Category: theatre

“The Touring Broadway Awards, established in 2001, were the first national awards to recognize such shows. According to the most recent study produced by the League, these productions sold more than 17 million tickets last season.”

“David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole, which opened in February 2006 at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Biltmore Theatre on Broadway, has won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The Pulitzer jury had nominated three plays — Orpheus X by Rinde Eckert; Bulrusher by Eisa Davis; and Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue by Quiara Alegria Hudes — however, the board decided to bypass the nominations and chose a play that hadn’t been nominated by the jury.”

“Although there’s never been a great time to be a female comedian, fewer women are breaking through to stand-up’s top ranks. Most every comic deals with aspects of the job such as constant travel, working nights in boozy joints, nonexistent job security, wildly variable pay and isolation from friends and family. But for female comics, there’s also the facet of being in a culture — and a business — that’s uneasy with the idea of a woman generating laughter.”

Clear Channel is abandoning the live touring theatre business. That’s not good news for cities such as Minneapolis, which have invested heavily in theatres run by Clear Channel’s theatre dvision. So wo will take on the programming and debt obligations for these important cultural venues?

“Just as language and nudity became the subject of First Amendment court fights in the face of obscenity and indecent-exposure statutes, smoking has emerged as a battlefront in the ongoing struggle to keep censorship off the stage. In other states and localities across the country, as well as several European countries, stage exceptions to bans on cigarette smoking in public places have not been forthcoming — thus forcing theaters to alter plays, cancel productions or flout the law.”

“Is the world really so mad, grim and dark as the collective consciousness of the 52nd Sunday Times National Student Drama Festival appears to portray it? Since it was launched in 1956 by the Sunday Times drama critic Harold Hobson, this festival has been an annual opportunity to measure the morale of a generation who in a short time will be acting on our stages, working in our television studios, writing in our newspapers, teaching our children. Their tastes and preoccupations are going to change our world.”

A current Guthrie production of The Merchant of Venice” “has been a catalyst for discussion and uneasiness. Some theater patrons are staying away. Others say they are disturbed by the stereotype of a Jewish man who is more concerned about his ducats (money) than his daughter.”

“Students at a Connecticut high school whose principal canceled a play they were preparing on the Iraq war are now planning to perform the work in June in New York, at the Public Theater, a venerable Off Broadway institution, and at the Culture Project, which is known for staging politically provocative work. A third show at a Connecticut theater is also being discussed.”

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s searches for stars to cast in his London stage musicals have been television ratings hits. “Even if he enjoys making the shows themselves … TV is a means to an end, not an end in itself. And that end is to make the West End cool. ‘Well, cooler,’ ” he says.

Are young, hip theatre companies in the UK trying to be too many things to too many audiences? “The artistic policies of recently established fringe companies are becoming depressingly uniform, with every new group laying claim to multidisciplinary territory and announcing the use, for instance, of ‘various combinations of movement, text, mask, music, puppetry and mime’. And, naturally, circus skills.”