Category: theatre

Fringe festivals don’t work that way. “Isn’t the spirit of the fringe to do art for art’s sake, for no other reward than having created something beautiful or startling or ugly or interesting? The minute a finance company gives £4,000 and a Perspex award to someone, doesn’t that destroy any Fringe spirit that they might have had, in any case?”

“Jon Morgan, who has been in the role just over a year, leaves the job only days after it was revealed ticket sales for the festival dropped 10% this year. The Fringe was hit by several problems, including the failure of a new computerised ticketing system.”

“In most areas of life professionals are paid and amateurs are unpaid, but in the theatre lots of actors who regard themselves as professionals end up working for nothing. The distinction between pro and am often seems to be more a state of mind than anything else. But ‘amateur’ doesn’t have to mean ‘amateurish’.”

“There are other social and cultural factors that play a role in keeping young people away from the theatre that also need to be addressed, things that run deeper than price alone, like the perception of the medium, by some, as elitist, worthy, and maybe, just a tad dull, a form of entertainment that is for people ‘other than us’.”

“In Edinburgh, a vast majority of venues are staffed by unpaid volunteers, serving the needs of performers who have actually paid to perform in return for an often derisory cut of their box office takings. As monster-venue empires spread ever more widely, they begin to resemble factories built on slave labour and exploited workers.”

Workers “gutted and updated almost everything that was not concrete. To create more lobby space without disrupting the building’s circular shape, they went underground, taking out 30 parking spaces to create a stylized lounge with gold, curved couches and mosaics of mirrored tiles that fit the era in which the building was designed. And yes, there are more bathrooms: 16 stalls for women.”

“David Esbjornson, Seattle Repertory Theatre’s artistic director, will step down within the next month — more than six months earlier than originally announced. Longtime casting director Jerry Manning will take over as acting director.”

The London theatre hopes to attract new audiences. “Albums will be produced in-house, using modern studio techniques, under the banner of Globe Editions. They will be distributed in the UK and abroad by classical music company Select Music.”

“It is curious that there has been so little comment about how the BBC and Channel 4 have together quietly murdered one of the two forms which may be said to have been distinctively pioneered and championed in this country. The nature documentary survives, glorious as ever. But mention of the single play, in which one writer is given the opportunity to make his or her own fiction at will, seems to evoke the past more powerfully than Green Shield Stamps or Craven A.”

Internet addresses for Broadway musicals are getting as elaborate as the shows themselves.