Category: theatre

In a first, “actors working in real time from remote locations recently were beamed onto a stage where they performed with live, in the flesh actors for an audience that experienced one seamless, three-dimensional show.”

“Kent Thompson said he wanted his annual Colorado New Play Summit one day to rival the nation’s premiere festival, and his 2007-08 season is one huge step in that direction. The Denver Center Theatre Company will cluster three world premiere stagings, all to be showcased around the artistic director’s third new-play summit next February.”

“Sardi’s was the ‘unofficial nerve center,’ as Edward Murrow once called it, of the theater world. Sardi was known to give out-of-work actors a prominent seat in the restaurant to lift their spirit and job prospects. Sardi took over the eatery in 1947 after buying it from his father.”

Theatre box office in Washington DC was down 1.2 percent last year, an improvement from the 8.5 percent drop the season before. “There were 1,929,826 theatergoing derrieres in seats last year, at 7,354 performances of 402 productions. In 2005, there were 1,952,405 attendees at 348 productions. While attendance dropped in 2006, the number of productions went up nearly 14 percent.”

“Next week the Nederlanders, one of the big three Broadway theater owners, are planning to announce the details of a new company they have formed that, among other things, will present and market tours and live entertainment in China. But the entry of the Nederlanders into the Asian market is only the latest sign of how sizzling it has become.”

Kent’s Margate Theatre Royal’s “funders have supplied the struggling theatre with a rescue package, including increased subsidy of £210,000 in the first year. However, as part of the deal, the current team, including long-standing general manager Michael Wheatley-Ward, will be axed and the venue’s programming will be changed to include more participatory and education work, as well as music, dance and film.”

“The board of directors of the 35-year-old Bush Theater in London announced the appointment of Josie Rourke as artistic director. … She replaces Mike Bradwell in April.”

“No matter how brilliant your panel of judges – and ours was – the whole enterprise constantly stumbles over the big truth that the art of standing up in public to tell a story through words and action is as old as humanity itself, so that its beginnings can never be known, and that even when we know that a major theatre event took place, a vital element of that event, in this most live and transient of art forms, disappears for ever when it passes beyond living memory.”

“One of the biggest nonprofit theaters in North America, OSF employs hundreds of staffers and lures in more than 80,000 tourists a year (including many from Washington state). In 2006 the fest took in $14.6 million at the box office, and the entire operation had an estimated $147 million impact on Southern Oregon’s economy.”

The city of Norfolk, Virginia is getting into the theatre business. Not because it loves theatre. “The city did not have a particular yen to be a tour promoter; officials estimate it will cost $600,000 to present the three shows on its schedule. But a series of baffling developments involving its longtime presenting partner has left the city with few other options.”