Category: theatre

“Arena — located on Washington’s southwest waterfront — was the nation’s first theater with an integrated acting company, the first in Washington with an integrated audience and the first regional theater to send a play to Broadway. Now it’s striving to make an even greater impact beyond the theater capital of New York.”

“The businessman Lloyd Dorfman has given the National Theatre £10m – its biggest ever private donation – which will go towards the organisation’s ambitious £70m redevelopment, it was announced today. To recognise the gift, the Cottesloe theatre will be renamed the Dorfman theatre when it reopens in 2013.”

The composer and impresario said it had been a “gut-wrenching decision” to let the Palace, Her Majesty’s, Cambridge and New London theatres go. “However, following my illness last year, I was advised to reduce the debt in the family company,” he said.

“If you’re talking about Aha! moments, that comes with any collaboration. You sit in a room and you’re talking to someone and your collaborator says ‘X, Y, Z’ and you say ‘Wait a minute, that’s a great idea for this song.”

Michael Billington: “The most basic is that we are there to work. If we are doing an overnight review, we need an aisle seat to get out quickly. Even something as simple as the overspill of light from the stage helps if one is making notes. … [A play is] more likely to get a considered review if the critic is not hampered by acoustic or sightline problems.”

“With opening night (and performances for the critics) fast approaching, the creators of the new Broadway musical Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown [have] added several changes … most noticeably a new number at the top of the show that had been the Act II opener.” The creative team has still not settled on the show’s finale.

“Even if one allows that the attempt was satirical–and Steppenwolf certainly leaves itself open to satire–this was still a numbingly clueless attempt at humor. To say that Steppenwolf was unrecognizable doesn’t even begin to capture the absurdity of the scene.”

“If the highly anticipated Colin Firth film The King’s Speech performs well this awards season, chances are a stage version will come about relatively quickly on Broadway, in London’s West End, or both.”

“The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, a wrestling-themed drama by Kristoffer Diaz, scored a knockout Monday night at the 42nd annual round of the Joseph Jefferson Awards,” taking five trophies. “The Jeff Committee … also liked the Drury Lane’s production of Ragtime, which sashayed to eight Jeffs, the most of any show this year.”

Sarah Ruhl: “Tony Kushner made people feel that going to the theater was a way of engaging in this incredible aesthetic, political, civic, historical event.” Lisa Kron: “Angels put us at the center of the intellectual universe as gay people.” Doug Wright: “What Tony did was write a play where being gay was a metaphor for the whole human experience.”