Category: theatre

“A furious bidding war has broken out for a chain of theaters around the country, pitting some of Broadway’s richest and most powerful players against one another – including two branches of the fabled showbiz family, The Nederlanders… Sources say the chain could fetch as much as $200 million.”

“These are heady days, indeed, for Broadway in Chicago, which took some flak for dark theaters in the early days of the restoration of the Loop’s theater district, and now has batted away the naysayers… But all of a sudden, a new problem has presented itself. Since its creation, Broadway in Chicago has run two subscription seasons a year. But that requires moving shows in and out with sufficient rapidity to create multishow seasons for regular patrons to buy. When you have a limited number of theaters, and when those theaters are full of the same shows for months or years, that becomes very difficult to do.”

“How has theatre fared in the Blair decade? On the whole, surprisingly well. And for two main reasons: one intentional, one not. The injection of new money has rescued regional theatres from near-bankruptcy. At the same time, the disastrous Iraq invasion has galvanised political theatre. This is the ultimate irony of the Blair years: that extra cash has enabled British theatre to resume its traditional oppositional role.”

“During the 1970s and 1980s, Seattle enjoyed the benefits of a tremendously rich and healthy theatrical ecosystem. Below the canopy of the big theaters, there was a diverse network of mid-sized and small theaters driven by imagination, youthful optimism, and excitement about new forms. Seattle earned the reputation of being the best theater town west of Chicago. Then, with greater budgets and more competition, ‘the business of theater’ started upstaging the creative side… Now, the Seattle area has lost eight small theater companies in the past few years.”

Many theatres have turned to producing one-person shows. There are many advantages… and some pitfalls.

“CanStage, Toronto’s largest not-for-profit theatre, announced a series of changes to its administrative structure yesterday,” and some observers are sniffing a behind-the-scenes power struggle. “Was there even a process involved? …This is one of the largest theatres in the country and it appointed a new artistic director without a search or a consultation. That can’t be right.”

“Right now, many of the most prominent plays on Broadway are incarnations of British productions – sometimes recast with American actors, or wholly imported. In a strange transatlantic calculation, the chances of a British or Irish play making it on Broadway are seemingly greater than their US equivalents. A quick look at so-called straight plays on Broadway provides, at the very least, anecdotal evidence that this is so.”

“I often sit in theatres and wonder why the audience doesn’t just storm the stage in protest at the tedium being inflicted. But there is a difference between dull and boring. Dull is something that is really not very interesting; feeling bored in the theatre is often more to do with incomprehension and sitting through something that you can’t find a way into, something that perhaps just isn’t to your personal taste. This just means that you have to work far harder at it to get a reward.”

Mel Brooks is taking another of his movies and making a musical. The principle creators of “Young Frankenstein” hope to repeat their huge success with the earlier Brooks musical, “The Producers.” As he did for “The Producers,” Brooks will pen the score for “Young Frankenstein,” and co-author the book (based on his screenplay) with Thomas Meehan.

“While it took place just a generation or two ago, the fertile tumult of the early years of the Off Off Broadway theater movement seems almost as distant. Wading through the tricked-out strollers clogging the streets of Greenwich Village today, it is hard to conceive that not so long ago — well, O.K., getting on toward 50 years now — a scrappy, determined bunch of young artists ignited a vibrant new era in theater by staging plays in local coffeehouses, churches and other commandeered spaces.”