Category: theatre

When a play from a previous time uses a word that is offensive to many today, do you keep the word in or change it?

Playwright Lisa Loomer: “Theater has the power to remind us of our shared humanity. In this political climate, that matters. And, in a world of computers and iPods, a world of screen, there’s something about sitting next to a fellow human as the lights go down. There’s something about experiencing living, breathing actors — in real time. You can’t TiVo something like that.”

“It could just be the way the stars are currently aligned: The theater here has had its flirtations with any number of emerging talents before. For whatever reason, though, many playwrights being staged this season are innovators with the language and structure of drama.”

Hamlet may have been a protagonist to Shakespeare, but to any conventional legal mind at the time, he would have to have been judged a murderer. Of course, he spent no small amount of time claiming to be insane, as well, a condition which is occasionally used to mitigate murder charges. This week, as part of Washington, D.C.’s ongoing Shakespeare festival, Hamlet’s case came before “no less a jurist than Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, [as] a jury of Washingtonians deliberated over whether Hamlet was in his right mind when he stabbed Polonius to death.”

Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille has named Andy McKim, longtime associate director of the city’s Tarragon Theatre, as its new artistic director. “He won the job in a competition that began last June; there were 25 applicants from across the country and a short list of six were interviewed and asked to submit vision statements. Forty years old next year, Passe Muraille has been a seminal force in the development of Canadian theatre.”

“An enhancement deal, conventionally, is when a commercial producer pays money to a nonprofit theater to help subsidize a production. If a theater decides to stage a big musical, for example, a commercial producer may throw in a few hundred thousand dollars — or a couple million in some cases — to raise the show’s production values and get a sense of how it would look in a bigger theater… Some theaters still fear that widespread knowledge of enhancement could jeopardize their reputations, their donations or even their nonprofit status. But as money has become increasingly scarce, the enhancement system has become accepted. In fact it is all but essential, even in Off Broadway’s small and midsize theaters.”

Two Seattle theaters–the “Seattle Rep (budget $9.6 million) and ArtsWest (budget $794,000)–both announced they would be doing I Am My Own Wife in May of 2008. Both were surprised by the other’s announcement–having two productions of the same play in the same season just ain’t done.” So what to do…

“Women who are often in the forefront of experiments in form and style in British theatre. For many women, it is not just what you say but how you say it that matters. Yet it still seems to be the case that when women experiment in form they are more likely to be shot down by critics and told that they don’t know how to structure a play properly.”

A Baltimore-based theatrical booking company is being investigated by law enforcement officials after reneging on agreements to present various shows in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. theatres and failing to offer refunds to advance ticketbuyers.

Bringing a musical to Broadway is always an uphill battle, but for the first new Kander & Ebb musical in years, it’s been a theatrical melodrama of epic proportions. The death of lyricist Fred Ebb in 2004 threw the production into uncertainty, and the eventual completion of the work was thanks to an almost unprecedented level of collaboration.