Category: theatre

“I’d never been naked on stage before and, like most people, the thought of volunteering for that universal nightmare of full-frontal nudity before a jeering audience scared the bejesus out of me. But I’m an actor, and we’re nothing if not an ambitious lot, so with the help of a gym membership and some hair removal cream, I found myself at an audition…. A week later, I was offered the job. (A day after that, I moved into the gym and began an affair with rice crackers and beansprouts).”

“Total ticket sales for live shows in Australia fell by 13.6% last year in a trend that Aussie producers say reflects Oz’s faltering economy during the period. … In the five years the survey has been undertaken, overall figures appear to have grown and then slumped in line with the broader economy. (Individual show grosses are a tightly guarded secret in Oz.)”

“The Stratford Shakespeare Festival, squeezed by declining ticket sales and a vanishing pool of American tourists, is asking its board of governors to donate funds toward the 2010 season. … The board is believed to be close to approving a season of substantially fewer plays than the 14 on the 2009 playbill.”

“Our greatest playwright was a commercial playwright working for a commercial management. Yet the idea that commercial is a dirty word persists in the theatre. So, too, does the notion that somehow it is nobler for everyone to survive on crumbs of funding rather than nurturing the best possible environment for artists to create work.”

The theatre company at Shakespeare’s Globe in London means to find out: this fall the group will perform Love’s Labors Lost at eight U.S. universities. “The lights will remain on in the theater, to try to mimic the outdoor feel of the Globe, and characters will talk directly to audience members (or look at them as they talk to other characters).”

“The four-day California International Theatre Festival will run Aug. 20-23 at various locations throughout the city of Calabasas. The festival is being organized by actress Linda Purl, who last year directed the Rubicon International Theatre Festival in Ventura. When financial cutbacks forced the cancellation of the Ventura festival for 2009, Purl approached the city of Calabasas, which agreed to partly fund the new festival.”

“The Skylight Opera Theatre has retained Eric Dillner as managing director, despite mass defections from performers demanding his resignation in the wake of the firing of artistic director Bill Theisen.”

“As a sound-system blasted a cha-cha-cha, the men began to dance. Wearing outlandish costumes with oversize hats and wigs, and boots with 15-centimeter heels from a Milanese store that caters to drag queens, they strutted and pranced.” It’s Alice in Wonderland, a Theatrical Essay on the End of a Civilization, performed by a company that for 21 years has made theater with, and for, inmates at a maximum-security prison in Italy.

“Chicago is snagging the very first post-Broadway production of one of the most successful musicals of the decade. Attracting a long run by arguably the only current Broadway show with a box-office pull that could rival ‘Wicked’ is a major coup for Broadway in Chicago, which fought hard for the show against presenters in San Francisco, who also wanted their city to be the first outside New York to stage the show.”

Michael Frayn will be the next visiting professor of contemporary theatre at Oxford University, succeeding Kevin Spacey in a “starry professorship” that “seems to be more of a PR exercise than a serious academic proposal. Frayn is a respectable, intellectual choice but Oxford does not even have a drama department at which he is expected to lecture.”