Category: theatre

Producer Jeffrey Richards is a bit of an odd duck in the Broadway world. “He does not belong with the young Turks intent on reinventing the Broadway musical, nor with the Broadway Medicis who finance their projects with money earned elsewhere. He is a professional theater man with a love for straight plays and a rather scary amount of industry knowledge, akin to baseball fans who can rattle off decades-old batting averages of obscure players. Fanatic would not be too strong a word.”

Any law seeking to place restrictions on the right to free expression, and particularly one that privileges one belief system over another (in this case the Church of England), has no place in what he terms our “essentially secular society”.

Broadway theatre grosses “dipped by 25% overall to total $15,474,798. That news was made even grimmer by comparison with the same frame last year, when 28 shows (as opposed to the current 30) tallied $17,341,680.”

“The Theatre Royal Bath and Bristol Old Vic are less than 15 miles apart, yet the fortunes of these West Country near neighbours couldn’t be more strikingly or dismayingly at odds.”

“Stage schools are experiencing an unprecedented demand for places with some of the best-known academies having to turn down applicants in an era that has been called the ‘golden age’ of fame schools.”

“Twenty months after South Florida’s oldest regional theater abruptly shut down during its 50th anniversary season, the company’s board has crafted a vision for a reborn Coconut Grove Playhouse.”

A new $50 million Long Wharf Theater in a hip district of downtown New Haven is causing leaders of the 43-year-old institution, one of the oldest in the regional theater movement, to ask: “Who are we?”

“Forget the overused and now cliche ‘theme-park’ adjective. This musical, buoyed by one of the best Disney film scores and a delightful new leading lady, succeeds as enjoyable family entertainment. And, yes, the sets are big, but then, so is the ocean.”

“What this ‘Little Mermaid’ feels like, above all, is a cynical reversal of a once-traditional pattern of art and commerce. It used to be that the show came first, followed by merchandising tie-ins. Thoroughly plastic and trinketlike, this show seems less like an interpretation of a movie musical than of the figurines and toys it inspired.”

The bloated, 2 1/2 -hour show — an hour longer than the 1989 movie — represents a low watermark for the Disney-on-Broadway franchise.