Category: theatre

“Off Broadway’s Theater for a New Audience announced on Wednesday that its critically acclaimed 2007 production of The Merchant of Venice, starring F. Murray Abraham as Shylock, … will return to New York for a two-week run starting Feb. 27 … The Public Theater, meanwhile, is continuing to look at options for a Broadway transfer of its current [Central Park] production of Merchant,” starring Al Pacino.

Charles Isherwood: “One of the pleasures of a life of theatergoing, I’ve discovered, is the serendipitous dips into wildly diverse areas of culture it can provide…”

“Visiting the Latitude festival [in Suffolk] for the third time, it struck me that this event is fast becoming a genuine alternative to the Edinburgh festival fringe. The theatre offering gets better every year, and … a short-form festival such as Latitude must seem like a far more practical proposition than schlepping up to Scotland for a month. The same could be said for audiences.”

The Skokie Theatre — which has been presenting jazz, cabaret, theatrical and variety events since reopening in 2006 — has gone into receivership after a $1.2 million refurbishment.

“In the best of times, actors find it challenging to make any kind of a reliable living simply from intermittent stage parts. Now a down economy that has led to the highest number of unemployed Americans since the Great Depression and technological advances have combined to create a perfect storm of challenges for actors, hardships that have made the Twin Cities one tough theatre town.”

“My movies are not for children,” says the star of Boogie Nights, Far From Heaven and the new lesbian-parenting comedy The Kids Are All Right. But she has written a successful book for youngsters, Freckleface Strawberry, and a new musical adaptation of the book opens in New York this fall.

“To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre. Theatre is fake: there is a black box, you pay for a ticket, and you sit in the dark and see somebody playing somebody else’s life. The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real.”

“Two months after Elie Wiesel used legal threats to shut down a play that imagined his relationship with his former money manager, Bernard L. Madoff, that work – revised, with a new character replacing Mr. Wiesel – will have its first performances this week.”

“There is widespread enthusiasm for immersive, site-specific performance, as well as a revival of interest in older performance forms like theatre-in-the-round, traverse, promenade and street theatre. But what have we all got against the proscenium arch?”

“At a time when many artistic institutions have seen a drop in donations, Yale Repertory Theater announced on Monday that it had received a $950,000 gift from the Robina Foundation, a Minnesota-based nonprofit group. The gift will go toward supporting the Yale Center for New Theater.”