Category: theatre

“Theatre needs to look to football and computer games to recapture the excitement of drama. The core of theatre has to be experiential, and that’s what has been lost.”

Last week, San Diego’s Old Globe announced that its co-artistic director Jerry Patch was leaving for the Manhattan Theatre Club. “The news also carried a faint yet detectable signal of what may be the most insidious problem facing American theater today — the subtle and not-so-subtle blurring of commercial and nonprofit realms. The issue boils down to procedures, values and, most important, who’s in control.”

“It was supposed to be a partnership, a shared leadership, and Antoni would intervene only if it was urgent, and it came not to be that. We were misled as to how we were actually functioning.”

Taskent theatre Ilkhom Theatre has “produced controversial and contrarian work since 1976, when it became one of the first companies in the Soviet Union to refuse state funding. Since then, Ilkhom has outraged Communist apparatchiks, Muslim fundamentalists, and members of the current Uzbek dictatorship. But detectives concentrated their murder investigation on the artists of Ilkhom, interrogating them for hours at a stretch, asking about their personal lives and favorite positions in bed.”

“While other Broadway classics have had plenty of revivals — this is the fourth ‘Gypsy’ since its 1959 premiere — ‘West Side Story’ has had only one full-scale revival, and that was nearly 30 years ago. So why is mounting a professional production in New York so problematic?”

Gone With the Wind: The Musical opens in the West End in April under the auspices of Trevor Nunn. “Nunn, apparently something of an American Civil War anorak, is well used to translating large books from page to stage – he did it with Nicholas Nickleby and Les Misérables – and has said he relishes ‘the challenge of telling Margaret Mitchell’s epic story through words, music and the imaginative resources of the theatre’.”

“In 18 seasons at the helm of that once-comatose regional theatre, Des McAnuff earned a fearsome reputation as a visionary who could be brilliant, maddening and egotistical, a personally and professionally provocative director who demanded the best of his actors, designers and craftspeople and, in turn, gave the same of himself. Yet while McAnuff has a reputation as an adept charmer, he is not known as a man who likes to share power, nor will he back down from a fight.”

When the last show of Toronto theatre promoter David Mirvish’s season fell apart, he didn’t just throw in another production for subscribers. He shortened the season. “We have not been able to find another high-quality show that could be made ready for us within the time available.” Now he’s offering six options for shortchanged season subscribers.

Lord of the Rings is closing in London. It’s considered one of the most expensive failures in London theatre history. “This could spell the end of the age of the musical behemoth. Theatre audiences can be equally content with the more modest virtues of good stories that are well told.”

Jerry Patch, who will be leaving San Diego’s Old Globe for New York’s Manhattan Theatre Club on June 1, acknowledged that there are a lot of similarities between MTC and his longtime employer, Costa Mesa’s South Coast Repertory.