Category: theatre

“The Fringe’s four big comedy venues have joined up to call themselves the Edinburgh Comedy Festival (ECF). They are not, they insist, abandoning the Fringe – simply rebranding to appeal to sponsors. This will pay for marketing, which will help pull in new audiences for comedy and theatre alike.”

“It is thought that they have uncovered the original brick foundations of The Theatre – one of London’s first playhouses, which was built in 1576 and was home to the company in which Shakespeare first performed as an actor, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. It was dismantled in 1599 and its timbers were shipped across the Thames to construct the original Globe Theatre.”

Protesters picket a show in Toronto that takes on their church’s anti-gay preaching. “Controversial as it all sounds, it could be a marriage made in heaven from a publicity perspective, as each side draws more attention to the other’s message than either might receive on its own.”

Plenty, writes theatre critic Geoffrey Wheatcroft. He doubts its status as the great American musical, in score, lyrics, and plenty more: “these prosperous bourgeois liberals conjuring up the life of teenage gangs have all of Steinbeck’s little-man-where-art-thou condescension.”

“The establishment of a national theatre in Wales has been a long and arduous process marked by a good deal of infighting and factionalism, in which the two chief sticking points have been: where should it be based? And which language would it be in?”

“After opening night, directors and designers usually move to their next projects, while a small army stays behind to safeguard their artistic vision.” These are the stagehands, light and sound directors, and other behind-the-scenes workers whom the audience never thinks about, but without whom no show would be able to go on.

Two plays examining the various prominent artists and performers who collaborated with or stayed silent under Hitler’s reign are on show in Chichester, England. “The implied question – what would you do, and when? – strikes keenly, but is not necessarily one we could answer honestly from our safe distance. Would we, like Strauss, acquiesce in the face of threats to our family? Like Furtwängler, continue to believe in the sanctity of our art? Follow Zweig into exile and suicide?”

Theater critic Michael Billington makes his list of performances that have helped define the role. “Oscar Wilde famously said that ‘there is no such thing as Shakespeare’s Hamlet … there are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies’. One sees his point: there is something elusive and unpindownable about the role and, of all the great parts.”

“Few directors are capable of dividing critical and audience opinion quite like Katie Mitchell. Her distinctive approach to her material, her signature style, has gained her many vocal admirers and advocates… [But] is she in danger of slipping into self-parody?”

“More than five decades on from its first performance in Washington, West Side Story remains as relevant as ever; some may argue more so… The deaths of Bernardo, Riff and Tony do not have to be made visceral to reach a modern audience. The action and the language, while very much of its time, speak a universal truth.”