Category: theatre

“The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is giving Hartford Stage a $500,000 grant to help stage the world premiere of ‘The Orphans’ Home Cycle,’ the late Horton Foote’s reconfiguring of his nine-play epic, described as an American ‘Odyssey.’ … The grant is one of the largest in Hartford Stage’s history and the largest for a specific production.”

“Q’ahwa Sada,” which has been running since November at a Cairo theatre, “is a series of 12 vignettes that satirize the ills of Egypt. The cast of 30 punctuates each episode by sipping on small cups of unsweetened coffee, the kind served at funerals throughout the Middle East. The corpse in question is Egypt: its politics, civility, economy, family cohesion, architecture and even Arabic language all in decay.”

“Green Day, the chart-topping pop-punk band born in Berkeley, is morphing into a collective playwright, and it will unveil its first effort at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in September, the group announced Monday. The musical titled ‘American Idiot,’ based on Green Day’s 2004 Grammy-winning, multi-platinum album of the same name, is being developed in collaboration with Michael Mayer, the Tony-winning director of Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik’s ‘Spring Awakening.'”

“Theatre is a fun, powerful and ubiquitous art form, but having a “World Theatre Day” makes it seem like some sort of disease we need to raise consciousness about. Or a cause to don a little rubber bracelet for: Save Our Thesps. There’d be no World Theatre Day if everyone thought theatre was in a healthy state. We only organise capital-D Days for things that we fear are in peril. (See also: Earth Day.)”

“A lot of what drives the latest wave of shock theater is a desire to be hip and current and cool, and to compete with the dominant media of our time: movies and television. Playwrights seize the tools of these essentially visual media – graphic imagery, turbo-powered plotting, and a heightened version of reality that can feel more involving than reality itself – and apply them to a medium that is quintessentially not visual but verbal. It’s a mistake on two levels.”

“In a move that rips apart one of Chicago’s most venerable off-Loop theaters, almost all of the acting ensemble members of the American Theater Company say they are severing connections with the institution many of them helped found 25 years ago.”

The show’s new Broadway revival has Richard Zoglin thinking some heretical thoughts: that the script “seems too thin to live up to its ambitions”; wondering if Bernstein’s score “really belongs in the very top rank of American musicals”; asking “Who would know that the lyricist would grow up to be Stephen Sondheim?”

The highly-regarded company announced that its 2009-10 season would offer six productions in place of the usual seven and that it would rent out its 150-seat Stage II rather than present its own work there. The good news: Among the stars on the MTC stage next season are beloved veterans Rosemary Harris and Linda Lavin.

“The Guthrie Theater will cut its next fiscal-year budget by 14 percent, from $28 million to $24.1 million.” Director Joe Dowling, whose 2007 compensation totaled $682,229, “said he would reduce his salary by 10 percent and that four senior managers will take 5 percent cuts. Actors Equity and the Stagehands union have both agreed in principle to wage freezes (awaiting ratification).”