Category: theatre

“Theater aficionados need not panic: the bright lights, flying scenery and lavish costumes are not going away, but washing those costumes with eco-friendly detergent and illuminating those lights with low-watt compact-fluorescent bulbs and light-emitting diodes are on the list of conservation measures [New York’s theatrical industry] is already carrying out.”

“A concert pianist’s dying wish to appear on stage in Hamlet has been realised 26 years after his death. André Tchaikowsky, a Polish Jew who escaped the Holocaust and settled in Britain, bequeathed his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company to be used as a macabre prop… The relic finally emerged to take its place centre stage when David Tennant took on the role of Hamlet in Stratford-upon-Avon.”

“1816: Gaslight illuminates Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theatre. Theater patrons are living in an age of wonders: lights that burn ‘without wick or oil.'”

“The last week was one of the grimmest on Broadway. Within eight days four shows announced their closings. Yet the news about ‘The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein’ shutting its doors Jan. 4 seemed to spark an unusual guilty glee among theater people.” Its sin, in their view? Arrogance.

“Charlotte St. Martin, executive director of the Broadway League, said on Friday the next six weeks were a crucial time for the theater business, which typically enjoys its busiest period over the Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year holidays.”

“Offhand I can’t think of a single page-to-stage transfer that really thrilled me, that came close to equaling — or even approximating — the achievement of the book. More often than not these efforts come across as dehydrated-and-reconstituted Reader’s Digest versions of literature, denuded of the distinctive authorial voice and the imaginative scope that gave them their stature as memorable, sometimes even life-altering works of art.”

“So Christmas is once again lurching towards us with all the stealth of a Salvation Army band and as I look around at what the arts have to offer I’m left with the same nagging question I have every year – how do we manage to make art about Christmas so boring?”

“Playwright Michael Yawney spent the last three years crafting a comedy about Anita Bryant’s 1977 campaign to repeal Miami-Dade County’s first gay-rights ordinance. Yawney never expected that on the eve of its world premiere Thursday in Miami, 1,000 Homosexuals would be so relevant.”

“World-renowned theatre maker Robert Lepage is to join forces with dancer Sylvie Guillem and choreographer Russell Maliphant to create a new show called Eonnagata, which will be staged as part of Sadler’s Wells spring 2009 season. The story recounts the life of Charles de Beaumont, a member of French King Louis XV’s spy network, the King’s Secret, whose true gender was a constant source of speculation right up to his death.”

“In Imagine This, a new musical about the Holocaust, a group of actors in the Warsaw ghetto stage a play. The play is about a community of Jews in Masada who, in AD73, are surrounded by the Roman army and, rather than surrender, choose to kill themselves en masse.”