Category: theatre

“Patti LuPone is irreplaceable. So say the producers of Broadway’s Gypsy, who yesterday announced they would shutter the hit musical revival on March 1, 2009, rather than try to replace its bold, bossy and critically beloved leading lady.”

The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, once a big Broadway-style extravaganza, is coming to London in an admired small-scale production from the Watermill Theatre in West Berkshire, where it completely sold out.

“The artistic director of the California Musical Theater, a major nonprofit producing company here in the state’s capital, resigned on Wednesday in the face of growing outrage over his support for a ballot measure this month that outlawed same-sex marriage in California.” Scott Eckern donated $1,000 to the campaign for Proposition 8.

The London theater company Punchdrunk has teamed up with HP Labs, gaming company Hide & Seek, and web design firm Seeper to create Last Will, a “hybrid experience” for two on-site players, one in a “physical realm” and the other in a “virtual realm.”

The Weinstein brothers have acquired the film rights to Tracy Letts’s Tony-winning drama about a ferociously dysfunctional Oklahoma family. Actresses are already lobbying for the juicy female roles in the film, which is planned for 2011 release.

“Producer Elizabeth I. McCann, who guided the Tony Awards through some choppy times, had a lot to do with the success of this year’s telecast, a program that won an Emmy and good reviews from the press.” But McCann was relieved of her duties this week, reportedly at the hands of “Charlotte St. Martin, who heads the Broadway League, and Howard Sherman, who looks after the nonprofit American Theater Wing.”

A festival at San Francisco’s Theatre Rhinoceros presents a series of short plays with gay or queer themes from the entire span of the 20th century – from a 1907 Russian “mini-musical” through Tennessee Williams and Joe Orton to a Tony Kushner one-act from 1998. The selection “poses some fascinating then-and-now questions about how gay life is seen in a culture that keeps rotating the lens to sharpen the view, blur it or blot it out altogether.”

“News that U.S. anti-gay campaigner Fred Phelps is encouraging followers from his Westboro Baptist Church to travel to Vancouver to protest against a production of The Laramie Project, has met with outrage. In response, a cast member of Fighting Chance Productions set up a Facebook page … and within 36 hours had 1,200 members interested in a counter-rally.”

“There are no hard statistics for how many fledgling drama groups emerge each year in the Puget Sound region. Judging from theater listings, a conservative estimate is at least a half dozen. And you can add that to more than 50 existing companies.” The treacherous financial landscape doesn’t seem to be discouraging newcomers.

“A gay arts group has sued the city of Milwaukee in federal court for violating its free speech rights three years ago when officials shut down a musical revue featuring nudity. The city temporarily shut down performances of ‘Naked Boys Singing!’ in August 2005 while it considered the Milwaukee Gay Arts Center’s application for a theater permit. The group later received a permit and reopened the show.”