Category: theatre

Broadway stagehands voted unanimously Sunday to give their union the authority to call a strike against theater producers, increasing tension in their stalled labor negotiations.

“It seems the divide between the world of contemporary visual arts and the world of theatre may be getting a little smaller. Visual artists are starting to produce work that is more theatrical, at the same time as a growing number of theatre companies are interested in collaborating with artists and presenting their work in galleries.”

After six years, Michael Ross is leaving the company. “Responsible for matters as diverse as fundraising campaigns and building plans, Ross was more than just the top administrator of the regional theater. He also was the very visible and public face of Baltimore’s largest nonprofit professional company, allowing artistic director Irene Lewis to concentrate on selecting, casting and rehearsing plays.”

“The RSC was in Minneapolis — one of only three stops on its current national tour — partly to pay homage to the Guthrie’s long tradition of support for classical theater, but mostly because of the astonishing new theater complex designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel. Now 16 months old and fully functioning, this is a theater without Midwestern peer.”

37 Arts, Mikhail Baryshnikov’s off-Broadway theater, dance studio and foundation headquarters, is being foreclosed on. The company that built the studio claims that 37 Arts is $4m in debt, and still owes $10m to the builders. The theater, which was intended to be the moneymaking part of the building, has struggled to attract audiences, due in part to its remote location.

The Broadway-bound musical version of Billy Elliot “which will open in the fall of 2008 at the Imperial Theatre, is budgeted at $18.5 million, making it one of the most expensive non-Disney musicals ever… One thing is clear: Broadway has turned its back on the working and middle classes. If you’re not rich, if you don’t have a loft in SoHo or a three-bedroom on the Upper West Side or a house in Westport, get lost, we don’t need you, you can’t afford us.” So it’s ironic that the story of a young working-class boy fighting to break free of his status should be so expensively embraced by the Broadway power brokers.

“The issues that have led to this volatile standoff are less about money than about technology and its effect on a tradition- bound industry. The saber rattling may harken back to union hall fist-waving of the 1930s, but the stakes are extremely high.”

“After years of complaining about scalpers, the theaters’ introduction of the premium ticket in 2001 meant that Broadway had decided, in a sense, to join them. And this year the League of American Theaters and Producers chose not to fight state legislation repealing longstanding price caps in the ticket-resale market, showing that Broadway had decided they couldn’t beat them either. Now, less than six months after Albany passed the law, StubHub, where you can buy and sell Broadway tickets at any price, has set up shop — literally — right down the street.”

Harvard has created a new theatre in the Hasty Pudding builing, built in 1887. “The problem was to figure out a way to tuck a state-of-the-art undergraduate theater, to be known as the New College Theatre, into the back end of a dignified Victorian clubhouse.”

“The Oily Cart is a widely acclaimed, London-based theater company that specializes in theater for the very young and for kids with special needs. Its three, middle-age founders — Max Reinhardt, Tim Webb and Amanda Webb — have been invited… by the Chicago Children’s Theatre to do something radical. They are developing an original theater piece designed especially for autistic youngsters and their families.”