Category: theatre

A Klingon opera was not enough. A company in Chicago has adapted the Dickens chestnut into “an hour and 20 minutes [with] three fight scenes, 17 actors with latex ridges glued to their foreheads and a performance delivered entirely in … a language made up for a Star Trek movie.” (The plot “has been rejiggered to match the Klingon world view.”)

In 2010 “the experience is almost unrecognisable – slick, high-budget productions with international stars delivering genuinely funny lines. The Great British Pantomime has become an industry, with spectators numbering in the millions and revenues growing steadily.”

“John Cariani’s ‘Almost, Maine,’ an earnest 19-character play about the romantic happenings one cold night in northern Maine, has since been produced around the world, including in Australia, Dubai and South Korea. A Spanish-language version will be presented this spring in Mexico City. More than 600 companies, amateur and professional, have put it on in the United States and Canada.”

“The other Broadway? The one with the new musicals and modern plays? It is in a Grinch-worthy slump. More than a dozen shows with high hopes but meager ticket sales are poised to close by the end of January.”

The producers of the U2/Julie Taymor musical have decided to postpone the show’s official opening from Jan. 11 to February. “[The] delay is intended to provide more time for the creators to stage a new final number, make further rewrites to the dialogue and consider adding and cutting scenes.”

“Undertaking an unusual poll-cum-pledge-drive among theatergoers, the producers of the Broadway musical The Scottsboro Boys, which closed on Sunday due to weak ticket sales, are asking fans and others to commit on the show’s Web site to buying $99 tickets if the musical were to re-open on Broadway this spring.”

“The names of the most popular playwrights on German-language stages haven’t changed much in decades, even centuries. Recently, however, marquees from Hamburg to Vienna have to add a new name alongside Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller and Ibsen – Roland Schimmelpfennig, a 43-year-old Berlin-based author and director.”

“[A]lthough directors, actors and audiences still love the genre, 21st-century playwrights don’t seem to be drawn to it. … It may be that good farce has to be written in the theatre the way Feydeau did it, requiring a semi-permanent ensemble of actors to try out ideas. … Others argue the genre was the product of a vanished era of bourgeois respectability: we are no longer bound to keep up appearances.”

“The producers of the Off Broadway revival of Dracula fired their star actress Thora Birch on Friday, four days before the play’s first performance.” Her dismissal was reportedly due to disruptive behavior by her father during rehearsals.

“‘Wahuhrah, wahuhrah …’ exasperated pause, ‘words.’ That, more or less, is how Rory Kinnear pronounces the immortal redundancy ‘words, words, words’ in Nicholas Hytner’s new production of Hamlet for the National Theater in London. Those words (words, words) have of course been uttered more times than any calculator could compute.”