Category: theatre

“The Roundabout Theater Company, the largest nonprofit group rolling dice in the Broadway casino, is adding a fourth house to its empire. The plan has outraged many of the company’s commercial competitors, who are further peeved that the Roundabout will almost certainly open the new space with a revival of its smash 1998 production of ‘Cabaret.'”

“Soon after Falluja became a symbol of the horrific violence and aggressive American tactics in Iraq, the theater director Jonathan Holmes listened to a group of British generals and journalists conduct a post-mortem on what had happened during the assault on that town. … Thus the play ‘Fallujah,’ now at the Old Truman Theater in London’s East End, was born. The play (which uses the preferred British spelling in its title) is the latest entrant in the growing canon of documentary theater that concentrates on Iraq.”

“Plays old and new flop on Broadway with a regularity that surprises nobody in the theater business. But the failure of ‘Journey’s End,’ R. C. Sherriff’s 1928 drama about British soldiers in the trenches of World War I, has been an unusually resounding one. The play received some of the best reviews of the season when it opened in February.” But “the show never found an audience and played to some of the smallest houses on Broadway this season, at times dipping to about 25 percent capacity at the Belasco Theater.”

“For the second year in a row, it looks as if the Tony Awards telecast won’t have a host. Broadway’s go-to guy, Hugh Jackman, passed on the job. So did Broadway’s other go-to guy, Rosie O’Donnell.”

Shakespeare seems to have taken a powder in Toronto. “In the last year, four of our fully professional summer theatres devoted to the Bard have suspended their activities.”

It’s difficult to look at recent theatre awards and not conclude that they suck, writes Tony Brown (okay, well, he didn’t say “suck”, but he meant it). The Pulitzers have a big drama problem. And the Tonys: Come on…

“Despite six Tony nominations and rave reviews in London, the wonderful ‘Coram Boy’ is set to close Sunday in New York. There’s little mercy in the world, as so many characters in this play with music can tell you.”

Here’s a question that ought to have been raised earlier, potentially saving untold thousands from misery: “Why do back catalogue-based musicals have such stupid plots?”

Well, duke it out verbally, anyway, over Nicholas Hytner’s “allegation that too many critics are ageing misogynists cut from the same cloth,” Michael Billington writes. After the two ran into each other in the car park, “a lively debate ensued. To his credit, Hytner gave some ground and admitted, particularly over the accusation of entrenched misogyny, that he may have overstated the case. But he stuck fiercely to his line that daily drama criticism was dominated by men of a certain generation….”

Both “Coram” and “Journey’s End” were plays that had trouble attracting crowds in a spring season unusually crowded with nonmusical offerings. Not all the news is bad for plays, however: The revival of “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” mainly passed over by the Tony noms (which overlooked Kevin Spacey but nominated co-star Eve Best), recently recouped its $2.4 million capitalization.