Category: theatre

West End theatre owner and global producer Cameron Mackintosh has topped this year’s Stage 100 – The Stage’s list of the most influential figures working in UK theatre.

“The NEA said two new American plays will each receive up to $90,000 to support advanced development and at least one full production, while five additional projects will receive up to $20,000 each to support early development.”

“As the 2007-08 season hits the midpoint, it’s the wave of challenging drama, not the thin smattering of song-and-dance, that’s galvanizing critics. As for audiences, the jury’s still out.”

“Let it be noted that in 2007, a wearying year in which audiences might have been excused for staying home with a mystery or drowning sorrows in bubbly musicals, people were lining up for tickets.”

“2007 will surely be remembered here as the year Steppenwolf came roaring back to life — and reminded the rest of America that Chicago actors are something else entirely.”

“To see a great production is to marvel anew at Shakespeare’s gift for free movement between the homespun and the mythic, comic giddiness and tragic despair, the sound of verse that delights in its own artifice and sudden, heart-stoppingly simple lines of a few monosyllables that are endlessly faithful to common experience.”

“While Peter DuBois begins to make plans as the youngest artistic director to be appointed at the Huntington, he is leaving some of his colleagues shaking their heads in both admiration and disappointment that New York has lost a rising star to Boston.”

“Judging a play by a performance can lead to some embarrassing verdicts, yet theatergoers do this all the time when sizing up new works. Separating the player from the play, to paraphrase Yeats, is never easy. And critics themselves aren’t always adept at distinguishing where fault and virtue lie.”

“The Drowsy Chaperone, the Canadian musical that went from bachelor-party sketch to Tony Award-winning musical announced yesterday that it would play its final New York performance on Dec. 30… The show played to capacity audiences for a long time and moved into the profit column, but for the past six months the crowds had stopped coming.”

Converting Disney movies to Broadway extravaganzas seems like a natural move today, but it’s easy to forget that when Beauty and the Beast made the jump to the stage, it was a surprise hit. Now, as The Little Mermaid prepares to open in New York, everyone’s wondering whether Disney can do it yet again.