Category: theatre

“On Thursday, New Haven’s Long Wharf will be drawing on the world-class medical and scientific community at nearby Yale University and Yale-New Haven Hospital, as well as representatives of major drug manufacturers and other biotech experts, for a daylong symposium on AIDS and other infectious diseases.”

“A more repellent personality would be hard to imagine, and yet Hedda Gabler is one of the eternal fascinators of the world stage… So what is the mystery of her attraction? Probably her mystery itself. No matter how many times we encounter her, how many new angles we view her from, Hedda remains strangely inscrutable.”

In the age of the jukebox musical, it had to happen. ‘Thriller Live, a new West End show built around the music of Michael Jackson, features a moonwalking lookalike, zombie choreography and prepubescent singers who hit the high notes on ‘ABC.’ What’s absent: any backstory about the elusive King of Pop… There’s no plot or dialogue – just music.”

“The premiere of a West End play directed by Kevin Spacey has been delayed for nine days. Complicit at the Old Vic, starring US actor Richard Dreyfuss, will now open its run on 28 January. A spokesman said ‘more development time’ was needed, but declined to comment on reports that Dreyfuss has been prompted during preview runs.”

“Is it frivolous to be making or talking about theatre while people are dying in Gaza? … As those of us who marched against the invasion of Iraq know all too well, demonstrating in a democracy often changes nothing. But can theatre do more? Can it engage quickly with such crises, and can it play a part – if not in fixing the world, then at least in helping to change it?”

The Oscar-winning Dame’s first stage performance in six years – in Nicholas Hytner’s staging of Racine’s Phèdre – will be the first of four National Theatre productions broadcast live to movie theaters. The program includes 50 independent cinemas in Britain and a further 100 around the world.

“[T]he funky midtown Manhattan space that offered edgy plays, pop and rock musicals, concerts, comedy and more, has closed its doors, owner Lee Z. Davis announced on Jan. 14. No other explanation was given.”

Last fall, Thomas Oberender, tired of fighting for funding and prestige for his programming in a festival dominated by opera and classical music, announced that he was leaving Salzburg after this summer. But now that his nemesis, artistic director Jürgen Flimm, is moving on to Berlin, Oberender has changed his mind.

“An Austrian theater says it will stage a satiric soap opera centered around Josef Fritzl, a man who allegedly held his daughter captive for 24 years and fathered her seven children. The 3raum-anatomietheater in Vienna says the show will be titled Pension Fritzl – German for ‘Fritzl’s Bed and Breakfast’.”

“Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s Really Useful Group is developing a range of video games based on the theater impresario’s musical stage shows… the group says two industry shifts have prompted its interest: the emergence of more female gamers in the traditionally male-dominated game consumer demographic, and the popularity of singing- and music-based titles like Playstation’s Singstar and Xbox’s Lips.”