Category: theatre

“Stoppard’s epic trilogy ‘The Coast of Utopia’ won seven of the awards given for Broadway productions and performances, including best play and director, and ‘Spring Awakening’ dominated the musical categories, taking home eight prizes including best musical and direction of a musical.”

“Have there ever been more actors nominated for playing real-life characters? Glancing through the names of performers and parts, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Biography Channel had recently been hijacked by a squadron of Broadway all-stars.”

Broadway theatre did $939 million of business this season. “If the growth continues at a similar rate next season, Times Square box offices will break the billion-dollar barrier — this just a few years after Broadway producers worried about their future after the terrorist attacks of 2001, which scared off foreign visitors and depressed ticket sales and grosses alike.”

“Broadway, in case you’re wondering, is second to none when it comes to buzz, and to audiences that, as Ian McKellen remarked when he won his Best Actor Tony for Amadeus in 1981, ‘lift you so high that sometimes you feel you want to fly for them’. But you can’t compare a city with (in a good year) 40 openings a season – and perhaps as many again in the major off-Broadway venues – to a capital like London that can open well over 250 shows in a year, from big musicals to agitprop, site-specific experiments to star vehicles, and reclamations of unfamiliar plays to soul-stirring reappraisals of time-honoured ones.”

“If Tony voters choose Spring Awakening for Best Musical on Sunday, it will be an important vote of confidence in composers who think that the orchestral, scenery-heavy work that we’ve called ‘the Broadway musical’ for nearly a century doesn’t have to mark the limit of Broadway musical theatre. And who knows what innovation might follow?”

The “Lord of the Rings” that played in Toronto was hardly a big hit. Now the show is in London. “So how do you go about turning a semi-hit into a show that can take its place, in the West End’s top three alongside Billy Elliot and The Lion King?”

As Broadway gears up for tonight’s Tony Awards ceremony, a glance at this year’s crop of plays and musicals proves exactly one thing: there is just no accounting for what does or doesn’t become a hit on the Great White Way.

If American musical theatre has a face, it is surely that of Audra McDonald, who is up for her fifth Tony tonight, which would tie a record for a female performer. It would be a historic honor for a singer who had to face racism, family tragedy, and her own emotional demons on the way to one of the most successful careers in American theatre.

A new play focusing squarely on America’s obsession with (and fear of) racial epithets is getting a two-month run at a major L.A.theatre. And did we mention that it’s a comedy? The play, “whose three-word title consists simply of… racial slurs, seems remarkably well timed to land in the middle of the national discomfort zone.”

“When it comes to actual theater — you know, with tickets, ushers, curtains and the whole live performance thing — it’s harder to spot a tradition of biting political commentary. That’s because America doesn’t have one. At a time when every aspect of life has been polarized both right and left — when buying a red T-shirt at the Gap is supposed to fight AIDS in Africa, and SUV drivers support the troops from their bumper magnets — mainstream drama is still content to be expensive highbrow escapism. Anyway, how can producers expect people to pay $100 a ticket to be hectored for their complacency, when attending a play is already perceived as an elitist, blue-state activity?”