Category: theatre

“In a development that will inject a powerful new East Coast player into Chicago’s burgeoning downtown entertainment scene, Madison Square Garden Entertainment said Tuesday that it will purchase the iconic Chicago Theatre.”

“Since 2006, attorneys representing Women’s Expressive Theater, Inc. have sent Seattle’s Washington Ensemble Theatre four cease and desist letters, demanding it abandon its acronym. With last week’s letter, the attorneys included a copy of the 16-page legal complaint Women’s Expressive Theater will file with the U.S. District court, should Washington Ensemble Theatre not want to change its initials.”

Producers made their “final offer” Tuesday night. “If the lockout is imposed it would be the second work stoppage on Broadway in five years; the musicians’ strike in 2003, which lasted for four days, was the first time in nearly 30 years that Broadway was shut down by a labor dispute. The league and the union have been in negotiations since before the contract expired at the end of July.”

Marco Barricelli will replace widely respected actor and director Paul Whitworth. “Like Whitworth, Barricelli is best known as a meticulously prepared, versatile and charismatic actor, proficient in classical and contemporary roles alike. In eight seasons each at ACT and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, he’s excelled at everything.”

The long-rumored demise of the Empire Plush Room as the capital of San Francisco’s small but fiercely defended cabaret scene will apparently soon become a reality.

This past season, its first full one at $10 a pop, the Washington’s Catalyst Theatre performed to an all-time high of 76 percent capacity, and this fall, annual subscriptions have doubled. On a larger scale, though, what Fortier’s daring move taps into is a growing acknowledgment that to attract diverse age groups and income levels, theater and other performing-arts organizations must come up with more radical approaches to pricing that address, among other things, the competition from less expensive nights out.”

Going to the theater in New York is a famously expensive entertainment, to the extent that many in the city probably never even consider such an evening out. In recent years, some theaters have dropped certain ticket prices in an effort to cultivate new audiences who will eventually be willing to pay full price. But are such programs sustainable, and do they work?

A good performer makes what happens on stage look effortless, so it can be easy to forget the years of agonizing work that go into the development of such a career. For one musical theatre student in Boston, keeping the goal of Broadway stardom in mind can be tricky when your throat is scratchy, your voice teacher is lecturing you, and you have a schedule full of early morning classes getting in the way of your practice time…

Firing back at a critic is almost always a losing proposition for actors. After all, what’s the use of taking on someone who is professionally guaranteed to have the last word? Still, actor Harvey Fierstein has been lashing out at a Los Angeles Times critic who panned his new musical adaptation of an old Paddy Chayevsky film. It might seem like a standard-issue star tantrum, but Michael Riedel sees some smooth strategy behind the dustup.