Category: theatre

“The success of shows from companies such as Punchdrunk, Oily Cart and Dreamthinkspeak have not just changed our relationship with spaces and theatres, but also with the actors. Just as we like to press the red button on our remote control, so we like shows that are interactive. Here in Edinburgh, touching is all the rage.”

“After a year of frustration searching for a suitable space, Black Watch, last year’s Edinburgh festival hit play about the Scottish regiment and the lives of its soldiers in Iraq, is finally to be shown in England. It will be staged at the Barbican in London next June, nearly two years after its Edinburgh festival premiere.” Audiences in Los Angeles and New York will see it first, this fall….

“One of the New York theater world’s annual rites of summer — the Broadway Show League , in which softball teams representing Broadway and Off Broadway productions trade their costumes for cleats — will draw to a close on Thursday afternoon with a championship game in the Heckscher ball fields in Central Park. This final battle, after an 18-week season, will pit a team made up of representatives from ‘Wicked’ and ‘The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee’ against the winner of that morning’s all-Disney matchup between ‘The Lion King’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast.'”

“A Broadway show which was based on the hit reality TV programme American Idol has closed after its first official night on stage in New York. Idol: The Musical, which was dubbed a ‘satirical musical comedy’, was originally previewed in July. By the end of the month the entire cast had been replaced without explanation and fresh previews began on 1 August.”

“(I)s it hypocritical for those of us who love the theatre to rave about a production and campaign for its success, only to turn cold on it when it achieves the kind of mass appeal we always believed it deserved? … Does commercial success kill the soul of such shows or is it merely our restless quest for new ideas that makes them seem stale?”

“How about a lifetime ticket? In what may be a first for a theater company, the Boulevard Ensemble is offering just that. For $1,000, you can see every individual performance the company presents until you die or the troupe dies, whichever comes first. And you get free intermission refreshments at every one of those performances. In true Boulevard fashion, founder and artistic director Mark Bucher warns you not to be a pig about the coffee and cookies.”

The New York International Fringe Festival “this year is expected to sell more than 75,000 tickets to nearly 200 productions (culled from more than 1,000 applications).” It will do that on an operating budget of $840,000, with only two full-time employees. “Otherwise the Fringe relies on over 1,100 part-timers and volunteers to do some remarkably demanding work. … Site directors make only $800, though that’s up $200 from last summer. Box office managers net $500. Almost everyone else is unpaid.”

The new stage version of Mel Brooks’s classic movie, Young Frankenstein, opened preview performances in Seattle this week, where the show is getting a tryout before an expected leap to Broadway, and audience reaction has reportedly been strong. Tweaks are expected, but Brooks himself is heavily involved in the Seattle staging, and says that the show is “75% there.”

“Where most writers would be content to get one play up and running in August, Mark Ravenhill’s Herculean undertaking involves presenting a new 20-minute piece on 17 mornings of the [Edinburgh Festival]; around five and a half hours of theatre in total.” Not bad for a guy only a few months removed from an epileptic seizure and a botched anaesthetic that cost him two months of memories…

“The Edinburgh Fringe is no stranger to controversy, but this year the most controversial shows all seem to be musicals.” Religion and politics seem to be the main targets of the satire, which can be decidedly hit or miss, and sometimes unnecessarily mean-spirited.