Category: theatre

“More than 100 performances and a keynote address by poet Maya Angelou are expected to attract an estimated 60,000 people to the biannual, weeklong event.”

“North London’s Arcola Theatre is laying plans to create the UK’s first environmentally friendly arts ‘campus’, in a multimillion-pound project that will see the company’s new home constructed from straw bale.”

“With unprecedented intensity, new plays are telling us about our lives in styles ranging from documentary socio-drama to great apocalyptic statements. Our fears are transformed into hopes in that process of joyful recognition peculiar to the experience of live theatre.”

“If only we had a David Hockney image of Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth or Tom Phillips’s take on Simon Russell Beale or Antony Sher as Richard III. The list of performances one would love to have seen painted is endless: Vanessa Redgrave as Rosalind, Peggy Ashcroft as mad Queen Margaret, Ian McKellen as Richard II, Mark Rylance as Hamlet. Why don’t theatres take the initiative and start commissioning painters to preserve individual performances for posterity?”

“When this fiasco opened to lousy reviews in January 2008, Disney executives ran around town telling everyone that the reviews didn’t matter because ‘The Little Mermaid’ was like ‘Bank of America.’ Let’s see. Bank of America stock price, January 2008: $50. Bank of America stock price, July 2009: $13. You know what? Those Disney executives were right!” (Scroll down.)

“Our mission is in large part to promote conversations about theater. You do that in person,” says Victoria Bailey, executive director of the Theater Development Fund, which runs TKTS. “There is an urban fellowship about that experience.”

“Two blockbusters dominated the Helpmann Awards presented at Sydney’s Opera House last night. The Broadway hit musical Wicked and the Sydney Theatre Company’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s history plays, the eight-hour War of the Roses, both won six awards.”

“For months it has been known simply as Steven Soderbergh’s untitled project for the Sydney Theatre Company. The secret nature of the production that opens in December has been tantalising.” Part of the reason for the silence, it seems, is that the script is based on a real-life case that’s not over yet.

“So, Too Close to the Sun is closing four weeks early at the Comedy theatre. The unlikely musical about Ernest Hemingway is the latest in a lineup of West End duds that have bombed.” The latest, that is, in a lineup of West End duds whose bombing was entirely predictable. Unlike their flamboyant Broadway peers, “London’s musical flops tend to involve comparative unknowns (such as the team behind last year’s Imagine This) and can be seen coming a mile off.”

“[T]here’s something about a certain kind of summer theatergoing … that makes you look differently at the city and at the conventions of the stage. This year there are shows on boats, in cars, on the streets and in many public places, from ‘Joan of Arc’ in Fort Tryon Park to ‘Measure for Measure’ in a Lower East Side parking lot. These productions are blurring the boundaries between the created and the real worlds through immersion, interactivity and site-specificity.”