Category: theatre

Elysa Gardner makes the call…

A record 2050 shows will be offered at this summer’s Edinburgh Festival. “The 2007 Fringe hopes to continue the success of last year, which saw a huge rise in audience numbers and ticket sales, announcing an even bigger lineup featuring almost 200 more shows, around 40% of which will be performed for the first time.”

a Los Angeles production of Charles Busch’s WWII spoof “The Lady in Question” has sparked outrage because of a promotion meant to lure patrons. Postcards were mailed out reading: “Come see The Lady in Question dressed as a Nazi and get $10 off.”

Theatre professionals from across the country are gathering this weekend at Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater to ponder the future of their craft, and how best to adjust to a rapidly changing world of entertainment choices. “Will theater have to extend its definition to include 3-D creations? Online-only productions? Virtual communities? What is the role of theater in an America where the public is increasingly infatuated with celebrity?”

Making a musical about teen sexuality is no easy task, so it’s no surprise that the producers of the Broadway smash, Spring Awakening, decided that much of the inherent sexual tension in their story would need to be told through movement. What was a bit of a surprise was that the show scored the services of Bill T. Jones as choreographer. “In some ways it’s a perfect fit for a choreographer concerned with storytelling, the power of gesture and sexual identity. Yet working on a mainstream musical was not an obvious move for Mr. Jones, who has always seen himself as fiercely experimental.”

It’s official: The Pirate Queen, savaged by critics and largely ignored by ticketbuyers, will close June 17 as one of the costliest flops in Broadway history. “The lavish musical by the team who created Les Miserables and Miss Saigon will have played 85 performances when it calls it quits at the Hilton Theatre.” It cost $16 million to bring the production to New York.

Broadway producers of Tony-nominated shows are complaining about the cost of including them in the awards show. “To stage a musical number at Radio City, individual shows are required to foot most of the production costs. That can set a show back more than $200,000, a figure that has producers seeing red. Producers would like the Tony show to share in those costs.”

Canada’s Stratford Festival is under new management, and it appears that the a renewed focus on Shakespeare (Stratford’s original centerpiece) is in the cards. “All four shows on the flagship Festival Theatre stage next season will be written by [Shakespeare]… This can be taken as a solid sign that the festival is returning to its classical roots and away from the model of more recent years, in which multiple musicals and family-styled adaptations like To Kill a Mockingbird were allowed to dominate the schedule.”

“The Royal Shakespeare Company has just won planning permission to transform its centrepiece theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon within a £113 million reinvention of one of the country’s most famous cultural centres. As the builders’ hoardings go up around the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, it brings to an end many years of uncertainty and debate about what should happen here to address the many shortcomings of the RSC’s most important theatrical space.”

A professor of old-age psychiatry gives his take on Ian McKellen’s King Lear: “When Lear punched Kent, I found myself thinking: ‘This old man is the terror of the nursing home.’ That is a type of character I know very well. … It’s dangerous to make psychiatric diagnoses from plays, but I thought Ian McKellen’s performance was consistent with a vascular condition rather than Alzheimer’s.”