Category: theatre

The actress-journalist, “who transformed the art of solo performance in the 1990s by embodying dozens of characters in her plays Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, is returning to the New York stage this fall for the first time in nine years with a new production about medicine and health care, Let Me Down Easy.“

“Sheffield Theatres took its first public step to reopening after a £15.3 million refurbishment project on Wednesday (April 8) by announcing its new artistic director. Daniel Evans, 35, an award-winning actor and director, will take on the position full time in June, to prepare for the complex’s grand reopening in November. Evans has won two Oliver Awards, both for best actor in a musical….”

“I’m not a God-squad type. I’m a beyond-lapsed Catholic. Yet something in me shudders at the thought that the only reference to a divine creator anywhere apparent on our stages this fortnight so far as I can tell, aside from the noble Italian invasion, is in His Dark Materials at the Birmingham Rep, where God, sorry ‘The Authority’, isn’t so much dead, as in need of a mercy killing. … And yet our rich theatrical tradition sprang from the church.”

“The Lexus Broadway series is going to add some spice to the grandeur of the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts’ new Winspear Opera House in its inaugural season [beginning this fall].” The series will include two-week runs of South Pacific, August: Osage County, Spring Awakening and Avenue Q.

“Actors’ Equity Association, the union of professional actors and stage managers in the United States, has purchased its own building on Randolph Street just a block or two west of the core of Chicago’s theater district. … Equity is considering moving some of the union’s national back-office functions from New York to Chicago.”

“Want a glimpse of Kylie Minogue’s minidress or Mick Jagger’s jumpsuit? How about a close-up of Pete Townshend’s smashed guitar? The Victoria & Albert Museum’s new Theatre & Performance Galleries are the place for you. They just might not be the best place for them.”

Neil LaBute’s Broadway play includes a ferocious and deeply insulting monologue delivered by a woman to the ex-boyfriend who’s wounded her. “A male audience member must have found something a bit too personal in the verbal assault because he stood, called her a bitch twice, said a few other things that cannot be printed, and stormed out of the theater.”

“In contemporary criticism, authority is everything, and it is nothing without both expertise and experience. As far as I know, there are no regularly employed theatre critics under 30. For all their vim and vigour, their self-assurance and their passion, the young critic is inevitably a naive one. The question, then, is not one of whereabouts, but of training: where are tomorrow’s critics going to come from?”

“This has become a hard-and-fast rule for Broadway producers. Perhaps anxious that thrifty theatergoers will be shopping only for brand names this spring, they have stuffed the season with famous actors in plays new and old.”

Though his name was never to be found above the title, he was one of the half-dozen most influential figures in modern American theater.