Category: theatre

“The French had the food, the philosophers and the designer clothes, but if there was one cultural genre where London could always claim undisputed superiority it was musicals — with the best shows and the biggest audiences outside New York.” Now Paris is making inroads.

“Martin, who succeeded Tony winner Roger Rees as Williamstown artistic director in 2008, will continue in his role throughout the upcoming season at the Massachusetts theatre hub,” then step down.

On a night when many audience members were delayed in a jam caused by the theatre’s parking lot, the show started on time — and it shouldn’t have. “Unpleasantness prevailed. My blood was boiling. I don’t think I [have] ever come closer to jumping out of my seat and tackling an usher.”

The show, now in its seventh year, “has become the only show in Broadway history to gross more than $2 million at the box office in a single week of performances.”

It’s David Finkle of TheatreMania. “Everyone agreed that Finkle was qualified; but several members, particularly those who had been in the Circle for a long time, were reluctant to start down what they worried would be a slippery slope into the blogosphere.”

“Second City, which celebrates a splashy, star-studded 50th anniversary next weekend, always has danced a delicate pirouette between light and dark, polish and heart, business and art, slickness and spontaneity, expansion and retraction, function and dysfunction, maternal nurturing and patriarchal practicality.”

Downsizing still engenders some key questions, though: Does the trend toward fewer musicians have creative consequences? And can composers of new tuners expect larger orchestras for their shows in the future? The answers are a respective “yes” and “no.”

“The old theater (built 40 years ago out of a 1930s-era restaurant) was about ready to fall apart. It wasn’t even a question of one or two things that needed to be fixed. That space had long outlived its purpose. But it was a space in which great art was made.”

“San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre this morning unveiled a $22-million theater and education center on its 3-acre campus in Balboa Park. The new complex, which also includes an outdoor restaurant and a plaza, came in on time and on budget.” The addition’s centerpiece is the 250-seat in-the-round White Theatre.

The English-language staging of David Henry Hwang’s “play centred around homosexuality and the Cultural Revolution, both taboo subjects in China,” was in the middle of its second performance when “[p]olicemen arrived … and said that the show was being performed without a licence and should therefore cease.”