made unwitting witnesses to the construction of a second act, is a special case if ever there was one. It’s reasonable to give a new musical time, but there’s a difference between fine tuning a show and workshopping a commercial enterprise on the backs of overcharged consumers.”