Category: theatre

Under artistic director Yorgos Loukos, the Athens and Epidaurus Festival “has been transformed from a moribund event into a vibrant arts experience. … Mr. Loukos, a genial round-faced man, has made sweeping changes that have radically altered the nature of the festival. First he reduced the leisurely five-month Athens portion to two high-concentration months in June and July. Then he set about finding new sites to expand performance possibilities and audiences.”

“Illness has forced postponement of the Bridge Project, a joint venture involving the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Old Vic theater company of London and the director Sam Mendes. … As a result, the Bridge Project will open at the Brooklyn Academy in January 2009 with Shakespeare’s ‘Winter’s Tale’ and Chekhov’s ‘Cherry Orchard,’ after rehearsals beginning in New York in October 2008.”

“Max Crumm and Laura Osnes, a couple of unknown 21-year-olds, were chosen as the stars of this $10 million production not through a massive casting call but by amassing toll-free calls. They were the winners of a particularly bad reality-TV show called Grease: You’re the One That I Want. And because of that, not everyone on the Great White Way would be devastated if they fell on their bright young faces.”

Bill Rauch is in his first season running the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Rauch says he’s a passionate believer in the resident-company concept. “It’s no coincidence that most of the great works come out of companies,” he says. “They’re essential. We move [away from that] at the risk of the art form.” But, he notes, resident companies are an endangered species in America today. OSF is an exception, with many actors rehired year after year, most on a 10-month contract for the 11-play, eight-month repertory season; 91 actors compose this season’s company, most playing several roles.

The O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Ct, has had several rough years. But Preston Whiteway, 25, who succeeds Amy Sullivan as executive director, “is inheriting an organization that will be in the black for the first time since 2001. He says the center is going into its summer season in the best shape it has been in years.”

The annual Shakespeare on Boston Common has been a tradition for many years. But “struggling to break even, the Citi Performing Arts Center has slashed the budget for Shakespeare on the Common in half and shortened its run to less than a week. Instead of 20 performances, the Center will present seven, starting Tuesday, plus two open dress rehearsals. Even the stage has shrunk, to less than a third the size of last year’s.”

Is Southern California’s South Coast Repertory Theatre “losing its Midas touch as an incubator for important new plays? This isn’t just an idle critic’s rumination intended to fill space during the summer lull. I’ve been hearing a rising tide of criticism from the theater community – critics, longtime season-ticket subscribers, and artists who have worked at SCR – that lately, the theater’s roster of new scripts hasn’t measured up to its traditional standards.”

A Sydney performance of Stephen Sondheim’s “Company” was shortened by a few scenes when one of the actors got sick. “Sondheim, who was in Sydney for opening night two weeks ago, was made aware of the changes by an insider and threatened to remove Kookaburra’s production rights unless a public apology – on the scale of a full-page newspaper advertisement – was issued.”

Toronto’s city council has agreed to buy the home of Theatre Passe Muraille. “Theatre Passe Muraille will lease the space, which it has occupied since 1975, for a nominal $2 a year and pay $20,000 annually toward upkeep. Purchase of the building will allow it to wipe out a $500,000 deficit.”

The BBC’s over-the-top promotion of a new “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat” at the Adelphi is another example of how little the Beeb cares about theatre, writes Michael Billington. “Would the first night of a new play by Stoppard, Pinter, Ayckbourn or Hare get the same attention as Joseph? Of course not. With very rare exceptions on BBC4, the corporation doesn’t even bother to televise the key works of modern drama. As for the classics, forget it. You have as much chance of seeing a play by Shakespeare, Ibsen or Chekhov on BBC TV as of a cow jumping over the moon.”