Category: theatre

“Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin are in talks to star in Samuel Beckett’s modern classic,” Waiting For Godot, in a Broadway revival set to open in 2009. “The revival will slip in just under the wire of the April 30 Tony Award cutoff date, setting the stage for what could be a fiercely contested race for Best Actor in a Play.”

“Kenneth Branagh will no longer direct Jude Law in his West End production of Hamlet next year, the Donmar Warehouse has announced.”

“Ticket Window, a local ticketing agency, and its sister company, half-price ticket vendor Ticket/Ticket, have gone out of business.”

“People will always want entertainment, even if times are hard. That’s the message coming from London’s top impresarios and producers, who remain bullishly upbeat as the credit crunch crunches ever harder. … There have been no early closing notices in London to match the sudden spate of closures on Broadway.”

“During this election season theatergoers in New York can see a dozen or so overtly political plays, about Iraq, Washington corruption, feminism or immigration; what they won’t see are any with a conservative perspective.” The absence is just as pronounced in the rest of the country.

Yes, seriously. Charlotte Caffey of the Go-Gos and Anna Waronker of the band “that dog” have created a musical on the life of the woman who was called “Miss Holy-Holy” in high school and went on to become a byword for 1970s porn and (later) a feminist cause célèbre.

“The board of directors of Theatre de la Jeune Lune has signed a purchase agreement to sell its building” in Minneapolis. The company’s general manager “declined to disclose the price, although she said it would cover the theater’s accumulated debt of about $1.2 million.” The Tony Award-winning company announced in July that it would shut down.

“The stock market is in turmoil. Unemployment is climbing. Banks are closing. Retail sales are slowing. TV analysts are sounding like so many Chicken Littles. What we have here is … a marketing opportunity.”

“I have an impressive Armenian cast,” playwright Mark Ravenhill writes from Yerevan, where he’s directing one of his plays. “Part of the Soviet legacy is the high standard of actor training. The quality of the acting is astonishing.” Still, there is one obstacle: “I don’t speak any Russian or Armenian, and the cast doesn’t have any English.”

“I went to the theatre last Thursday evening to see a touring musical with no real star names, no West End transfer on the cards, and no long-established fanatical following (all right, I admit it: I was seeing Flashdance). Usually with that kind of show a good crowd would be a three-quarters-full auditorium. This place was packed out. … All became clear as I heard one little girl aged about eight say to her grandmother: ‘So will this be like High School Musical?'”