Category: theatre

“The Red One Theatre Company has been producing theatre in alternative venues for about four years, and doesn’t disclose the location to audience members until they’ve booked their tickets, and sometimes even later. In last June’s production Howard the Rookie, audience members were told to meet at the corner of College and Grace Sts. The show started when two actors raced by yelling Irish profanities at each other, and the audience followed them to a transformed alleyway where the rest of the play took place.”

“All the city’s a stage in Buenos Aires, where a surge of interest in the dramatic arts has rendered every street corner an amphitheater and every pub a theater.”

“The four multimillion-dollar musicals are all leaping to Broadway without a net because of their creators’ confidence in the material and, to varying degrees, skepticism that a tryout elsewhere is useful anymore. The Internet has made it impossible to fly under the radar at theaters in La Jolla or Seattle.”

“Timothy Douglas, a New York-based freelance director with a raft of impressive credits at major theaters across the nation, is the new artistic director of Chicago’s Remy Bumppo Theatre Company.”

“The Burmese authorities are poised to ban all stage and theatre performances – often scenes of dissidence and criticism – ahead of elections planned for early next month … during a period that is traditionally marked with festivals and events.”

Peter Marks: “Playwrights, directors and performers all seem to think that we want to be part of their act, that during a performance we’re desperate for actors to descend into the aisles, converse with us, tussle our hair – even, occasionally, drag us back up into the footlights with them.”

It took them long enough, but London theatres have finally been catching on to the fact that there is serious audience demand (with the consequent revenue) for Sunday performances. Why can’t England’s regional theatres do the same?

The Pasadena Playhouse’s path back appears to be a middle way, paved not with megabucks and glitter, but relying instead on such old-fashioned virtues as patience, perseverance and thrift — which may turn out to be the new “sexy.”

The New York Musical Theater Festival, now six years old, “presents 30 shows in various Midtown venues. Typically, the shows are at an early stage of development and may go through many changes (plus budget increases) if they are eventually produced elsewhere.” The festival’s star “graduate” thus far is the Pulitzer-winning Next to Normal.

There’s “‘a revolution in Irish theatre’ that has seen the great literary tradition challenged by an enterprising new generation of theatre-makers emerging from the universities … The great myth is that audiences want froth and fantasy during a recession: the Irish experience suggests that what they really crave is innovation and substance.”