Category: theatre

“In the decades since Porgy and Bess opened on Broadway … it’s become fashionable in some quarters to criticise” the George Gershwin piece “as reductive, even patronising. But transplanted” by Cape Town Opera “to a place and an era when state-sanctioned oppression and segregation was a part of life,” it “has recovered its edge.”

“When almost the entire ensemble of the American Theater Company walked out last year following a dispute with artistic director PJ Paparelli, the actors vowed to reconvene under the original name of their company: American Blues Theater. Wednesday morning, plans for a new season were announced.”

When Finian’s Rainbow opened in 1947, its treatment of American race relations – “white and black performers dancing and holding hands” and a bigoted white senator “magically turned black so he can experience bigotry firsthand” – was provocatively edgy. These days, some aspects of the show seem provocatively retrograde.

“While Chicago’s Goodman and Steppenwolf theater companies have long track records of sending shows to New York, … Berkeley Rep’s emergence as a prime source for Manhattan stages is more abrupt and more unusual for a Bay Area not-for-profit theater.”

Combat is raging in the Australian theatre blogosphere over a pair of issues. The first is the under-representation of female directors, occasioned by the season announcements of two of the country’s major companies. The second is a certain critic’s demand for a return to “realism and well-made plays.”

“The role of Washington as a hotbed for musical theater advanced solidly Thursday when the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts announced it had received a $5 million gift for that express purpose.”

“Andy White is taking over the artistic helm of the 23-year-old Lookingglass Theatre Company,” which “rotates its chief artistic role among its ensemble members.” White is a founding member and past artistic director of Lookingglass.

“Being $6.8 million in debt and struggling with diminished fund-raising, leaders of the Shakespeare & Company theater in Lenox, Mass., announced on Tuesday afternoon that they were cutting jobs, restructuring the theater’s business model, and taking other steps in hopes of shoring up its year-round productions and education programs.”

A stage adaptation of the novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter begins and ends with speeches by a deaf-mute character – making it difficult for a deaf actor to perform the role. As the play arrives in New York, deaf actors are arguing that a “hearing actor playing a deaf character is tantamount to putting a white actor in blackface.”

The director of the ten-day Suspense festival says that “recent shows such as War Horse, Avenue Q and Anthony Minghella’s Madam Butterfly have revealed how ‘sophisticated, irrational, grotesque and potent the artform can be’.”