Category: theatre

“Performances of the London stage version of the Lord of the Rings have been suspended after a cast member was injured during the show. One of the actors is believed to have caught his leg in the moving stage during an early scene. The individual was not one of the lead actors, but the show was halted and the audience offered refunds. Performances are due to resume on Saturday.”

Vanessa Redgrave will headline “The Year of Magical Thinking” on Broadway for only four more months, but HBO is aiming to preserve her performance in the one-woman show.

“Revenue jumped 8.9 percent to $939 million and attendance rose 2.6 percent to 12.3 million for the season that ended on Sunday. The League of American Theaters and Producers, Broadway’s trade association, also said playing weeks — the number of shows multiplied by weeks they’re open — was the second highest on record at 1,509. The record for playing weeks was set in 2002-03, when ‘Hairspray” opened.”

Los Angles has a big sprawling theatre scene. So why don’t more people appreciate it? “Theater is as vital here as anywhere, but because it’s so spread out, you don’t get that intense energy that you do in New York. But everybody knows that. You can do something here and it just goes out in the Pacific Ocean.”

Minneapolis’ new Guthrie Theatre is almost a year old. It will have attracted 500,000 theatre-goers by the end of the season, and has changed the overall Twin Cities theatre scene. “I think what’s really been good for the rest of the theater community is — this new Guthrie shows up with its new programming and new facility, that the rest of us need to put on our best face for the audiences and for the press to come and see the work we’re doing.”

New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre is surviving the suicide of founder Curt Dempster, its guiding light. “Before his suicide in January, Mr. Dempster, 71, was fretting that his theater, perpetually on the brink of fiscal crisis, would have to cancel its pièce de résistance, the annual marathon of one-act plays. Piling his sudden death onto this precarious existence might have made it seem that the end was nigh for the theater. But that has not happened.”

“Equus”, its producers maintain, is “the most expensive production of a straight play yet to hit the West End, costing £700,000 to bring to the Gielgud – twice the capitalisation cost of The Play What I Wrote. A lot of factors piled on the pounds: the cast size (there are 14 in the company), a six-week rehearsal period, the high-spec onstage seating for the audience, and also the need to cement the pre-opening publicity with a fresh advertising campaign capitalising on the glowing reviews for Radcliffe in the starring role opposite Richard Griffiths as psychiatrist Dysart.”

“Who is, or was, the greatest British actor? As party-game questions go, that’s particularly slippery since personal preferences vary, public taste changes. But it’s the right time to ask the question, because two other actors are posthumously clamouring for supremacy. Last week was the centenary of Laurence Olivier’s birth.”

“Broadway musicians, who staged a four-day strike in 2003 that cost New York City’s economy about $10 million, agreed to a three-year contract with producers, both sides announced today in a release.”

“Though they disagree on specifics, for the most part these critics have been asking: Is no relief to be had from the parade of staged films, Disney spectacles, European pop operas, and nostalgic jukebox musicals? Is the only alternative a plethora of Golden Age (read: Rodgers and Hammerstein) revivals, not always better the second time around?” And then comes “Spring Awakening”…