Category: theatre

District Six, a neighborhood in Cape Town, South Africa, “became a symbol of the apartheid era – and of the struggle to defeat it.” Now a new theatre there, named for playwright Athol Fugard, “is home to an all-black company, Isango Portobello.” (Well, not quite all black: The artistic director is white.)

“In Pleasance Two, in Edinburgh, I like to sit in the centre of the first row because that’s where I was sitting when I realised with total certainty that I was pregnant with my first child. … As I walk up the steps of the Royal Court, I always recall sitting there weeping for a lost love, who abandoned me for ever at the interval of a show.”

“Without immediate hope of conventional tenants, and with more shoppers going online or to out-of-town retail parks, landlords and local authorities are co-operating with arts organisations to draw people back into town centres, allowing everyone from the Royal Court … to tiny groups such as Write by Numbers to use the empty space.”

Jude Law and Rachel Weisz have scooped the acting honours at this year’s Whatsonstage.com theatre awards, voted for by the public.

“The five-foot-two inch tall Eve Robot 3 (EveR-3) was developed by South Korea’s state-run KITECH in 2006. The android speaks in both Korean and English, and exhibit 16 different facial expressions.”

“So which plays rise to the top over time? The Denver Post asked a long list of theater professionals nationwide to give an opinion. Their cumulative take: U.S. writers have produced only two plays in nearly 50 years that belong beside the very best.”

“The Mountaintop, a new two-character play that imagines a surprising turn of events for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the night before his assassination, is aiming for Broadway in the fall … The play, by Katori Hall, received a critically praised production in London last summer.”

“The Sundance Theatre Lab, long ensconced 6,200 feet above sea level at Robert Redford’s Sundance Resort in the Rocky Mountains, will descend in March to the Berkshire Mountains community of North Adams, Mass. – elevation 700 feet. And come June, it will be dipping its toes at Governors Island in New York Harbor.”

“The first is that, because Lucy Prebble’s Enron and Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem have transferred to the West End, we are witnessing a golden age for new writing. … Delighted though I am by the commercial success of Enron and Jerusalem, two swallows don’t make a theatrical summer.”

Charles Isherwood: “The news that the Royal Shakespeare Company will install a classical theater inside the Park Avenue Armory for a six-week residency in the summer of 2011 inspires both gratitude and chagrin. … The chagrin derives from the dispiriting reflection that the chance to see five Shakespeare plays in rep is virtually unheard of in this, the country’s theatrical capital.”