Category: theatre

“At a gala performance on Monday night of the new Broadway musical ‘Sondheim on Sondheim,’ the director James Lapine and the musical book writer John Weidman were to announce that Henry Miller’s Theater, which re-opened on Broadway last fall after a nearly complete overhaul, will be renamed the Stephen Sondheim Theater.”

Hall: Interesting thing about notes. You can see an actor missing doing something, and if you tell him what he should do, he won’t do it…. But if you say: “I think you were so wise not to . . .” then he’ll do it. It rather works, I find.
Ayckbourn: Remember when Mrs Thatcher invited you to a reception at Downing Street and you asked me to come with you because “she likes you”?

“‘Grease’ was first performed in 1971 in the original Kingston Mines Theatre…. From there, it conquered the world on stage and screen, but the content changed drastically and its teenage characters became less Chicago critters and more generic. Now, they’re coming back home.”

“I was on this same cruise ship and didn’t have anything to do on that particular trip, and the resident cruise ship genius said there was this script that Dore Schary wrote subsequent to Sunrise at Campobello on FDR’s last years. … I’ve never done a one-man show, and I wanted to see if I could meet the challenge, and of course, I adore Roosevelt.”

Charles Isherwood, from London: “It’s only when you come to this city and hear British actors playing Americans that you realize how funny we all talk. … I found myself wondering whether the twang-free voice I’d always assumed I’d been speaking in sounded so very peculiar to the British.”

“[Theresa] Rebeck’s argument would gain credibility and traction if she questioned things like why the only show from last season’s crop to transfer from off to Broadway is Geoffrey Nauffts’ ‘Next Fall’ — about gay men. Consider, after all, that several plays written by women had very healthy runs last year but didn’t transfer….”

“[W]omen playwrights live in a world where we are told it is a bad thing if women are 57 percent of the undergraduate population, because that’s too big an imbalance, but it’s an okay thing if women are only getting 17 percent or 6 percent or 9 percent of the best jobs in show business … and if we tried to rectify that it would be unfair because it would involve ‘quotas.'”

Juliet and Her Romeo, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy now at the Bristol Old Vic, casts the star-crossed lovers as octogenarians in two wings (private and NHS) of an English nursing home. Starring as Juliet is stage and television veteran Siân Phillips, playing the role for the first time.

“I particularly enjoyed [Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem], so I stood up at the end and clapped. Something often referred to as a standing ovation. A man and woman next to me also stood up, and at once provoked the blind, spitting fury of a well-dressed couple behind them who had remained seated.”

The “suggestion that ‘the definition of good art would be that which people wanted to see, or that which private patrons wanted to fund’ turns art into a kind of popularity contest. Such an approach to funding would kill our thriving and innovative theatre culture stone dead – the same theatre culture that gives such a good return on the investment it attracts.”