Category: theatre

“[H]owever lethally misleading the famous line about love meaning never having to say you’re sorry, the story has legs. Mawkishness is counteracted by the timeless theme of defiant youth and the astringent stroppiness of the working-class heroine Jenny Cavilleri, taking on her preppy boy-man and slapping him about verbally until he grows up.”

“In the Twin Cities, theater is in danger of becoming a market like academic publishing: everybody’s just making stuff for each other. In other words, it’s not a market at all. We’re all struggling to get a bigger piece of the pie, when the pie is a cupcake. We need a bigger pie.”

“Most theater backers seek a windfall or at least some financial return,” but Ted and Mary Jo Shen “instead fund non-commercial musicals that they believe advance the art form, usually through non- profit theater companies such as the Signature [Theatre in Virginia] or New York’s Roundabout and Public Theater.”

“Although not specifically written for a subterranean stage, the drama is a perfect match for the dimly-lit, dank location. The play itself unfolds on a pit of earth, surrounded by a moat of water. As you might expect, audiences are advised not to wear their best shoes.”

“London’s National Theatre said Monday that it will broadcast its production of ‘Fela!’ in January 2011 as part of its NT Live series. The high-definition broadcast will take place in approximately 300 cinemas and performing arts centers in 22 countries.”

“Having become president of Jujamcyn when he bought 50 percent of its shares for an undisclosed sum last fall, Roth, at 34, is also an industry evangelist, now with a series of gilded pulpits to preach from.”

“While most actors have unremarkable routines for passing the time backstage — reading, listening to music, updating their Facebook pages — some performers this spring have found themselves, like [Jan] Maxwell, in need of ways to busy themselves to avoid performance-killing tedium because their characters appear so briefly.”

“Sure, small theater companies long have thrived in every nook and cranny of this city’s real estate — from the proverbial church basement, to rehabbed factory, to studio above a funeral home, to standard issue black box tucked into a legit theater space. But during the last few years, a handful of companies housed in hard-core storefront facilities — some operating under Equity contracts, others non-Equity — have enjoyed unusual success.”

“Where the National has been thinking big,” with live broadcasts, “the Royal Shakespeare Company has been – equally adventurously – thinking small, exploiting the bite-sized power of Twitter to retell the story of Romeo and Juliet.” Other companies have been engaging with technology in even more creative ways.

“One of the most intriguing results from the National’s NT Live screenings is that, despite lower expectations, cinema audiences reported higher levels of emotional engagement with the production than theatre audiences,” a report on innovation in the arts has found.