Category: theatre

“Mara Manus, who led the Public Theater out of the red and through nearly six years of steady financial growth, has decided to step down as the organization’s executive director. … Ms. Manus, 49, who notified the theater’s trustees of her decision at a board meeting on Thursday, will serve out the term of her contract, which ends in August.”

Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage is boosting its season from eight productions to ten next year. “The company is seeking to prepare audiences for the magnitude of work it will generate come 2010. That’s when Arena will return to its Southwest Washington campus, which is undergoing a $125 million renovation.”

“Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe will make his Broadway debut in the US this September, playing the disturbed stable boy in a revival of Peter Shaffer’s play Equus. Radcliffe, 18, earned rave reviews for his performance in the London production of the Tony Award-winning play.”

A revival of Clifford Odets’ “riveting 1950 backstage melodrama,” The Country Girl is currently in previews on Broadway. But something seems to be missing: “an entire six-page scene was dropped from Act 1… Internet theater sites were buzzing that several cast members were stumbling around, unsure not only of their lines but of their blocking.”

A Toronto-born musical called The Story Of My Life has earned a slot on Broadway, beginning in early 2009. Interestingly, the show didn’t impress Canadian critics when it premiered in 2006, but a couple of years worth of revision were enough to impress Broadway insiders.

Three revivals playing on Broadway this season illustrate a unique age in which musicals went from light entertainment to serious theatre. “In this Darwinized musicology, Hammerstein’s avowed disciple Sondheim ranks as the natural culmination; Rodgers and Hammerstein themselves are viewed as the glorious moment just before Sondheim, when the musical first stood upright.”

“In an unusual move designed to raise the profile and productivity of two respected classical-drama troupes, Seattle Shakespeare Company and Wooden O Theatre have merged their nonprofit operations, a move legally finalized Monday.”

When Tracy Letts won a Pulitzer Prize Monday for his Broadway play, “August: Osage County,” the playwright was at work on a new play at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, which premiered “August.” “‘It’s in rough shape,’ Letts said of his newest drama. ‘It’s teaching me a lot of humility. Which is good, because I am going to be impossible.'”

“Here’s some good news for producers hard up for cash: The 1991 Tony Award for best musical revival, honoring the producers Barry and Fran Weissler for ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ … was sold at auction in Dallas on Saturday night for $5,676.25.”

More than any other playwright, August Wilson made it his life’s work to chronicle the black experience in America, and he did it from a completely fresh perspective. “Wilson was not much influenced or inhibited by the canon of western theatre, for the simple reason that he had not read or seen any of it.”