“By terms of a settlement announced Monday, Aug. 19, [Carole] Shorenstein Hays will give up her half ownership of SHN, operator of the Orpheum and Golden Gate Theatre. [She] will retain her ownership of the Curran as a separate entity. [Hays and former business partner Robert Nederlander] are now free to compete for Broadway productions, a sticking point to their prior arrangement that had led to years of costly lawsuits over noncompete clauses between the theaters.” – San Francisco Chronicle
Category: theatre
Ruth McGowan On How To Curate Shows For A Fringe Festival
“How, then, do you avoid the cringingly awful? The shows so bad you feel you’re never going to get those precious moments of your finite life back again? McGowan smiles and looks up – as she does when she’s thinking or, as is most likely in this case, remembering just such a show.” – Irish Times
London’s National Theatre Says 35 Percent Of Its Plays By Living Writers Were By Women Last Season
This figure is still 15% short of the NT’s stated 50/50 target for gender representation, which the theatre has said it will achieve by 2021. It is also below the 42% figure recorded in 2016/17. However, the theatre argued that it is still “on course” to meet its targets. – The Stage
The Director Happily Tackling Six Hours Of Shaw
Kimberley Rampersad was a dancer who started to sense that dance jobs would dry up – and it was time to move into directing. Now, she’s got Man and Superman, all six hours of it, on her plate, thanks to her previous work – and to Mark Rylance. – The New York Times
At Edinburgh Fringe, There’s A Tremendous Amount Of Raw Talent That Needs Support To Thrive
Lyn Gardner says that “the fringe is like a machine churning out ever more raw talent, which is attractive to venues who buy it up cheaply. But the issue is they then offer very little ongoing support to develop that talent in a way that allows companies to grow and develop.” (Instead, they just get more raw, cheap talent the next year.) – The Stage (UK)
Twenty-Five Years After Founding Native Voices At The Autry, Randy Reinholz Gets Some Major Recognition
Reinholz, an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, also had a hit as a playwright with Off the Rails (an adaptation of Measure for Measure) at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2017. He “is now the first Native person to receive the Ellen Stewart Career Achievement in Professional Theater Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.” – Indian Country Today
The Number Of Kids Taking A-Level Drama In The UK Has Dropped Below 10,000 For The First Time Ever
But drama is actually doing well, compared to the other arts. Yikes: “Entries for music fell by 6% to 5,125, and dance dropped 18% to 1,050.” – The Stage (UK)
How London’s National Theatre Live Changed The Landscape
Broadcasting live theatre changes the audience – and the theatre. But for the better? Directors try to “collaborate with the show’s creative team and company. ‘We’ve got to do it in such a way that the artists are supported, that they trust it.'” – Playbill
How Napoleon Used Theatre To Legitimize Himself As Emperor
From one year to the next, he manipulated the Comédie-Française, selecting plays and scheduling performances on or around his birthday (which fell, conveniently, on a major Catholic feast) to give himself (born into minor Corsican nobility) the aura of a divinely appointed monarch. – History Today
Mini Cardboard Theatres: How The 19th-Century English Bourgeoisie Staged Plays At Home
“The characters were laid out on sheets of paper, frozen in dramatic poses … [and] the sets [were] storybook illustrations of extravagant palaces and howling wildernesses, to be slotted in and out of the back of the theater, behind the cavorting characters. The scripts that came with them were as miniaturized as the stage.” – JSTOR Daily