Category: theatre

“In the book, playwrights complain that the American theater lacks leaders. That Broadway lacks real producers. That their plays get workshopped to death. That workshops are too hard to get. They don’t even much care for the audience that shows up to see their works.”

“What do you do when your universally praised cast departs and you have to find another set of actors to carry on in a hit Broadway play?”

“What to make of all this? It suggests to me that American theaters have a pronounced bias in favor of new and newish plays by American authors, especially ones that have high public profiles.”

Matt Trueman: “I’m serious. I would outlaw cigarettes on the stage. Not, I should add, for the sake of our health … Something else is the problem: theatre shouldn’t smoke because, well, it doesn’t do it very well.”

“Enron,” the hit play, transfers to the West End next week. “In London, it’s already taken more than £1 million in advance bookings — small beer compared with the £40 billion that the Enron energy corporation owed when it went bankrupt in December 2001, but pretty darn impressive for a play about number-crunching in Texas.”

“[W]hy should theatre be immune from the global recession? The curious truth is that no one in the industry really knows. … The problem is that, unlike on Broadway, individual shows in the West End don’t release weekly box office grosses, so it’s impossible to get a picture of what is happening.”

“What works brilliantly in morbidly hilarious cartoons … is a tougher trick to translate to live theater, as the producers of ‘The Addams Family’ have learned” in the show’s Chicago bow. They chose “to eschew the slapstick humor of the popular ‘Addams Family’ television show of the 1960s and three movies in the ’90s” in favor of the cartoons.

Adam Cohen, a Shakespeare scholar and associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, died of cancer Saturday at 38. During his illness, radiation treatment left him temporarily unable to read — and thus, he later wrote, forced him to “experience the plays as Shakespeare probably intended”: visually.

“Los Angeles police detectives have arrested a man in connection with the slaying of Bennett Bradley, a longtime director and producer at the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood. … Police had initially suggested that Bradley was the possible target of a robbery.”

“Figures out later this month from the Society of London Theatre … are expected to show 2009 was a record breaking year – with more than 14 million tickets sold. The straight play has done particularly well.” But why did this happen during an economic slump?