Category: theatre

“To claim that Dame Judi Dench is ‘strangling theatre’ by suggesting that younger actors ought to have a bit more respect for the traditions to which they belong, as Rupert Goold has done, is insulting, absurd and maybe even self-serving.” But “he’s right to defend younger actors from any inference that they’re less able than their predecessors.”

A Shakespeare authority at the University of London “used software called Pl@giarism, developed by the University of Maastricht to detect cheating students, to compare language used in Edward III — published anonymously in 1596, when Shakespeare was 32 — with other plays of the period.”

“The award, created in 2001 in honour of scientist Lou Siminovitch and his late wife Elinore, a playwright, is worth $100,000. The winner gets $75,000 and gives the other $25,000 to a protégé or organization of his or her choice.” This year’s prize recognizes accomplishment in Canadian stage design.

“Now there’s an epilogue to The Laramie Project, and tonight more than a hundred theaters around the country will perform readings of the new play. Together with the first one, it constitutes a powerful version of Matthew Shepard’s story. But it’s not the only version — and that’s a big part of why the epilogue exists.”

“Harps and Angels,” which is to premiere in November 2010 at the Mark Taper Forum, “will feature songs previously written by Newman arranged in a way to tell a story about the American experience, according to Center Theatre Group.”

Set on New York’s Coney Island in 1907, 10 years after the Phantom fled Paris, it is co-written by Ben Elton and has taken more than two years to complete.

“I’m not ignoring the economy. We are flying in the face of it. We are saying, ‘This is not going to stop us.’ And so the best way we can figure out for it not to stop us is to do more than we ever have in the past.”

“Despite a bumper year for Britain’s stages, political theatres find audiences are staying away, opting to forget their troubles with escapist, light-hearted productions.”

“I think talk-backs are being embraced more and more by commercial theater because we producers sense that when people connect to a show, they want to prolong that experience as much as they can.”

“The action is set ten years after that in The Phantom of the Opera, has new music but features the same lead characters and takes place in Coney Island, the wonder-filled early 20th-century playground where New Yorkers gawped at freakshows and broke limbs on terrifying early rollercoasters.”