Category: theatre

“The show is also big-budget, with capitalization costs said to top $18 million — a sum inflated in large part by the demands of developing a corps of wunderkind thesps who can handle the challenging title role. It’s also a big risk.”

Perth’s two major theatre companies have begun talks over “closer synergies”, or even a merger. The news “has caused anxiety among actors and directors who remember previous abortive attempts to form a state theatre company in the city. But others say it could be the only way Perth will ever get a well-funded company with an ability to mount large-scale works.”

Since taking the helm of the West Hollywood-based Celebration this month, Michael Shepperd has been trumpeting plans to attract the kind of audiences one may not normally associate with a gay-centric theater: children and heterosexuals.

Everybody wants to be first with a play. Premieres make more news, attract more grants and confer more prestige. There’s often money involved–the theater premiering a play sometimes gets a piece of the subsequent action. It’s understandable–and even applicable to other professions. Journalists prefer to break stories than follow up on news already seen elsewhere. But the facts are the facts: I can’t tell you how often a New York theater will claim the American premiere of, say, an English play that we have already seen in Chicago.

“The national conversation in Britain these days seems to be taking place on stage: If these are great times for theater, they are grim times for reality, so you leave the theater both exhilarated and despairing. Play after play took up the same themes: the desperate economic underclass, the greedy upper class, dangerously disappointed immigrants, crumbling marriages, drugs, resentment of America, disaffection and decadence everywhere – what the English call, wryly and ironically, ‘happy families’.”

“Something that people seem to be talking about at this year’s festival is the way in which pieces they didn’t think they’d liked have stayed with them, sometimes far more than performances that they enjoyed sitting through, but which left no real impression.”

The Japanese theater world is currently in crisis over the question of to whom public theaters belong, since the decision by the New National Theatre Tokyo (NNTT) to appoint new artistic directors for each of its three divisions.

“I genuinely can’t understand why this is so. Because no good composers are working in theatre? Because directors are worried it’ll somehow dominate, or turn it into opera – or, worse, a musical? Surely it can’t be because they don’t know any better? Can it?”

“Toronto’s Andrew Moodie, 40, electrified the country’s theatrical community last week when he announced that he was starting an online initiative he calls Share the Stage to lever the festival, started 46 years ago at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., to embrace such practices as colour-blind casting. In the announcement, Moodie asks: ‘Does the festival actually have a policy to exclude people based on race?’ ”

Bouncewas seen in 2003 in a different production at the Goodman and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. Now renamed Road Show, it will be the first new Sondheim musical done in New York since Passion in 1994.