Category: theatre

Some New York theatre critics were upset after producers of the show “Grease” ran an ad Wednesday that suggested the critics endorsed the show. “The ad is deceptive. Quotes are always considered an endorsement from the publication and its theater critic. Any critic misquoted is entitled to feel misrepresented.”

The company is selling 4000 costumes. “Many of the items sifted from the RSC’s enormous collections can be bought for as little as £2 and include garments worn alongside some of the theatre company’s most famous thespians such as Judi Dench, Ian McKellan, Helen Mirren and Simon Callow.”

Richard Monette led the Stratford Festival for 14 years. “The longest-serving artistic director of the Stratford Festival is retiring after 14 seasons, leaving behind a legacy that includes a fourth theatre (the 260-seat Studio), an acting school and a financially profitable operation.”

“A funny kind of switcheroo happened on the road to Broadway. By using a TV program to cast the show’s leads, the producers have made the show feel like an adjunct of the TV program, like a season-finale-plus-one. But what has reached the stage of the Brooks Atkinson reminds me a lot of that moment in presidential politics when you watch the party nominee take the stage at the convention and think: Him?”

“The Washington Post recently featured a column in praise of Shakespeare’s plays,” written by former Bush speechwriter and current Bush adviser Michael Gerson. “In a way, Shakespeare has hovered over this administration from the beginning. After the 2000 recount, plenty of us hoped – we really had no choice – that Bush would turn out to be Prince Hal in Henry IV, the layabout brat who, on succeeding to his father’s throne, finds the maturity to lead. His presidency has indeed turned out to be like Henry V, but in reverse.”

“Churches and theaters have been at odds for most of the last 500 years. So why are so many Dallas theaters moving into churches?” Not, of course, that “theaters designed to bolster faith” are unusual. “What’s different about the current crop of church-housed theaters is that they aren’t specifically religious in their programming. You can now put on your Sunday best, go to church, and see a play that doesn’t preach.”

London theatres say they are losing out on funding because of the Olympics. “There were plans to split the £250 million bill to renovate many West End venues between theatre owners and the government. However, it is no longer expected that Arts Council England, the Heritage Lottery Fund or the London Development Agency will be able to provide the anticipated £125 million cash injection towards the project until after the London 2012 Olympics, because of the strain the games are putting on public funding sources.”

Three big shows are calling it quits in a summer downturn.

The latest Broadway revival of “Grease” used TV to find its stars. So how’d they do? “There’s the numbing sense of performers of undeveloped talent conscientiously doing what they have been told to do and failing to claim their parts as their own. The message of this latest ‘Grease’ is that anyone, famous or not, can star in a Broadway musical, a natural enough conclusion in the era of YouTube and ‘American Idol,’ when the right to be a celebrity is perceived as constitutional.”

“Four decades later, the small, but professional, neighborhood resident acting company has become one of the nation’s leading regional repertory companies, a Tony award-winning institution with two theaters in downtown Berkeley, known for innovative new work.”