Category: theatre

A new crop of artist-led, artist-funded “projects defiantly see themselves as creative opportunities rather than businesses, with an-anything-is-possible attitude that I find cheering. … The shows that we never see because they never got past the grant application stage may have been the ones that would have changed the way we think about theatre.”

Howard Panter, co-founder of the Ambassador Theatre Group, the UK’s biggest theatre owner, “hopes to increase the number of shows that transfer among a larger number of cities within the United States and Britain. Traditionally, most theater productions have moved mainly between London and Broadway.”

So much for Whoriskey working in tandem “with outgoing Artistic Director Bartlett Sher over the next theater season before fully taking the reins in 2011.” Already, “Whoriskey is … the theater’s sole artistic director.”

“Previews right before opening of a big show are often the best performances to attend. The opening-night countdown is on. Nobody is missing a show. Anticipation is in the air. The bosses are still in the room, raising everybody’s game. There is that almost spiritual sense of creativity.” But there are drawbacks, too, to seeing a show before it opens.

Plays and musicals that once might have had long off-Broadway lives now set their sights on Broadway. “Today the money — and there’s a lot of it floating around just now — is going exclusively to Broadway, where investors will roll the dice for a chance to stand on the stage with a star or two during the broadcast of the Tony Awards.”

Andrew Fishwick, whose company, The Fish Partnership, produced Little Voice and Three Days of Rain, has been sentenced to 20 months in prison for collecting more than £200,000 in tax rebates on charitable donations that were never actually made – and depositing those rebates into a personal bank account.

“For £10 it’s possible to see [Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem] from a (very) creaky balcony seat, roughly at eye level with the light fittings and ceiling sconces of the Apollo, with a view of the stage that’s, to put it mildly, vertiginous. The actors seem very far away indeed.” Is it worth it?

“Next to Normal,” which passed its one-year mark on Broadway on Saturday and is preparing for a national tour in November, now qualifies as a hit: it has earned back its $4 million capitalization, the producers said last week.

“It also discovered that 93% of London audiences in 2008 (when the research was undertaken) thought that the performance they attended was either very good (75%) or fairly good (18%), while 83% thought their ticket represented good or fairly good value for money.”

“Nearly 30 per cent of the total television audience were watching BBC One on Saturday evening as 20 young hopefuls auditioned for the part of Dorothy in a new production of The Wizard Of Oz.”