Category: theatre

The California Men’s Colony is a men’s prison. Twenty-five of its inmates are “participating in the nonprofit London Shakespeare Workout Prison Project with casts pairing distinguished professional actors with convicts and ex-convicts — pros and cons, you might say — in prisons and theater venues throughout Britain, Europe and North America. Pros who have participated include Al Pacino, Richard Dreyfuss and Kenneth Branagh.”

“While 6½ hours of theatre may seem a bit of a marathon, consider that there are 27 actors playing more than 100 speaking parts, and a boy’s journey to manhood, to get through. Consider, also, that the version of Nicholas Nickleby landing at Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre on Saturday is two hours shorter than the landmark stage version that opened in London in 1980.”

A difficult list to make, but one worth considering…

“The secret weapon is subsidy. Nicholas Hytner’s National Theatre gets 40 per cent of its budget from the government, unlike here, where Canadian Stage gets 18 per cent, Shaw 6 per cent and Stratford less than 4 per cent.”

“To write an autopsy report for The Boys Are Coming Home is not so much to document failings or disagreements among personnel — although fissures were present in this case — as to explore the difficulty of creating and nurturing a new work for the American theater.”

The Colorado Department of Public Health is keeping up its uncompromising fight against theaters seeking a performance exception to the state’s indoor smoking ban.

Cate Blanchett and her playwright husband, Andrew Upton, have become co-artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company (STC), Australia’s most prestigious theater. “The Australian media and theater community, nonetheless, is still struggling to come to terms with the couple’s lack of experience in running a theater company…”

“According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 18 percent of Americans — over 51 million people — have some level of disability. Yet, according to a 2005 SAG report titled “The Employment of Performers with Disabilities in the Entertainment Industry,” less than 2 percent of TV characters display a disability, and only 0.5 percent have speaking roles.”

A new play that “deals realistically with ghetto life in Toronto and the gun culture that young people are drawn into” is seeing multiple cancellations from school groups in the city after two area school boards issued cautions about its content. Producers are attempting to calm the controversy and lure the schools back to the theatre.

A highly stylized production of Macbeth currently running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with Patrick Stewart in the title role could be on the verge of making the cross-borough leap to Broadway and shaking up the Tony race. The only thing holding up the move is logistics – there may or may not be a venue available for the Scottish play.