Category: theatre

“Can theatre and rock music ever mix? It’s a question that rears its poodle-haired head every few years or so. Whether the answer is to be found in anything other than a greatest-hits medley hung on a paint-by-numbers plot is another matter. The new play this time is Nevermind, a fringe piece at the Old Red Lion Theatre in Islington, North London about a manic depressive music journalist visited by the ghost of Kurt Cobain.”

“In a time of lowered ratings nearly everywhere else, Sunday’s 63rd Annual Tony Awards — capped by 10 wins for the Elton John musical ‘Billy Elliot’ — actually delivered improved numbers. An average of 7.4 million total viewers tuned in to the three-hour Tony telecast, up 17% compared with last year and the best figure since 2006, according to early data from Nielsen Media Research.”

If British accents were in large supply, so were celebrity presenters and recipients, with Broadway having one of its busiest years for actors from film and television.

“Buffeted by high production costs, the ever-widening problem of piracy and a reluctance by established record companies to produce CDs for many shows, the cast album seems to survive today largely on the will of a few people determined to keep show music enshrined.”

“Tkts is the West End’s only official theatre booth, which has been operating since 1980. It has its main booth in Leicester Square, and another outlet in Brent Cross shopping centre.”

“That British actors, dancers, singers and directors, not to mention all those involved in design, are used to taking home a hefty trove of Tonys each year is hardly news. But not since the days when Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera first landed on the Great White Way has a Broadway season been so dominated by British imports. It is a state of affairs that some deplore.”

“If you didn’t live near New York, or couldn’t afford tickets, you picked up the print editions if you wanted to be part of the conversation. Those days, sadly, are pretty much gone. Readers’ eyeballs have fled elsewhere. New plays are hard to find in bookstores. They are issued, if at all, mostly by university presses and boutique publishers.”

“Theatergoers have long been accustomed to a measure of bad behavior: people who think their whispers are inaudible; snackers who open deafening cellophane candy wrappers; latecomers who knee-bump entire rows of settled attendees. But some theater veterans say manners are breaking down faster than ever.”

And, when those predictions chafe, the critic states the outcome he’d prefer, such as this one in the best-play category: “‘God of Carnage’ will vanquish its competition, but a sentimental appreciation for the late [Horton] Foote would have had me cast my vote for the timely ‘Dividing the Estate’ in what is undeniably a weak category this year.”

Says Kazuo Ishiguro, author of the original novel, “Steven Sondheim’s A Little Night Music shows you can set an unlikely story to music. … This is a small scale thing and I might feel more cautious about it if the film version hadn’t been such serious, faithful adaptation.  … There is comedy in the book and a musical could bring that out more.”