Category: theatre

When the musical theatre bug bites you, it often bites hard. “For many children, musicals aren’t merely entertainment, they’re the embodiment of a yearning that can last – and shape – a lifetime. Even now, these theater artists get a wistful tone in their voices when they recall those early, eye-popping experiences.”

“Longtime ACT Theatre managing director Susan Trapnell is stepping aside to make room for a new top administrator: Jolanne Stanton. The widely respected Trapnell is not leaving ACT but will take on a newly created position as executive director of endowment funding. … Stanton, who will run the day-to-day business at ACT, is a Seattle resident who joined ACT’s board of directors in 2006 and has worked on its strategic planning as a volunteer.”

“There may be more difficult novels to adapt to the stage … but Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’ is right up there with the most intractable. Scant of dialogue and old-fashioned plot, this classic of modernism defies anyone to spin a play out of its flowing stream of consciousness. Berkeley Repertory deserves credit for undertaking the project, though the solutions it advances … confirm the obvious: Some art — the greatest perhaps — can only be fully appreciated on its own inflexible terms.”

The League of American Theaters and Producers’ “Singles’ Night on Broadway” seemed to attract mainly older, straight theatergoers. “The crowd looked a lot like — well, a Broadway crowd. The Broadway audience, according to the league, is a little more than 60 percent female. Same here. More than half the Broadway audience is between the ages of 35 and 64. Same here, if not more so.”

“Daniel Radcliffe’s powerful stage debut in ‘Equus’ suggests he’s heading for a career beyond the ‘Harry Potter’ films.” But for many child actors, the road to adult success proves to be a harsh dead end. So why can some make the transition while others falter?

Harold Pinter is hot again in the UK, and after a relatively quiet 75th birthday year for the playwright, it seems that everyone in theatre wants to make up for lost time. “One sign of any genuine creative artist is that he or she is always ahead of the game: they see or hear something that the rest of us don’t. Both artistically and politically, Pinter has persistently been ahead of the pack; and now the public and critics are at last catching up with him.”

The New York Times’ Charles Isherwood proclaimed his boredom with Tom Stoppard’s “Coast of Utopia” trilogy in a Sunday essay published mere days into previews of Part 3. With the play having opened, Michael Feingold asks, “What causes Charles’s boredom? Having now seen Salvage, The Coast of Utopia’s closing chapter, and having been less actively bored than Charles, but less enthralled than many others, I think I can offer some tentative explanations.”

You’d be hard put to find a bleaker place to live than the Jenin refugee camp on the West Bank, where Palestinians displaced by their leaders’ decades-long clash with Israel struggle terribly for even the basic necessities of life. But for the last several years, a unique project known as Freedom Theater has provided Jenin youths with an outlet for their anger and loss beyond the violence that has helped to perpetuate the conflict for so many years.

One of the unique and much welcome eccentricities of Chicago’s theatre scene is the spirit of cooperation between some of the city’s largest and smallest houses and companies. “The easy flow of audiences and artists between Chicago’s large, established theaters and the scrappy up-and-comers has been instrumental in maintaining its stature as the country’s most vibrant dramatic capital after New York, allowing now-celebrated artists… to make their way from the fringes to the mainstream.”

Stratford, England’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre is preparing to shut its doors for three long years of renovation. And “although the building is a Shakespearean mecca, it is one that has been vilified and attacked for most of its 75-year history.”