Category: theatre

“True, few theater devotées would make their Telecharge choices based on the possibility of scoring a free snack. But in some instances, the lure of something special may be the only way to get a particular group of bodies in the seats.”

“The 85-year-old director Peter Brook is stepping down from the leadership of his ground-breaking theater troupe, which rejuvenated the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris. As feared, the French government has taken advantage of his departure to make some substantial cuts to the theater’s government subvention.”

“The Royal Shakespeare Company has announced a five-year plan to present an annual London season of work at the Roundhouse in Camden.” The program, to begin in 2012, “will see [the RSC] reconstructing its ‘Roundyard’ venue – a replica of the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon – within the Roundhouse every year until 2016.”

“Some Broadway producers said in interviews over the weekend and on Monday that the theater itself was sending signals that the show might not be around that long.”

“During the week that ended Nov. 28, the show grossed $1,986,319, making it the highest-earning week for a show in Canadian theatre history.”

“More than $135 million is on the line in the 11 new musicals that are opening this season. Ten of them have original music, compared with just two in 2009-10 … No theater producer interviewed could recall a season full of so many expensive musicals with new scores.”

“It’s not the public’s fault that we haven’t had a musical as shockingly pertinent as, say, West Side Story for so long. … But orchestras, chorus lines and dancers are now almost solely the domain of the Webber-style spectacle; put simply, nobody else can afford them. New productions by smaller theatres must depend instead on actor-musicians and a fair amount of inventiveness.”

“If you’ve got ambitions to do the classics, you jump the Hamlet hoop. And then when you’re old you do the Lear hoop. I’ve always felt slightly young for it. But I’ve waited and now I’m only about eight years off the textual age that he is. I’ve always wanted to have a go at it, but I’ve wanted to be in the right frame of mind.”

“The show stopped five times, mostly to fix technical problems, and Act I ended prematurely, with Spider-Man stuck dangling 10 feet above audience members, while Act II was marred by a nasty catcall during one of the midperformance pauses.”

Michael Billington: “‘Expressionist’ is one of those handy terms that we critics use rather promiscuously. … Now it is widely applied to anything that is non-realistic. But, however randomly deployed, it has its value. And what is striking is how applicable it is to much of today’s theatre. In the past week I have seen three productions that all, in different ways, could be labelled expressionist.”