Category: theatre

“Not long before the Citi Performing Arts Center decided to make drastic cuts to its popular summer production of Shakespeare on the Boston Common, its board agreed to pay president and CEO Josiah Spaulding Jr., a $1.265 million bonus. That payment came on top of Spaulding’s annual compensation of $409,000, plus $23,135 in benefits. … Spaulding has presided over five straight years of budget deficits, cuts to programming, and a dramatic drop in performances at the Wang and Shubert theaters, which the Citi Center operates.”

Stars of the English stage are voicing concern over the impending 16-month closure of Bristol’s Old Vic Theatre. “Sir Ian McKellen, Dame Judi Dench, Patrick Stewart, Alan Rickman, Simon Curtis, Sir Derek Jacobi and Emma Thompson are among 120 signatories. It warns the Old Vic Theatre Company could ‘fade away’ while the theatre is closed for a £7m revamp.”

Leonard Bernstein’s timeless musical classic,West Side Story, is 50 this year. “It wasn’t just a flashy composer’s triumph: the great strength of West Side Story lay in its totality: a show where all the artistic elements blended to produce something that Broadway audiences genuinely couldn’t classify… West Side Story worked because it was a team effort – and because the team successfully deflected Bernstein’s highbrow inclinations.”

New York Times theatre critic Ben Brantley has been reporting extensively from London this summer, a fact which has not gone unnoticed by British critics. What’s he doing so far from home? “That’s an easy one: because Britain more than ever is relied upon to fuel a New York theatre scene that, in the absence of thinking for itself, likes to import whatever has received the cultural imprimatur of the town’s most influential critic.”

It took a cast of 13 women and a production team spread across two continents to bring The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood’s 2005 reimagining of The Odyssey, to life on the stage. One of the actresses has been keeping a blog of the experience, and Atwood herself has been stunned by the cooperative spirit and commitment of those involved.

“Nothing happens in a Broadway theater without one or more of the industry’s 350 union stagehands getting paid. That won’t change. This makes Broadway producers crazy. Every time a contract comes up for renegotiation, they complain that IATSE’s work rules are responsible for skyrocketing production costs. The result, they say, is fewer shows produced, a higher failure rate of the ones that are produced, and inevitably, higher ticket prices. And they’re right, sort of. The stagehands have a pretty good deal.” But there are other factors…

“You don’t have to have an especially long memory to wonder what on earth possessed Budd Schulberg to rewrite, though not reinvent, his Oscar-winning screenplay of On the Waterfront for the stage. Not as something new, like the libretto for an opera, say, or the book for a musical, but as [an] earnest, perfunctory, overproduced straight play.”

Australian producers are laying the groundwork for a homegrown stage adaptation of the 1994 drag queen-intensive movie, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, to make the long leap to Broadway. “With 23 tons of scenery, 514 costumes and enough glitter to entomb Liberace, a Broadway production could cost as much as $15 million, industry sources estimate.”

“In early July we have a block party on my street. One constant — along with the visit from a firetruck and the Weber grills in the middle of the street — is the kvetching of disgruntled Steppenwolf subscribers. For each of the three years I’ve attended our party, I’ve listened to neighbors complain, unsolicited, about Steppenwolf. … But this year, I had an answer for my block. Go see ‘August: Osage County.’ It will restore your faith….”