Category: theatre

The American acting – well, she’s too vigorous to be an éminence grise – veteran will play the “eccentric psychic” Helga ten Dorp in the upcoming London revival of Deathtrap starring Simon Russell Beale and Jonathan Groff, with Matthew Warchus directing.

A new campaign cautions “West End theatregoers to watch out for online ticketing scams.” But do such scams exist? “There just isn’t the demand. As a fraudster, there’s very little point in selling fake theatre tickets on the web because you can’t sell them quickly at high enough prices, or in enough bulk, to turn a quick profit and disappear.”

“Puppets can seem more real than actors, because they leave more to our imagination. Stripped of his striped camp garb, the naked puppet becomes transparent…. Actors can never reenact what happened in a place like Auschwitz, at least not realistically, because what happened cannot be recreated.”

“Taught he was the height of greatness, they’ve somehow mistaken his birth for a kind of literary Second Coming, thinking every word he wrote must be perfect and without sin. … [And] once you declare that a god has walked the earth, satanic forces must instantly spring up to deny him. … [Thus] a counter-assumption was born: A lowly actor from a small-town background, like ‘the man from Stratford,’ could not possibly have written these extraordinary plays.”

Ratings were flat. “The Tonys remain the least-watched of the major kudocasts. And this year’s 7 million viewers came on the heels of improved numbers for most other awards shows — including the Academy Awards (41.7 million), the Grammys (25.9 million) and the Golden Globes (17 million).”

“Is [Catherine] Zeta-Jones’s win for A Little Night Music a feather in the UK’s cap? The film siren belongs as much to Hollywood as to Swansea. [Douglas] Hodge is a delight in La Cage, but surely its success has something to do with the local actors – including TV star Kelsey Grammer – who occupy the other dressing rooms?”

“Broadway once had many homegrown stars who committed to working on a show for a year, as Nathan Lane has for the ‘The Addams Family.’ This year … several Tony Awards were given for productions that were always intended to be short-timers on Broadway, given that many of their film-star performers had to move on to other commitments.”

“That I have seen none of your Tony-nominated productions does not impede my enjoyment of the television show that celebrates them. Possibly, it makes it more enjoyable, because I can take it as a series of discrete emotional moments, musical numbers and jokes, unfettered by liking or not liking a particular production. I am happy for everyone who wins.”

“For the third year in a row the best musical award went not to the work that deserved it but to the one with the greatest box-office potential on the road.” And “just look at the acting victories. Hollywood dominated in a way that befits a season that confirmed again and again the equation of solvency and mega celebrity.”

“Memphis, the uplifting, unifying musical about a barrier-crossing white DJ and the gifted black Beale Street musicians he promotes,” took four awards, including Best Musical. Red, John Logan’s two-man drama about the artist Mark Rothko, won six Tonys, including best play, while the revival of August Wilson’s Fences took acting honors for stars Denzel Washington and Viola Davis.