Category: theatre

“The Stratford Shakespeare Festival has cancelled plans to stage a new production of The Tempest at the Luminato festival of the arts in Toronto next June.” The production, with Plummer as Prospero, will run at Stratford next year.

“Touring theatre group the British Shakespeare Company is laying plans to use the full-size replica of the Rose Theatre featured in Oscar-winning film Shakespeare in Love as its new permanent home in the north of England.”

“Ushering in a new generation of Broadway power brokers, Jordan Roth, a 33-year-old producer, finalized a deal on Tuesday to buy a stake in and to lead Jujamcyn Theaters, one of the theater district’s biggest landlords.”

Mark Fisher of The Guardian has a few suggestions, from The Minack on the rocky coast of Cornwall to Switzerland’s Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne; readers offer their own candidates.

Theatre critic John Heilpern, having left his longtime perch at The New York Observer, has this to say about the paper’s publisher: “I don’t want to be too negative about the 12-year-old owner, Jared Kushner, but as my ma and pa from Manchester, England, used to say, ‘That boy couldn’t run a chip shop.'” (Scroll down.)

“With so many metaphoric families forming and disbanding every day in the world of theater, the old-fashioned kind seems to have little space to flourish.” Parents of small children don’t find much support.

“Fresh from a run on the Edinburgh fringe, Jane Austen’s Guide to Pornography arrived at Battersea’s Theatre 503 last week with an all-male cast and not a little innuendo. … There are some predictably nudge-nudge elements – ooh, let’s make Jane Austen say ‘enormous cock’, that’ll be hilarious – but it actually works pretty well….”

“A Massachusetts regional music theater that has gone out of business will finally see one of its original musicals reach Broadway.” It’s the only show the theatre did that got to Broadway.

“Twenty-five years later, Cirque du Soleil’s big-budget, animal-free circuses are Canada’s largest cultural export, employing more than 4,000 employees from more than 40 countries and pulling in an estimated C$800m (£440m) a year in revenue.”

“The Willows Theatre Company, which began entertaining Contra Costa County audiences 34 years ago with well-known musicals and popular comedies, will close at least one of its two theaters if it can’t raise $350,000 in the next two months, officials say.”