Category: theatre

“Her advantage is that [Hillary Clinton] knows her text inside out. She’s like one of those actors — Maggie Smith is reported to be one — who are always studying backstage, underlining and dog-earing their script. [Barack Obama] is the far better Method actor of the two. Which is to say there’s less of a visible gap between the role he’s playing and the self he has freely exposed since he became a marquee draw.”

Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater has been getting a lot of negative reviews from the city’s largest daily lately. So in a clear shot across the paper’s bow, the theater took out a full-page ad in last Sunday’s editions, and used the space to reprint a nearly complete review of their latest production – from a rival paper’s critic.

Author George Packer, who wrote a well-regarded non-fiction book on the American invasion of Iraq, has now written a play based on the tragic stories of ordinary Iraqis who agreed to serve as translators for the Americans and paid dearly for it. “It was the struggles of the Iraqis that stayed with Mr. Packer after the journalism was done, and what prompted him to bring ‘Betrayed’ to the stage.”

“The Canadian Stage Company, which has a stated aim to create and produce the best in Canadian theatre, will not produce any Canadian work on its mainstage next season… The country’s largest regional theatre [also] laid off up to a dozen people yesterday as part of a major restructuring effort in the face of ongoing financial and artistic problems.”

“The dancers and actors who participated in the 1974 recordings and workshops that were the foundation of A Chorus Line have been granted a financial interest in the current Broadway revival… The arrangement brings to a close 16 months of negotiations.”

“It’s hard to connect with such notions when the physical aspects of the production are as alienating as much of what goes on here. The electronic connection among the casts lead to a second or two of lag time between a line uttered in Orlando and one in Ontario or Illinois, so the result feels slow and laborious.”

“Of course it used to be that audiences were kept safe from physical harm (although not of course from mental suffering) by the fourth wall. But theatre performances are increasingly blurring the boundaries between performers and audiences.”

“Yesterday Charles S. Dutton dropped out of the Kennedy Center’s August Wilson tribute this spring — the second big name to leave the 10-play retrospective.” Actress Phylicia Rashad had already departed the ambitious project for a Broadway role; Dutton’s jilting apparently came as the result of being offered a part in an undisclosed movie.

“Andrew Lloyd Webber and Ben Elton are collaborating on a rewritten version of their 2000 London success, The Beautiful Game. This time around, the show will be called The Boys in the Photograph.” It will debut in Winnipeg in early 2009, then jump to Toronto in the summer.

“Will it turn out that the great American musical of the early 21st century is an opera born in Britain? A convincing case for the rights to that title was made by the celestial Jerry Springer: The Opera, the notorious show from London about the transcendent within tabloid television.”