Category: theatre

“Moisés Kaufman has wrestled with the trials of Oscar Wilde and the murder of Matthew Shepard. He’s grappled with Beethoven and Jane Fonda, both in the same play (33 Variations). Now this 46-year-old playwright and director is playing with puppets: fish, fowl, an ogre, rabbits, a cat. And they’re singing.”

“Still, how much longer can [professional drag queens] continue without a fresh batch of bona fide female stars to draw inspiration from? Since the 1960s, such role models have been scarce. … There is no Julia Roberts mask, or Sandra Bullock or Anne Hathaway or Jennifer Aniston ‘look’ that a drag queen could glom on to. … For a male drag queen to impersonate Madonna was beside the point.” (To say nothing of Lady Gaga.)

“Director Mike Nichols and Philip Seymour Hoffman are secretly – well, not anymore! – laying the groundwork for a revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman next year on Broadway. Hoffman, 43, is too young for Willy Loman – the script says Willy’s 62 – but both the role and the play have fascinated him for years.”

For this year’s Free Night of Theater, LA Stage Alliance is trying an online lottery “in which people can sign up at www.FreeNightLA.com in hopes of obtaining a pair of tickets to as many as five shows.” So far, more than 35 theaters are taking part, with more to join.

“The US host has revealed plans to reunite the entire cast of 1965’s The Sound of Music, including Dame Julie Andrews’s first appearance in decades with the Von Trapp kids.”

“As part of a national industrial relations agreement with trade unions, the government has undertaken to amend competition law, which currently prevents Irish Equity negotiating payment on behalf of its members on issues such as voice-overs for radio and TV advertisements, an important source of revenue for the profession.”

“The 71-year-old actor … believes the decline is due to the dwindling tradition of amateur dramatics. ‘Standards of performance are being reduced,’ he said. ‘Once someone declares they are a professional actor, they can now perform wherever they want. There is no system any more’.”

Michael Billington: “In my perspective from the stalls, British acting is phenomenally good; and, even if vocal skills occasionally leave something to be desired, young actors today have a physical expressiveness that was foreign to the McKellen generation.”

“This is the decided downside of Broadway’s dependence on star casting: how do you recast roles that grow to be heavily identified with widely recognized actors?”

“For more than 70 years, the original film version of L Frank Baum’s children’s story has stood as such a monument to wholesomeness and innocence that hardly anyone remembers what a nightmare it was to make, or the toll it took on its participants.”