Category: theatre

Berlin’s People’s Theatre has a well-deserved rep for outrageousness. Under its founding director of 15 years, “actors ignored huge portions of the classical texts they performed, stripped naked, screamed their lines for the duration of five-hour productions, got drunk onstage, dropped out of character, conducted private fights, tossed paint at their public, saw a third of the audience walk out as they spoke two lines at an excruciatingly slow pace, may or may not have…”

For years, the Washington-area’s Signature Theatre has performed “in a retrofitted bumper-plating factory, on a solitary strip in Arlington.” The company has “won national recognition, particularly for its revivals of the musical works of Stephen Sondheim. It’s also done original plays and won critical acclaim for productions of work by Cameron Mackintosh and Terrance McNally.”

John Heilpern is dismayed that Broadway theatres will now allow food inside. As I see and hear it, chowing down in the theater will kill the theater. The writing is now on the wall for our theaters, where, until only recently, eating and drinking at your seat were forbidden. Now even those ritual warnings about unwrapping candy and cough drops before the curtain goes up are out-of-date.”

When Kevin Spacey brings his production of A Moon for the Misbegotten from London’s Old Vic to Broadway this spring, it could quickly become the hottest show in town. And it had better, because Spacey is apparently demanding a salary of $25,000 a week plus a hefty chunk of the box office take for his services, which is causing some nervous investors to wonder whether, on a limited 10-week run, they have any chance of seeing any profit.

A “reality” TV show to choose leads for a Broadway revival of “Grease” has been a rocket for ticket sales. In just two days of sales, the show has sold $1.3 miilion in advance sale.

“Disney’s High School Musical–originally a fairly modest cable movie–has become a phenomenon, moving DVDs by the truckload, as though they were a cure for adolescence itself. Children’s Theatre Company landed the rights to produce this world premiere adaptation for the stage, and for their trouble they have already sold out the entire run.”

“Last Saturday saw the 920th and final performance of The Producers in London’s West End. We know all about first nights at the theatre, because they naturally get all the attention – the all-important early reviews, the news of the breakthrough performance, the will-it-won’t-it-float moment – but what are last nights like?”

“At a time when the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival was feeling the pinch of rising costs, the small, 13-year-old professional theater received a surprise, anonymous $1 million gift to create an endowment fund. … The festival was considering producing only two shows,” rather than its usual four per year, “when the $1 million gift came in. Instead, the theater, which has a $600,000 budget, now has a firm financial base.”

Why don’t London hits get produced in regional theatres? “We have now created a situation in which there is a demand for hundreds of premieres across the country every year, often in studio theatres. But there is no promise of subsequent productions. Writers – realising there is very small financial reward for this, and small audiences – are soon lost to television and film.”

“As conceived by the Kennedy Center President Michael M. Kaiser and curated by Kahn, the six-month festival is one of the most lavish explorations this nation has seen of Shakespeare and his impact on the arts. The 60 participating organizations include theater, dance and opera companies, museums, universities and music ensembles, most of them homegrown but some from as far as St. Petersburg and Tel Aviv.”