Category: theatre

“I am worried as anybody else that, with this massive downturn, people are going to say that what they can cut out of their budget is coming to the West End and going to the theatre. I think it will be a period of time where the populist things are what we rely on, and the more difficult and more serious things will have a lean time for a while. I guess that was exactly the same in the Great Depression and it was a long time before serious work started to come back.”

“TV and the theatre have always been intertwined. Who could have thought ten years ago that prime time TV would promote musical theatre and that there would be so many programmes about musicals – it’s marvellous. That is why the theatre is working.”

“London theater had a record-breaking year in 2008, with attendance for the year totaling 13,807,286, up 1% on the previous record set in 2007. Box office revenue hit £480,563,674 ($658 million), a 3% rise on the 2007 high.”

“The impresario is currently employing about 150 children who appear on stage in the show at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane and some of their parents have been muttering that the £20 that each child is paid per performance seems a little parsimonious.”

“Will theatergoers continue to be interested in issues raised by war? Given Americans’ exhaustion with the war in Iraq, and the departure of President Bush, not to mention the nation’s dire economic landscape, will there be a demand for war plays?”

It’s not enough that 81-year-old Estelle Parsons is starring eight times a week in August: Osage County on Broadway – she’s doing the national tour afterwards. (She lifts weights, too.) Meanwhile, Olympia Dukakis, 77, will do a six-wwek run in Craig Lucas’s The Singing Forest at the Public Theater this spring.

Kevin Von Feldt’s “A Christmas Carol” at the Kodak Theatre “experienced casting and technical problems and, despite a starry lineup … ended up realizing only 18.8% of the potential box office.” Von Feldt acknowledges “that there are indeed many bills he has left partially unpaid to creditors in the wake of the show’s financial failure.” His plan for paying those bills? Produce the show again next year.

“The Ohio Theater, a venerable cultural landmark that has nurtured generations of theater artists, has been given a six-month reprieve at its home at 66 Wooster Street in SoHo.” The theatre had been told it had to be out by the end of this month.

The journalist/intellectual-turned-politician, now head of Canada’s Liberal Party and possibly the next prime minister, was one of the rare small-l liberals who supported the Iraq War. Now more than a few observers are suggesting that the protagonist of David Hare’s play has a biography awfully similar to Ignatieff’s.

“The trust representing the late writer-director Colin Higgins has sued attorney Barry Hirsch for failing to properly represent his interests in the 9 to 5 stage musical.”