Category: theatre

“More plays than ever at this year’s festival are giving us a teenager’s-eye view on life. Are they providing insight or exploitative voyeurism?”

“[D]ozens of standups from around the world are in Edinburgh this year, here to perform comedy in a language – English – that is not their own. In this most verbal of artforms, one that’s intimately bound up with cultural references, identity and wordplay, can they possibly succeed?”

“I think there’s a mistake being made. We haven’t encouraged the young composers and lyricists as we did the earlier generation. In the course of my career, I did the first show with Bock and Harnick, and then with Sondheim, and then with Jason [Robert] Brown [‘Parade’], who is a young and very, very gifted fellow. It’s hard to get those people on Broadway now, and one of the main reasons is money and also the nature of producing.”

Louise Kennedy: “To speak of impersonal criticism is as ridiculous as to speak of impersonal drama, impersonal music, impersonal painting, or impersonal reaction to alcoholic liquor. There is no such thing.”

“Without anyone quite realising it, live performance has experienced a revolution. From being a unique experience shared by one group of people, it has become a form of mass participation. How has that come about? Is it even a good thing? And what about the work itself?”

“To her supporters, [ART director Diane] Paulus is a crowd-inspiring theater revolutionary. To her detractors, she is the Broadway-obsessed, box-office-driven director who has dismantled a prized institution.”

“Andrew Barnicle, artistic director of the Laguna Playhouse for most of the last two decades, has resigned his position. Barnicle was active as a director at the playhouse, helming 39 productions there. He also appeared occasionally onstage in leading roles.”

“Eight of London’s leading producing venues” – among them the National Theatre, Sadler’s Wells, Lyric Hammersmith, Royal Court, and Young Vic – “have united for the first time to create a £3 million city-wide theatre festival for 2012, celebrating the multicultural nature of the capital in its Olympic year.”

“Actors covet them. Producers dream of them. Marvin Hamlisch even composed a musical about one.” “They” are the caricature drawings that made Al Hirschfeld a legend. Four of the current generation of theater illustrators talk to the Times about what they do.

“Bike riders in New York have a secret, a communal understanding about the pleasures of navigating the urban landscape … Now there is a new piece of interactive theater to take advantage of that feeling. Joyride is a group bike ride with a shared route and a common soundtrack. Riders equipped with MP3 players and headphones set off from the same point, pushing ‘play’ simultaneously.”