Category: theatre

“The theater company, which has an average annual budget of $1.2 million, racked up a half-million dollar deficit in the 18 months before Ms. Crosby arrived; it was back in the black by the fiscal year 2007. Meanwhile audiences and critics began applauding. Ticket sales have nearly doubled since 2006.”

Does “American Idiot,” the artfully laid out Green Day jukebox musical now at the St. James Theatre on Broadway, represent the dawning of a new age or the end of a line? To put it another way, should we be celebrating the breakthrough spawned by “Rent” and “Spring Awakening” or looking into reform school options for this decadent grandchild of “Hair”?

“A dramatist who claims he co-wrote a modern version of Playboy Of The Western World with novelist Roddy Doyle has alleged breach of copyright over the staging of the play in the Abbey Theatre [in Dublin].” This is the third court action taken over the production.

Michael Feingold: “The era of mega-profits, now apparently over, and of digitized communication, now degenerating into Tweeted triviality, have given us bad cultural habits. … The Golden Age we think we lack, and yearn for, the one granted public recognition, may be just around the corner. The ore is there, waiting to be mined.”

“‘The Good Wife’ is set in Chicago, yet its creators and writing team, Michelle and Robert King, said they decided to film in New York because [star Julianna] Margulies wished to remain based there. But they added that Ms. Margulies and Mark Saks, the show’s casting director, were passionate advocates of the city’s distinguished ranks of theater actors.”

The ’70s Brutalist concrete pile (which The Economist described as a “cultural concentration camp”) will be getting a major upgrade to its public areas. The proposed plan will finally make use of the site’s prime riverfront location, with the garbage bin area now facing the Thames replaced by a new glass entrance.

“Every time it’s revived, Pygmalion emerges from the long shadow cast by its own musical adaptation, My Fair Lady, and is ‘rediscovered’ as a timeless study of social manipulation, sexual cat-and-mouse and linguistic brilliance, despite its late Edwardian flavour and furnishings.”

“Baker scored the award for new American play for a pair of works: ‘Circle Mirror Transformation,’ which had a successful run at Playwrights Horizons earlier this season, and ‘The Aliens,’ now running at Rattlestick. Laurel comes with a cash prize of $1,000.”

“On May 1, police dealt with a potential car bomb that had been parked outside the theater where ‘The Lion King’ plays. In December, a plainclothes officer killed a suspected scam artist near a landmark Broadway hotel after a gunfight.”