Category: theatre

Cleveland’s Karamu Performing Arts Theatre is America’s oldest African-American theatre. In the late 90s it fell on hard times. “Audiences were dwindling, critics stopped attending, and actors were shunning auditions. The theatre that helped nurture the careers of such playwrights as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Lorraine Hansberry and actors like Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Robert Guillaume, and Anthony Chisholm was on the verge of closing its doors.” Enter Terrence Spivey, who in four years has brought life back to Karamu – on an annual budget of $300,000.

“In theatre circles, this pint-sized American widow is something of an institution. Her online newsletter, blanchemarvin.com, has a huge following here, and in the US. In it, she reviews every production she sees – and she sees a lot – be it in the West End or in a tiny room above a pub. Her reviews are detailed and impassioned, and feature a nifty star system. More significantly, she is a big champion of fringe theatre – though she prefers the term ‘studio’ – to the extent that, since 1991, she has funded, out of her own pocket, an annual £2,000 award to help small venues.”

Seattle’s ACT Theatre is looking for a new managing director, only months after hiring one. “The March 2007 hiring of Jolanne Stanton, a nonprofit consultant who has served on ACT’s board of directors, was a surprise to many because she had not run a theater before. Stanton succeeded the widely respected Susan Trapnell, who ran ACT from 1982 to 2000, and was rehired as its manager in 2003 after a financial crisis nearly closed the theater.”

“Once they decide to hire a creative force like Cirque (not that much is like Cirque), they pony up whatever’s needed and get out of the way. That’s unlike Broadway, where the producers consider themselves collaborators, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. They fight to keep investments modest, by Vegas standards. That’s because of another major difference, real estate: Broadway theaters are relative relics, charming but constricted.”

Broadway producers and stagehands are gearing up for a possible strike this fall. “The stagehands are currently working without a contract but are unlikely to call for a strike until late fall – when Broadway’s booming and the financial impact on the city would be significant. A strike around Thanksgiving could wreak havoc with New York’s economy.”

“Xanadu, the story of a muse come to earth to help open a roller disco, is on Broadway. And while the notoriously misguided film might seem a peculiar choice for resurrection, there is something almost as unusual about those behind it: all six of the musical’s above-the-title producers are Broadway neophytes. With an average age of 34 1/2, the producing team behind ‘Xanadu’ is decades younger than many producers on Broadway.”

Washington’s Olney Theatre Center artistic director Jim Petosa plans to leave the theatre at the end of next year to concentrate on running Boston University’s theater school. Since Olney’s new main stage opened in 2005, “it’s been about how do you function now as a fully completed facility,” he says. “Nothing does that better than a search for new artistic leadership. . . . The most potent and creative act I could do on the part of the institution was to allow it to start to ask these questions.”

“‘I was just thinking what it must be like to live in Tel Aviv, or anywhere in Israel, and have to face this kind of thing every day,’ Oregon Shakespeare Festival Artistic Director Libby Appel said Friday, scanning the confused midday crowd on the festival’s plaza. … For the first time in its 72-year history, the nation’s largest regional repertory theater had to cancel a performance because of a bomb threat.”

Roger Crane is about to see his first play open on London’s West End. Reviews have been, on the whole, extremely favourable. After a regional tour, the play arrives in the West End today. “How is that possible?” says Crane, 61, who by day is a busy New York lawyer.

So the Royal Shakespeare Company is taking up residence in London’s Roundhouse. “Certainly the Roundhouse has a long and honourable history of staging theatre, but when the RSC was there back in 2002 with a season of Shakespeare’s late plays it got its fingers burned as audiences stayed away in droves. The refurbished Roundhouse is a truly beautiful building, but so far in my experience it has proved itself an infinitely better venue for bands and circus than it is for theatre.”