Category: theatre

“The appeal of a blonde-wigged and warbling Elle Woods shimmying through Legally Blonde in the Philippines, say? Or the interest in seeing Billy Elliott‘s gritty northern mining town replicated in South Korea? Major British productions no longer just travel back and forth across the Atlantic; they’re franchised across the planet.”

“It’s hard to say whether American re-enactors would allow a digital camera on the 19th-century battlefield. But in the U.K., rules are a bit more casual. Because there’s little personal connection to the Civil War, the British can have more fun with it.”

Athol Fugard has “argued that writers were increasingly being pressured to write for audiences that only had ‘attention spans of 10 minutes between adverts’. But do these two elements of politics and entertainment have to be mutually exclusive? Of course not.”

“[P]laywrights have tended to find more creative potential in triangles where the bisexuality simmers unconsummated, expressed through a shared surrogate, or where it’s the fantasy of an imagination haunted by the potential torture of double exclusion.” Then there’s Noël Coward’s Design for Living.

“With small theater companies across New York struggling to make rent or renegotiate leases in a difficult economic climate, executives of Off Off Broadway’s Flea Theater said on Tuesday that they have purchased a building downtown to create a new home, concluding that buying instead of renting was necessary for its survival.”

“The world really can be a stage. In recent years, plays have been performed in everything from fields to freight containers, public toilets to disused department stores. Open your office stationery cupboard these days and you’re likely to find a theatre company doing site-responsive Kafka inside.”

“Director Max Stafford-Clark and actor/playwright Stephanie Street debate South African writer Athol Fugard’s claim that today’s theatre does not engage properly with political issues.”

“The annual performing arts awards, encompassing theatre, musical theatre, dance, opera, classical and contemporary music, comedy and cabaret, were once better known for their anomalies than for the talents they sought to acknowledge.” But now, a decade after they were created, the honors have become a major event.

Jersey Boys may have won best musical honors, but Avenue Q ruled nearly every other musical theatre category at the ceremony in the Sydney Opera House. The “boldly seductive” vaudeville/cabaret revue Smoke & Mirrors was named best new Australian work and took two other prizes as well. Melbourne Theatre Co.’s Richard III dominated the drama awards, while Brett Dean’s new opera Bliss lost out to Britten’s Peter Grimes.

“Theatre has a responsibility to hold a mirror up to our society and necessarily that is to reflect our political activity. I think that over the last five years the vigour, pertinence and virility of political theatre in this country has been unmatched.”