Category: theatre

“Here’s a question: when could you last tell what a theatre production actually looked like from its photograph alone? Theatre photography seems to have got into a bit of a rut.”

“The captions, received over wifi, scroll throughout live performances. The handsets have LED backlighting with a black background and orange text to minimise glare. They have a battery life of up to six hours.”

“A theatre group billing itself as Canada’s new national theatre company has been launched at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. The NAC 40th Anniversary English Theatre Acting Company is the first English theatre company formed at the centre in 25 years.”

“According to an Actors’ Equity Assn. spokesperson, there are roughly 79 theaters in Los Angeles that use one form of equity contract or another, a number that doesn’t include any big sit-down productions or the 40 or so theaters that sometimes use an Equity member or a guest artist or special appearance contract. Nor does it include the huge number of 99-seat productions each year (verging around 1,000, was the estimate).”

“Safety is job one,” but for wranglers there’s also “lots of reminding the children, who range in age from 7 to 18, that while waiting in the wings they’ve got to keep their energy up and their voices down, that if they want to eat something while in costume they’ve got to put on a robe, and that roughhousing while in costume is simply not in the script.”

“Years ago Alec Guinness was so thrown by a woman in the front row who was watching him through gigantic binoculars that he stepped down from the stage and removed them from her. The result? An usher came to him in the interval to say: ‘The blind woman in the front row apologises if she’s upset you.'”

The likely new owner of the North Shore Music Theatre, which sank under the weight of its debts this year, “has made a habit of buying closed or distressed properties and quickly reviving them.” William Hanney said the theatre’s “programming would remain largely the same” but “didn’t give positive reviews to the organization’s business structure.”

“An almost month-long creative explosion of comedy, art, dance, music and film will take place in at least 18 venues across London at exactly the same time artists gather in the Scottish capital.”

Ralph Miller, owner of the Bucks County Playhouse and of the recently charred Pocono Playhouse, “was facing a sheriff’s sale” of the Bucks County theatre until he declared bankruptcy. “But last week Skippack-based Stonebridge Bank called on the court to block the Chapter 11 bankruptcy, saying Miller ‘knowingly and fraudulently’ misrepresented his financial picture….”

The owner of Theatre by the Sea in Matunuck, R.I., has signed a purchase-and-sale agreement on the 54-year-old North Shore Music Theatre, whose financial troubles forced its closure in June. He says he’d like to “have a show sometime in the spring” but promises “major changes or else we’d end up the same way they did.”