Category: theatre

The St. Paul-based Penumbra Theatre Company is cutting a play from its current season in an effort to keep its finances in balance. “Penumbra, considered one of the foremost African-American theater companies in the nation, has been laboring to keep its fiscal house in order.” Ambitious plans are still underway to present August Wilson’s history cycle beginning in the 2007-08 season.

UCLA’s Chicana and Chicano Studies 188 is “billed as the first university-level course focusing entirely on the works of Culture Clash, the provocative Chicano trio that for 22 years has carried the banner of barrio-based theater, a form traced to Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino. Many students have enrolled in the weekly seminar … to satisfy a history requirement, using the trio’s work as an academic window on Chicano life and times.”

“The working class no longer has any strategic presence in British politics – it was defeated in the 1980s and no parliamentary party is its champion. Nothing on the political horizon will make a significant difference to its relative conditions of existence.” So say two British playwrights, who decided to make the growing class gap, and those who have created and perpetuated it, the subject of their latest work. “Today, theatre, rather than parliament, is one of the places where politics is being rediscovered.”

A Dutch production of the musical Grease went horribly awry in Amsterdam this weekend, when a car carrying the two leads in a key scene went out of control and slammed into the orchestra pit. Both actors were injured, although not critically. None of the orchestra musicians were hurt. The whole sorry episode will presumably be up on YouTube in the next day or so…

A group of New York bloggers competes to see who can see the most shows this year and blog about them. “The short entries range from campy, insidery quips to trenchant cultural observations. And their targets extend well beyond Broadway, including everything from Off Off Broadway to opera and story ballets.”

Broadway’s looking back this season with revivals of ’50s plays.

The show will have run 33 previews and 2,502 regular performances. “On Broadway, the show to date has grossed $283 million. Two national tours went out, playing 74 cities. There are productions running in eight countries, plus one in Las Vegas featuring David Hasselhoff. The show has grossed more than $1 billion worldwide, according to the producers. When the show closes, it will be the 18th-longest-running show in Broadway history.”

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera may not be a serious theatregoer’s cup of tea, but there’s no denying the show’s drawing power. Back in the 1990s, Phantom turned Toronto into a major theatrical destination. But when the show closed in 1999, Toronto’s theatrical fortunes dried up. Now, a revival is opening, but some wonder whether the city can recapture its commercial success.

Michael Billington is alarmed at the populist streak now running through UK theatre. “What disturbs me is a perverse and ever increasing populism that sabotages the specialist expertise on which any art form is built. Dr Johnson famously said that ‘the drama’s laws the drama’s patrons give’. But while the public is the final arbiter, that doesn’t mean that it should be a controlling force.”

“As white theatergoers were lining up for ‘Wicked’ at the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center across town, the audience filling up the Lyric, a slightly larger theater, was almost exclusively black, mostly middle-aged women. Many said they had heard about the play through the traditional lines of the circuit’s promotion: radio ads, fliers in local business and church parking lots and an astonishingly effective word-of-mouth network that precedes the show from city to city.”