Category: theatre

“Plans to run a hotel out of a former home of the von Trapp family immortalized in the movie The Sound of Music have triggered fierce resistance from neighbors who fear tourists will tie up traffic and make a nuisance of themselves.”

Do theatres do enough to make the hot weather bearable for audiences? Or is it something we just need to put up with? Can it even, in the right situations, be a dramatic asset?

What is it that makes site-specific theatre specific to its site? And what’s the point of performing in bad spaces when they’re not relevant?

“Theatrical archaeology isn’t an exact science. To be successful, Jackie Maxwell says, you need the right connections in the field and an instinct for where to dig.”

Bertold Brecht was an avowed Communist, a fact which is rarely mentioned when his work is performed. “There are three possible responses to an artist who dedicated his life to a monstrous cause. The first is to deodorise him by pretending he was really a liberal humanist, which Brecht certainly was not. The second is to do what the British theatre never does and have an adult argument… The third option is to shrug and walk away.”

“Diane Paulus, an acclaimed theater and opera director and creator of the off-Broadway hit The Donkey Show, has been named the new artistic director of [Boston’s] American Repertory Theatre… The appointment ends an exhaustive and at times turbulent search that has stretched well over a year, during which one top candidate turned the job offer down.”

Casting the stage version of Billy Eliot has been one of the most complicated things Broadway has even done. Somehow, though, producers have managed to find three little boys who can sing, dance, act, and confidently carry a multi-million dollar show, night after night after night. Until their voices change or they get too tall, that is…

“Livent’s top finance executive kept meticulous records of all the millions of dollars in improperly recorded expenses at the company because he believed that co-founders Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb would deny they knew anything about them in the future, a court heard today.”

“The museum proposal, scheduled to be voted on Thursday by the Chicago Plan Commission, now resembles a private office building wearing a toupee. The toupee to which I refer is a planted roof meant to suggest that the buried museum would fit seamlessly into Grant Park.”

“Small theatres have always struggled to acquire and maintain space, but the problem has gotten worse during the real estate boom in large urban areas (the current home-mortgage crisis notwithstanding).”