Category: theatre

“The phenomenon is hardly new; in fact, the once-edgy phrase ‘multimedia performance’ already seems to have been retired. But the cost of the toys has come down drastically in recent years.”

“Most of the traffic used to be moving west, as actors who had earned their stripes — and a modicum of fame — onstage headed to California, where greater celebrity and greater money beckoned. In the past decade or so, however, the westward traffic has slowed considerably, while the lanes heading east are filling up.”

Tom Short is the head of Broadway’s biggest union and a key figure in labor negotiations that might lead to a strike. Short was a critical figure in helping to save Broadway after 9/11 “Tom Short was the guy who really and truly defied the other union leaders and saved this industry.”

“The Donald is bigfooting his way onto Broadway, rounding up theater personalities in what’s likely to be a failed effort to pump life into his sagging ‘The Apprentice.’ Along the way, he and his two competing teams of B-list celebrities – well, to be strictly accurate, C-list (Marilu Henner is, after all, a team captain) – are causing chaos.”

Citing a severe “cash-flow crunch,” African Continuum Theatre Company’s board has decided to postpone its fall and winter shows and present a shortened season in the spring. Previously announced plays, including “Blue Door” by Tanya Barfield, “Intimate Apparel” by Lynn Nottage and “The Soul Collector,” a new work by David Emerson Toney, may not be part of that short season.

Galeen Roe decides to see all of Suzan-Lori Parks’ nationwide theater festival “365 Plays/365 Days,” in which more than 600 theaters in Los Angeles, Atlanta, San Francisco, Washington, Chicago, Minneapolis and other participating cities committed, sight unseen, to presenting one week of Parks’ date-specific works. So Parks wrote a play dedicated to Roe: “I think this will actually perfect the cosmic juju thing, to sort of write a play to the perfect witness, an audience member.”

An early play by Sir Alan Ayckbourn has been found more than 40 years after it was presumed destroyed, completing the 70-volume canon of his manuscripts.

“In terms of shows that all the family can genuinely enjoy together, rather than endure together, we’ve never had it so good. ‘I think people have always wanted family events, but what is new is that there’s an appetite for a new way of doing that’.”

“What has happened to successful plays by women that they have not entered and remained in the theatrical repertory? What is it about women’s writing that precludes their share in longevity? Do they lack the vital testosterone of Swimming with Sharks or Dealer’s Choice; the ‘hitting the back wall’ syndrome as one famous director has put it?”

“I always find the American theater is slightly locked in the nineteenth century. Everything is psychologically based. And I’ve seen some really good stuff recently, but I’ve seen some plays that in England would have been called television drama.”