Category: theatre

“Max Reimer, new artistic managing director of the Vancouver Playhouse, is taking on one of the most important jobs in Western Canadian theatre… If there are concerns about Reimer, they centre on a worry that quality could be sacrificed for popularity in his drive to increase box office. Reimer is aware of the criticism, but he rejects it.”

“Xanadu, the Tony-nominated musical based on the infamous flop film of the same name, will play its final performance at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theatre Oct. 12. When it closes the musical will have played a total of 49 previews and 528 regular performances.”

Theatre impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber is offering free tickets to two of his West End musicals to bankers who have become unemployed in the credit crunch.

The theatre troupe that traveled to Laramie, Wyoming in 1999 to create a play from the words and actions of residents following the brutal murder of gay college student Matthew Shephard is returning after ten years to create a new epilogue for the oft-produced script.

“Plans for a new gay-and-lesbian theater festival in Orlando have run aground because of accusations that chief organizer” improperly used funds from a charity fundraiser. The fest’s director, who was actually in jail on a parole violation on the night of the fundraiser, is accused of pocketing the money raised for a national AIDS charity, and resigned his post earlier this week.

Blanchett’s Sydney Theatre Company, Hoffman’s LAByrinth and the Ambassador Theatre Group of London have formed a partnership (“not monogamous… but special”), to “create, produce and exchange work that might not otherwise get produced in our different cities.”

“The unusually generous prize, named the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, …was created with an eye toward attracting talented playwrights and bolstering the status of their profession. … ‘We wanted to create something that was really significant, like the Pritzker Prize in architecture or the Pulitzer in journalism.'”

“How, in a commercial theatre culture that is increasingly reliant on musicals, do you get your adaptation into the West End and convince your target audiences that Shaftesbury Avenue – a thoroughfare that often, theatrically speaking, could be called the Street of Shame – is now the coolest of drags where it’s worth braving the civic squalor for bold experimentation?”

“The house that Gordon Davidson built to showcase bold American playwriting is still Los Angeles’ flagship theater. At once intimate and substantial, the Taper (now led by Center Theatre Group artistic director Michael Ritchie) has long been one of the most respected platforms for drama in the country. But the refurbished Taper is a reminder that it’s not simply architectural majesty and attention-grabbing world premieres that give a theater its distinctive identity.”

“As it has done each September since 2006, when it reopened after a $275 million expansion, the Getty Villa is using its newly constructed 450-seat outdoor theater to revive a genre of work rarely seen on American stages.” But an ongoing dispute between the Getty and some of the Villa’s neighbors saw one performance nearly ruined by a radio intentionally blasting from a nearby house.