Category: theatre

If you follow my rules for surefire Pulitzer-bait, you too can catch the laurel.

“Reported instances of actors losing it with disruptive audience members mid-performance and yelling at them to stop phoning/taking photographs/giggling/whispering/coughing/breathing (delete as necessary), seem to be as regular a feature as opening nights themselves. Sometimes the victims even have the temerity to answer back. If things get much worse, audiences will have to be safely kettled in the circle bar till the performance is over.”

“Des McAnuff is confident the Stratford Shakespeare Festival will finish this season in the black, even though slow ticket sales have forced the company to put 30 performances on hold. … [T]he festival’s artistic director insists the season will fare well financially. ‘Our projections are that we’re going to end the season in the black. … I’m not being a Pollyanna. We’re putting strong work on the stage,’ McAnuff said.”

“North Shore Music Theatre, trying desperately to survive, announced a new plan yesterday to dramatically cut costs so it can launch a season this summer. But the nonprofit Beverly theater said it must still raise $2 million by July in order to put on six musicals and its holiday production of ‘A Christmas Carol.'” New England’s largest nonprofit theatre is hoping co-productions will be the key to its survival.

“La Jolla Playhouse has tapped a veteran producer from artistic director Christopher Ashley’s extended creative family to become the theater’s managing director. The Playhouse’s board is announcing today it has chosen Michael S. Rosenberg, 40, to take over the theater’s top administrative job, effective May 4.”

“[Rapper] Akala engages [a group of teens] in a series of exercises that explore the close relationship between the rhythms of modern hip-hop and the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare. He hands out cards printed with a couple of lines. We have to decide whether they’re the work of the playwright or a rapper. It’s harder than you’d think.”

“An employee of Seattle Children’s Theatre was arrested early Tuesday at his home in Seattle’s Columbia City neighborhood and charged with possession of child pornography. … A statement from the theater said the man had been placed on administrative leave and that no theater children were involved.”

“At Roumieh, Lebanon’s biggest penitentiary, in the mountains above Beirut, something unprecedented in the history of the country is happening. Every Sunday for four months, inmates from the all-male prison are performing a play…. What’s more, they’re doing it in front of an audience from outside, many of them women. The play’s director is a woman from outside, a noninmate.” The play? “Twelve Angry Men,” in Arabic.

The playwright and monologuist is bringing a double-bill of one-man one-acts the New York’s Public Theater next month. In Berlin/Wall, Hare turns his gaze on two barriers: the one that used to divide Berlin and the one going up to separate the West Bank from Israel.

“[A]lthough the religious cult of the auteur has been widely attacked … it is now in danger of spreading to theatre. Certain creative figures, whose endeavours I frequently admire, are in danger of acquiring auteur status. What that means, in effect, is that their individual style and idiosyncratic signature becomes more important than the work itself.”