Category: theatre

“Remounting productions conceived for the Globe on other stages – especially the outsize auditoriums that it has often played in the United States – presents significant challenges for both artists and presenters.” Making the actors audible is one problem; another is that “the particularities of the Globe’s stage design don’t easily translate to other venues.”

Says Bartlett Sher, director of the new Broadway musical adaptation of Almodóvar’s madcap film, “Pedro thinks in a way that he called antipatico, a way of dealing with odious things, which I can only describe as ‘Puh!'”

“[It] seems clear that burlesque in its current incarnations can be checked off the endangered species list of performing arts. … While these productions generally involve some stage of undress, they ban total nudity and emphasize a tongue-in-cheek attitude” – with such acts as a magician who combines card tricks with striptease and the perfomer Alli Oops and her “French Fry Fan Dance.”

“Here’s more proof that the Broadway treatment can be applied to just about anything. It’s called Mahathir, the Musical, a two-hour song-and-dance extravaganza in [Kuala Lumpur] about Malaysia’s former strong-arm leader, Mahathir Mohamad. It follows a trail blazed by political musicals such as Evita and Thatcher, the Musical!”

The real theatre revolution should be theatres. The buildings. They should “be buildings that can respond, sensitively and nurturingly and challengingly and ambitiously, to an artform that wants to be all the things that buildings, and especially big theatre buildings, often can’t be: fleet, acute, unorthodox, dissident, liquid, ticklish, erotic, hopeful.”

“Services including box office, legal, HR, contracting, IT support, welfare and occupational health could be provided to other London venues at low or no cost as part of the proposal.” Among the eight companies in talks over this arrangement are Royal Court, the Donmar Warehouse, and the Almeida.

“Perth’s new State Theatre Centre may stay empty for several weeks next year because of a lack of money to stage plays … Black Swan State Theatre Company is struggling to match its ambitions for a full season of seven productions with a 75% increase in venue hire and staffing costs” at the A$70M complex.

“Sunday openings and the West End run of War Horse helped boost audiences for National Theatre productions in London by almost 50% in 2009/10 compared with the previous year.”

“Henrik Ibsen’s Emperor and Galilean will be staged for the first time in English in the UK” as part of the NT’s 2011 London programming. Other highlights include Zoe Wanamaker in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors and Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters.

“A kind of West Coast version of the annual New York International Fringe Festival, the [inaugural version of the] event featured 175 different artistic groups from various genres of performing and visual arts. Apparently, a good thing deserves a second helping.”