Category: theatre

A new play by a Chicago writer that focuses on a brutal heat wave in the city that killed more than 700 people in 1995 has premiered in the very neighborhood hit hardest by the tragedy. The production is prompting a reexamination of the “social fault lines” that led to so many dying so quickly.

“Jerry Patch, co-artistic director of San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, is leaving the No. 2 position at the Globe to take a job as director of artistic development for New York City’s Manhattan Theatre Club.”

“First and most obvious is our intimate, almost instinctive connection with the techniques and traditions of the storyteller. Spinning a tale is the world’s oldest theatrical form.”

“Recommending a play is not quite the same as enthusing about a book or an album. You’re encouraging someone to part with what can be a fair sum plus a night of their time, so more careful thought is needed.”

“In an attempt to create in Southern California the bucolic summer theater atmosphere that has spelled success for Massachusetts’ Williamstown festival and others, Ventura’s Rubicon Theatre is announcing ambitious plans for an annual 10-day International Theatre Festival to launch its first season in the theater’s seaside hometown in July 2009.”

A blockbuster musical version of Spider Man may be pushing Mel Brooks’s expensive flop, Young Frankenstein, out of Broadway’s Hilton Theatre. It’s more than a bit ironic, since Frankenstein similarly yanked the venue out from under the dying Pirate Queen just a year ago.

August Wilson’s Fences, about “a bitter and resentful former baseball player and ex-convict in 1957 Pittsburgh,” will be revived on Broadway this fall, in a production directed by Suzan-Lori Parks. The original Broadway run of Fences, in 1987, made it Wilson’s most financially successful play.

“Theatre for toddlers is booming. [But] is it just glorified babysitting – or a powerful cultural experience? Is there any point in performing to children who are still mastering the art of sitting up, let alone walking and talking?”

“The challenges to the establishment of small-town theaters include finding organizers with enough time, raising money for operations and cultivating audiences that sometimes resist traveling rural roads at night and in adverse weather.”

It’s been three months since new ownership was announced for the Chicago Theatre, the landmark theatre in the heart of the Windy City. So why no announcements about what’s going to happen there?