Category: theatre

“What’s the secret of Nicholas Hytner’s success? Cheap tickets, obviously: the £10-ticket scheme in the Olivier is the most radical, yet basically simple, audience-building idea in my lifetime. But Hytner has also realised a fundamental truth: that there is no longer a single, monolithic audience for theatre but a series of separate constituencies, hence his scheduling of canonical classics by Shakespeare, Shaw and Coward for the “brochure” audience. He has also realised that there is a younger group hungering for a more innovative kind of physical theatre.”

Last summer’s New York revival of Gypsy, starring Patti LuPone, was an extremely limited run. But plans are underway to revive the show again, on Broadway this time, at a cost of $9 million. “But a $9 million Gypsy is no slam-dunk at the box office. Potential backers of the show are worried about the cool reception two Times critics gave LuPone’s performance.”

“Paris’s theatre scene is braced for a revolution as big entertainment groups import Broadway and West End hits. France, which has long defended its cultural identity from identikit global tastes, seems about to embrace the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ toe-tapping style.”

“Go to London for the musicals and Paris for the food, the old saying went. While the French capital excelled at dining, museums and new-wave cinema, it didn’t care for singalong shows. Now Paris’s theatre scene is braced for a revolution as big entertainment groups import Broadway and West End hits. France … seems about to embrace the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ toe-tapping style.”

“Teenage and tween girls have become the demographic of the moment, wooed by marketing campaigns and featured as central characters in a flurry of shows in development. Increasingly, though, some worry that the sugar-and-spice enthusiasm may be misplaced, because while teenagers and tweens may be helpful in creating a hit, they are far from enough to ensure one.”

“Shakespeare had it easy. He lived in inherently stageable times: people lived in communities; were largely illiterate and so communicated through speech. … But the world has changed. People are spending more and more time online, some living virtual Second Lives or interacting in chatrooms. If one duty of the theatre is to depict contemporary society, how are its writers, directors and designers to approach virtual reality?”

“The League of American Theaters and Producers, the organization representing most of Broadway’s theater owners and producers, has scheduled two more meetings this week with Local One, the stagehands’ union, a union spokesman said.” After setting a Sept. 30 deadline for negotiations and then moving it to Oct. 1, “in talks on Friday the league sought more negotiating dates. The union agreed to sessions Tuesday and Thursday.”

Off-Broadway regular Theresa Rebeck weighs in on making her Broadway debut as a playwright. “I am here to report that having a play on Broadway does not suck. The sets are bigger, the lights are prettier, the seats are more comfortable, and if you play your cards right, the actors are so blindingly brilliant that you burst into tears in the rehearsal room, overwhelmed by the privilege of listening to artists of this calibre say your words.”

“One of the oddest aspects of writing about theatre is the tricky question of how one goes about describing the actors. After all, it is their presence, the way they look and how they sound, that constitutes a large element of seeing a play. The problem for critics is balancing the need to describe the obvious and deliberate dynamics which have been – often calculatedly – set up, while at the same time trying not to offend, appear lecherous, or come across as entirely superficial.”

Minneapolis’s Tony-winning Children’s Theatre Company surpassed $5m in ticket revenue for the first time in its 2006-07 season, and finished the fiscal year with a surplus. Despite a 5% decline in subscriptions, the CTC boosted overall sales 15%.