Category: theatre

“Theater that shocks is, of course, in the eye (and mind) of the beholder, but most plays and musicals in recent decades have ignored blunt instruments like blackface. … For the most part, shocks onstage tend to come through incendiary language, provocative plot turns and chilling frights.”

“For the big Broadway musical, surviving the recession often means that the sets are rarely stars anymore. You don’t hear many audible gasps these days when the curtain rises, or when scenery transforms to reveal a theatrical vision.”

Charles Isherwood: “As much as I enjoyed the show, directed and choreographed by Bill T. Jones, it left me with lingering questions about the depiction of the African milieu it evoked. In short, the emphasis in Fela! on the spectacle of African culture tilted the show a little too closely toward minstrelsy. It evoked an unsettling feeling I can’t say I ever had before at the theater.”

“As part of a $22-million upgrade, the Old Globe Theatre demolished a 224-seat in-the-round theater and replaced it with … a 250-seat in-the-round theater. The spaces are so similar that, from your seat, you have to look closely to notice what’s different. Good thing.”

“Research into the National Theatre’s live screening of Phèdre last year has revealed the cinema audiences had a lower average income than theatregoers who saw the performance in the NT’s South Bank home. However, 91.3% of the cinema-goers had seen a play within the last year, and 41.3% had been to the National Theatre within the last 12 months.”

The company “is to present a six-month season in a disused shop in Elephant and Castle shopping centre, opening next month. The season marks the beginning of the Royal Court’s Theatre Local project, which has taken three years to plan and aims to take plays into new locations and new communities.”

“Plenty of professions including law and journalism have an Oxbridge bias, and theatre criticism in particular has been, and continues to be, dominated by people who attended those universities. But why should the same be true of directors – particularly when you’d assume that it is creativity, not academic prowess, that counts on stage?”

“He plans to use some of his estimated £635m fortune to endow each of his seven London playhouses with enough cash to keep them open after his death, staging only musicals and plays. The move throws down a challenge to his friend and rival Andrew Lloyd Webber to follow suit.”

“A bad accent makes the suspension of disbelief a real effort for the audience because we start thinking about how the line is said, rather than the line itself. And the moment we become irritated by a poor accent, we start noticing all sorts of other deficiencies in the production – the hubris of celebrity casting, for example.”

The Elizabethan equivalent of movie-house popcorn was evidently oysters -“oysters by the cartload, crab and other shellfish like mussels, whelks and periwinkles. Dried raisins and figs, hazelnuts, plums, cherries and peaches were also consumed in great quantities, according to experts who excavated The Rose and The Globe theatres.”