Category: theatre

“If an initial concern after the birth last summer of Capital Fringe — brainchild of Brienza and executive director Damian Sinclair — was that it could become a way station for out-of-town shows moving on the circuit from one Fringe Festival to the next, this year’s could put such fears to rest. The event appears to be taking on a distinctly Washington flavor.”

Scott Morfee is “an example of an almost extinct breed: the creative commercial Off Broadway producer. At a time when the Off Broadway model has been declared broken and financially unworkable, he continues to steer long-shot propositions into the Barrow Street. So far he has beaten the odds: his productions regularly win good reviews and eke out yearlong runs.”

“Broadway’s most anticipated summer drama opened Friday, as producers and stagehands began contract talks. Their goal: Avert a strike like the one by musicians four years ago that cost the city $10 million in lost revenue and wages and shut down shows for four days. The stagehands’ contract expires July 29.”

She’s run the Oregon Shakespeare Festival since 1995. “During her partnership with executive director Paul Nicholson, the festival — founded in 1935 as an intermission between outdoor boxing matches — has seen its budget double to $24 million with the help of donors such as Microsoft Corp. co-founder and billionaire entrepreneur Paul Allen. It was named one of the top five regional theaters in the country by Time magazine and is now one of the nation’s biggest repertory companies, with 774 performances of 11 plays and a company of 475, including 91 actors.”

“The producers of an off-Broadway show are giving away free tickets to anyone who can demonstrate his or her chastity. Which raises the question: Just how will the theater know?”

A new Columbo murder mystery is ready for its national debut, but you won’t see it on television. Nope, Columbo is coming to Broadway, rumpled trench coat and all. Peter Falk will not play the role he made famous, but the producers hope to recreate the same absent-minded spirit that made the character a hit over multiple decades on TV.

“With the death yesterday of Edwin Mirvish, 92, Canada and England lose a man who played a modest but pivotal role in late 20th-century theatre. But in Toronto, the theatres the Mirvish family supported, the productions they mounted – and above all, Ed’s populist touch – shaped a cultural ecosystem.”

In August Edinburgh is crawling with theatre at the Fringe Festival. Many of the the offerings are home-made. But by the time you add up all the costs of doing work there, performers end up paying for the opportunity…

The English National Opera has been savaged for its production of Kismet. “Underlying the criticism is a sense of mystification that ENO should have put on Kismet, which is set in Baghdad at the time of the Arabian Nights, at all: a disquiet about what it means for the company – once at the cutting edge of radical opera – to be mounting a West End show with a West End star, Michael Ball, in the lead. And messing it up. Is this what they are subsidised for?”

“The West End, as so often, is in crisis; only today the crisis is artistic rather than financial. Twenty-six musicals dominate the scene in a grisly simulacrum of Broadway. Straight plays, unless equipped with a mega movie star, are an endangered species. Risk is rare.
But there is light on the horizon.”