Category: theatre

“A comedy-drama by Geoffrey Nauffts about a gay couple tested by religious differences and interfering family and friends, Next Fall was something of a test case for new plays without well-known cast members trying to make a go of it on Broadway.”

“In the UK, theatre created by companies of deaf or blind artists seldom reaches a wider audience. But Not By Bread Alone – a show that lasts as long as it takes the cast to make bread, which is then shared with the audience – has been playing several nights a week in Jaffa since 2007. Performances are almost always sold out.”

“As everyone connected with radio will tell you, its cheapness is its strength. It’s the perfect medium for raw, experimental or ultra-topical writers. And, of course, the audio experience itself remains as potent as ever, bringing an intimate book-like intensity to storytelling by doing it inside the listener’s head.”

“Over the next three years, five playwrights will be part of Arena’s American Voices New Play Institute, which was formed in August and financed by a $1.1 million gift…. The writers will be paid to write on any project they please during their three-year tenure, with the promise of a stage production and an additional pot of development money under their control.”

“Moving sets, transporting casts and lighting hotel rooms for British touring theatre companies creates as many greenhouse gas emissions every year as flying around the world 2,680 times, new research has revealed.”

“No one can deny the brilliance of Kushner’s epic drama, but its significance, I feared, would be tied more to national events than to imaginative acts. A generation of Kushner-inspired dramatists has assured me that there is no danger of this happening any time soon.”

“The clear and present evils in melodrama’s long and colorful history are a down-spiraling economy. Changing tastes. Home entertainment. 3-D movies. Audience gentrification.”

“British theatre has never been a level playing field and smaller organisations will be more badly affected than big players such as the National and the RSC, for whom the loss of £99,000 and £80,000 respectively – while not insubstantial – won’t cause too much damage.”

“‘A Night Less Ordinary,’ Arts Council England’s free ticket scheme for under-26 year olds, is to be ‘curtailed’ under plans unveiled by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to make £73 million of savings. … [Many] of the theatres taking part in the project are already signed up for two years, ending early in 2011.”

Ben Brantley after a single-date run of (fittingly) Brigadoon: “As it was, I left the Shubert feeling blessed and privileged, and I knew many of my friends would feel envious when I described what I had seen. Such single-performance shows, when they’re well done, tend to engender deeply personal and possessive responses.”