Category: theatre

You’re a good parent. You take every opportunity to expose your children to all the widely varied cultural events your city offers up, and that new musical version of Mary Poppins seems like just the holiday treat your kids could really sink their teeth into. One problem: you live in New York, where Broadway tickets can run $250 a pop. Furthermore, your kids are, well, kids, which means that they’re unpredictable, and a $2 tantrum could well wind up ruining your thousand-dollar evening out. So answer me this: you feeling lucky, punk?

“So Michael Billington wonders why British playwrights aren’t writing more gay farces, when the gay comedy of manners is proving so successful on Broadway. There are two answers to this. One, because British theatres aren’t commissioning them, and most writers have a hard enough time making ends meet without writing work just for the hell of it. And two, if gay writers write gay stories, we’re told we’re ‘ghetto-ising’ ourselves; if straight writers write about gay themes, they’re told they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

A Norwegian appeals court has ruled that striptease is an art form and should therefore be exempt from value-added tax (VAT).

“Whatever its faults, New York theatre has virtually patented a new form: the gay comedy of manners. Its origins lie in Mart Crowley’s 1968 play The Boys in the Band, dealing with a surprise hetero visitor to a gay birthday bash. Crowley’s work launched a series of plays that combined a gay agenda with mass audience appeal. In Britain, leaving aside Joe Orton’s taboo-breaking farces, the only real equivalent is Kevin Elyot’s My Night With Reg (1994). When will our own writers wake up to the fact that there is now a big market for gay boulevard comedy?”

A group of cultural heavyweights has banded together to protest the imminent closing of London’s Theatre Museum. “The organisation is demanding the V&A withdraws its notice of closure on the museum and is looking for alternative ways to manage the institution. In the longer term, it also wants to investigate ‘broader possibilities for properly housing’ the museum’s collections, potentially moving them to a new location.”

David Hare’s new Broadway play, “The Vertical Hour,” has hardly been a hit with American critics, but hometown critic Michael Billington views it from an entirely different perspective. “In many ways, it’s a characteristic Hare play. Dealing with the emotional journey of a woman who has swapped war reporting for academia, it is precisely about the intersection of public and private lives. But what moved me, almost as much as the play itself, was the audience response: the almost palpable hunger of Broadway theatregoers for a play about big issues. Even more than it might in Britain, Hare’s play fulfils an urgent need.”

What do you do when a multi-billion dollar company headquartered in your city collapses under the weight of its own lies and lawlessness, leaving thousands of employees penniless and your civic economy in shambles? Write a musical about it, of course.

Canada’s Shaw Festival finished its 2006 season in the black, with box office revenues of more than $14 million. “Attendance reached 295,016, or 70 per cent of capacity for 808 performances.”

The $100 ticket is old news for concertgoers in Los Angeles, and theatre tickets are starting to follow suit. Supply and demand is driving the high prices, but that doesn’t change the fact that culture in America’s second-largest city is increasingly becoming a luxury that only the wealthy can afford.

No one has ever accused Broadway of being shy about piggybacking on the latest pop culture trends. This season saw several former American Idol stars playing prominent roles in leading Broadway shows, and now, “it looks as if the Great White Way will soon be inundated with hoofers from ‘Dancing With the Stars.'”