Category: theatre

“Fugobi Broadway 3-D, which hopes to bring no fewer than five musicals to global audiences within the next year and a half, was formed to address what [entrepreneur Dale Smith] calls a crisis in the current Broadway model. While there were a record number of musicals in New York this season, he says, fewer people saw these shows, many of which took years and millions of dollars to develop, than watch an average episode of television.”

“Equity is to launch a campaign to reintroduce theatre cats into London’s historic theatres, as part of the union’s ongoing bid to improve actors’ working conditions in the West End.” The union’s proposal “notes that cats not only represent ‘an environmentally sound alternative to poison and traps, but [are] also good for morale’.”

“The container is not just the set, but the theatre itself; the audience of 28 will sit on boxes inside as the action goes on around them, and the only lighting will come from torches carried by the actors. A few extra ventilation holes will be drilled; the Young Vic doesn’t want the audience passing out. Recreating the smell of excrement would have been too overwhelming, says [director Tom Wright], but the heat, darkness, smell of sweaty bodies and claustrophobia will make the experience real enough.”

Livent founder and former Broadway producer Garth Drabinsky, convicted of fraud and forgery, “would teach theater students ‘discipline in the craft,’ talk about honesty and ‘avoidance of unethical conduct’ in visits to 65 schools across the country, as part of a sentence in which he would avoid jail, his lawyer Edward Greenspan told a judge at a sentencing hearing in Toronto today.”

“The Shakespeare Theatre Company will furlough its 100-plus employees, including Artistic Director Michael Kahn, this summer to help the bottom line. The furloughs will be staggered.” The company’s marketing director puts the move into perspective this way: “Compared to what other people are going through, [the furlough] feels fairly minor.”

“Yeats is coming back to the Abbey, but not as we might expect him. The [Celtic rock band the] Waterboys will perform a series of five concerts at the national theatre around St Patrick’s Day, with frontman Mike Scott, Irish fiddler Steve Wickham and guest musicians performing An Appointment with Mr Yeats, combining the poetry of Yeats with the passion of the Waterboys’ music.”

The Polish director, one of the most influential theater artists of the 20th century, “developed the concept of the ‘poor theater’ – theater that has been stripped down to its most essential parts.” A two-week festival in his hometown of Wroclaw last month “drew master directors like Roberto Bacci, Eugenio Barba, Peter Brook and [Richard] Schechner, among others.  … All were staging performances and giving workshops and talks as part of the extensive program.”

“The sentencing hearing for former Broadway producers Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb got under way Monday in Toronto, with the prosecution calling for a sentence of eight to 10 years for each defendant. … Charged in October 2002 with cooking the books at Livent, the now-defunct legit production company they co-founded, the two men were convicted March 25 on two counts of fraud and one of forgery, bilking investors of about C$500 million ($430 million). “

“Not that there shouldn’t be more opportunities for women to run institutions, but institutions with women at the helm don’t fare any better than those run by men in terms of producing women. There are a lot of great scripts out there by women that just aren’t making it on to the boards.”

“Shouldn’t the gender category have withered away by now? As the only first-string female New York theater critic for an indefensible number of years, I would have loved to pretend these disparities were illusions. And with a heartening new infusion of women on the aisle (there are now a record four of us in the 20-member New York Drama Critics Circle), we just might be able to test for unconscious, perhaps inevitable, gender bias in reviews.”