Category: theatre

“Hall is inheriting a company that has filled an average of only 61% of its seats since its new venue opened in 2003, suffers from a hefty financial deficit and has been on the end of some pretty scathing notices from the critics. It has also become saddled with a reputation as a failing theatre, stuck in a rut.”

“The check, drawn on the Obamas’ bank in Chicago, arrived Jan. 4. Mosaic officials called the White House and were able to confirm that the gift really did come from the Obamas, though further details are sketchy.”

A new study by that title has ignited controversy in the theater world, with playwrights “see[ing] the nation’s major nonprofit theater companies as impediments to their work,” company leaders “view[ing] playwrights as insufficiently savvy about the cold realities of the business” and some observers calling discontented playwrights self-serving whiners.

“It wasn’t always thus: consider As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream et al. and Shakespeare starts to look (well, just a little) like the Nora Ephron of the Elizabethan age. … Of course, there are still plenty of romances in theatre – but not many [non-musical] plays that satisfy themselves with romance alone, and fewer still that are funny.”

“A musical about Barack Obama’s ‘Yes we can’ election campaign premieres in Germany this weekend, including love songs by the president to his wife Michelle and duets with Hillary Clinton. Even John McCain and Sarah Palin are given stage time.”

“Hall, son of former National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company director Peter Hall, is best known for his work with all-male Shakespeare company Propeller, which has recently staged well-received productions of The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice.”

“There’s a fascinating account of a dinner with Tom Stoppard where Pinter says that he doesn’t plan his characters’ lives and then asks his fellow dramatist: ‘Don’t you find they take you over sometimes?’, to which Stoppard firmly replies: ‘No.’ That says a lot.”

Albert Finney, Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, Michael Gambon — all have been mainstays of theatre in England. “Whereas there was a time not very long ago when a single season might well have brought stage sightings of all these talents, this venerable array is itself disappearing from sight, for reasons having to do with health, temperament and personal predilection.”

“How do we distinguish between something that is new but still rubbish, and something that is unfamiliar at first but requires that we develop a taste for it before its merits can be fully appreciated?”