Category: theatre

“An audience of 200 people sits in the Historic Theatre at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. Each audience member is given a hand-held gaming controller and, on a big screen, an avatar – a small symbol – that’s specific to you. Then the questions come, and your replies will determine your avatar’s fate.”

“New York Theater Workshop said on Thursday morning that Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park have teamed up with Robert Lopez, the Tony-winning composer of Avenue Q, to create a new musical that will run in August and September. The theater would not provide any other details, other than that it would be a new musical.”

Ben Brantley: “‘Wait a minute!’ I’ll say to myself in the middle of the performance. ‘That actress playing the withered old aunt, isn’t she the one I saw as Juliet when I was in college?'”

“A performance at Frankfurt’s prestigious Schauspielhaus theatre ended in chaos after four of Germany’s top actors decided ‘as an experiment’ to substitute vodka for water during a performance of a play described in the programme notes as a ‘crazy depiction of one of the most famous alcoholic benders in world literature’.”

“This is not group suicide, or mass death via cult. Instead, these are discussion groups where people in despair come to ask questions about ending it all, where they talk about their intentions. … Those who linger become experts in the workings of the group, and a social hierarchy emerges.”

“The Society of London Theatre has announced that the total receipts for 2009 were £504,765,690,” a West End record. Attendance, too, was up. “While in previous years it has been musicals that have driven the increases … in 2009 the rise was almost entirely accounted for by the performance of drama at the box office.”

Richard “Christiansen, who retired from his post in 2002 after more than 40 years of reviewing Chicago-area theaters of all shapes and sizes, was especially known for his influential support of the off-Loop movement — in which Victory Gardens was a key early player.”

“In many ways, [‘A View from the Bridge’] is Miller’s best-observed work. Not only is the atmosphere based on his own dockside wanderings, but the play’s scandalous crux–will Eddie, driven by his attraction to his own niece, do something disastrous?–turns out to be based on a true tale.”

“Toronto’s Classical Theatre Project presented [the play] … to an enthusiastic audience of 1,000 students and teachers Monday afternoon, but the performance was almost derailed Sunday night by a group of self-appointed censors who found the Bard of Avon a bit too racy for Music City, U.S.A.”

“He may have murdered his way to the throne, killing the king, Duncan … but Macbeth brought peace to Scotland in violent times. He was an effective and popular ruler and the first Scottish monarch known to have made a pilgrimage to Rome.”