Category: theatre

It’s little remembered these days, but the classic American play, Inherit The Wind was actually intended not just as a rehash of the Scopes Monkey Trial, but as an allegory for the McCarthy witchhunts of the 1950s. Now, a revival is opening on Broadway, and this time around, the subtext behind the evolution debate concerns… can you guess?

The first rehearsal of an expensive new stage production is never a good place to discover that your script sucks. But for writers, who work mainly in isolation until that fateful first rehearsal, there aren’t a lot of other options. But a weekly workshop in Los Angeles is allowing writers the chance to see their work performed by local actors without the pressure of press and public looking in.

“Former lieutenant governor Kerry Healey’s bid to join the advisory board of the American Repertory Theatre was rejected last month because some members of the board were upset about the tone of her campaign for governor…. During a contentious March 19 meeting to consider Healey’s appointment, several members of the ART’s 40-member board criticized the Republican nominee’s unsuccessful campaign last fall, calling it mean-spirited and condemning a controversial television ad that highlighted Deval Patrick’s advocacy for a convicted rapist.”

“Shakespeare’s jokes: what’s the point? How many times have you seen a Shakespearean fool be funny? … I wonder if these comic routines – topical gags in Jacobean idiom, often low on dramatic or poetic value, and tailored to specific actors who’ve been dead for four centuries – are always worth persisting with. Nowadays, these once-entertaining scenes can be harder to enjoy than the serious stuff they were designed to offset.”

“The Greek theater of Epidaurus has long been considered a marvel of acoustics. Over the years, people have come up with a number of explanations as to why those who sit in the back of the semicircular theater, built in the 4th century B.C., can hear performers on the stage with such clarity. … Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology this month showed that the secret is in . . . the seats.” (second item)

“Christopher Ashley, the director of ‘Regrets Only,’ the 2000 revival of ‘The Rocky Horror Show’ and the coming Broadway production of ‘Xanadu,’ has been named the new artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego. He will replace Des McAnuff, who is leaving to become one of three artistic directors at the Stratford Festival in Ontario.”

“The writer-director partnership can be crucial to the success of a new play. A tried-and-tested classic will survive the attentions of an inept director, but a virgin text, mishandled, might never see the light of day again. A good writer-director mix can, on the other hand, produce a magical result that is somehow more than the sum of its components.” A new theatre festival in Suffolk, England, aims to match writers and directors at the earliest possible stage of a new play’s development.

Actors and critics may decry it as an unconscionable way to cast major stage productions, but Patrick Pacheco says that using reality TV as a way to drum up interest in costly Broadway shows won’t be going away anytime soon. “In some ways, these shows are merely a new wrinkle on stunt casting that has been around at least since impresario David Merrick began tapping performers with little or no stage experience, such as Betty Grable, to keep Hello, Dolly! humming along.”

There’s never been any shortage of film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. But the Bard’s work shows up most often in Hollywood as a twisted shadow of its original self, “an eclectic branch of ‘what if … ?’ cinema… Their production has always been underpinned by a commercial imperative, because most original-text Shakespeare has struggled at the box office.”

This year’s Humana Festival featured a seemingly endless parade of doom and gloom, says John Moore. “Two of the six plays address the apocalypse. Is there hope? A bit. The world ends only once… That playwrights are fearful is not new; they’ve been laden with it since 9/11. What makes this flawed but compelling 2007 collection different is that we seem to have settled into an acceptance that foreboding is now a lurking everyday reality.”