Category: theatre

“At a time when young audiences demonstrably are rejecting stolid, text-based theater for more eclectic performance styles, the maturation of the [House Theatre of Chicago] has excellent timing. This is the theater company that could — should — be a new leading public face of Chicago’s off-Loop. This is the House’s moment. “

“After several weeks of tense negotiations, [Kevin] Spacey finally signed to star in the upcoming revival of Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten.” But Spacey’s exorbitant salary creates serious fiscal pressure for the production, which will now have to sell huge numbers of “premium” tickets priced as high as $250 just to break even.

Is the turbulent state of the modern world causing theatregoers to flock to the stage equivalent of comfort food? In London, it sure seems that way. “Only The Sound of Music, at the London Palladium, is drawing the around-the-block lines that make producers wake up trilling.”

Spamalot gets seven Laurence Olivier nominations in London. “Despite wowing the critics after winning the role of Maria in The Sound Of Music, Welsh star Connie Fisher has not been nominated for Best Actress in the annual awards.”

“To make room for the Dec. 6 opening of ‘The Little Mermaid,’ Disney Theatrical has announced the closing dates for ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ the gold and purple warhorse that marked Disney’s debut on Broadway and has put in nearly 13 years on the boards. ‘Beauty,’ now playing at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater will close on July 29, when it will have played 46 previews and 5,464 regular performances, making it the sixth-longest-running show in Broadway history.”

When the producers of the new Broadway revival of Grease struck a deal with NBC to air a reality show in which viewers would pick the stage show’s leads, they figured that the TV exposure would be enough to boost their box office take through the roof. Think again: “Grease: You’re The One That I Want” has been trashed by critics, and is hemorrhaging viewers. Worse yet, the expected box office spike never materialized, and most working theatre types think the TV show cheapens their entire profession.

“Jeremy Skidmore, the visionary artistic director of Theater Alliance, the small D.C. company with big ideas, will leave at the end of this season to pursue freelance directing and take a break from five years as an arts administrator. He oversaw 22 Alliance productions.”

A new service in London will let West End theatre customers buy their tickets online and print them at home. “Customers will be able to buy tickets online and print off confirmation from their home computer which includes a barcode that can be read by ushers at the theatre using a handheld scanner. The system, which is already common on Broadway, cuts out the need to visit the box office on arrival and makes it harder to for tickets to be forged.”

“The Royal Court has arguably been the engine that has driven British theatre for the past 50 years, a contention more widely recognised abroad than at home. Living dramatists, you might think, have never had it so good. Yet there is a strong opposition that argues that the future lies elsewhere – that young audiences are bored with text-based plays, and crave group-devised work, visual and physical theatre, and site-specific experiments.”

Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre is an object of mythic proportions. “The passion for rebuilding the Globe emerges as a rather obnoxious default thinking for cultural leaders who have run out of ideas.”