Category: theatre

So many actors, including leads, have been missing performances of “West Side Story” on Broadway “that last week Arthur Laurents, who wrote the show and directed this revival, read his cast the riot act. His tone, I’m told, was chilling. The 91-year-old told them that professionals don’t miss performances, and that they’d better get their acts together or find another line of work. … Producers say actors today, especially kids in their 20s, think nothing of calling in sick.”

“The Royal Shakespeare Company is to apply for planning permission to keep its temporary base in Stratford-upon-Avon, the Courtyard Theatre, open for an additional two years, in order to minimise dark weeks while it moves back into the Royal Shakespeare and Swan theatres.”

“It’s one of those challenges you wonder how you ever came to accept: go to the Edinburgh festival and take part in as many plays and other events as possible. … Preparation for my Edinburgh extravaganza? A few calls to writers, directors, producers, publicists, anyone, just before I take the sleeper north, asking them if they had any parts for a large, greying man with a wooden stage presence. I’ll be honest: I do not sleep well on the train.”

“[B]esides introducing a certain kind of spontaneity and titillating uncertainty that can only take place in live performance, what makes bloopers so interesting is the opportunity they provide for the performers to display their quickness, wit or personality, uninterrupted by the dictates of the author. Disasters, oddly, are the only time when the actors are completely in control.”

“[H]ow much information is too much? What balance should a writer strike between safeguarding the joy of discovery for those who haven’t yet seen a play, and talking in such generalities that the writing becomes meaningless? … The answer is not clear-cut – it varies from show to show and writer to writer – but it raises [another] question: how much damage can a spoiler actually do?”

“Brian Yorkey, who wrote the book and lyrics and — with the composer Tom Kitt — won a Tony Award for the score, said that when first approached about adapting his play for thumb-typers, it sounded like ‘a bit of a chore.’ Mr. Yorkey grew to view it as a creative challenge, though, since the adaptation entails characters sending Twitter messages during moments they deliver no lines.”

Since becoming artistic director of the OSF in 2007, Bill Rauch “has made significant changes, increasing the number of non-Western plays, bringing in new directors, expanding the use of nontraditional casting and pursuing a connection between Shakespeare and contemporary theatrical forms, including hip-hop and spoken-word poetry.”

With works like Caroline, or Change, Sweeney Todd and Les Misérables, mostly through-sung but written in a Broadway-ish idiom,”does the old-school definition of opera as ‘drama set to music’ require a fresh look?” Composer Ricky Ian Gordon, who writes in both genres, says, “The lines have become blurred. I feel like both forms are mutating.” But could a theater market, say, Caroline, or Change as an opera?

“At this year’s fringe, dark theatres are something of a subgenre” – with an adaptation of the Iliad acted out in complete blackness, “Don Quixote performed to a blindfolded audience and His Ghostly Heart, a new one-act drama by Skins writer Ben Schiffer, played with the lights out” and a couple in bed dimly visible.

New York Times theater critic Neil Genzlinger: “Back in 2001 I was sent to review a play at the Fringe, a two-hander called Hustle that left me underwhelmed. … I took in a few other Fringe shows that year as well, and I soon came to this conclusion: ‘Heck, I could write better plays than this’.” (He tried, twice.) “Since then I’ve absorbed a bit more of the Fringe culture … and now know the keys to mounting a successful Fringe show:”