Category: theatre

“The audience, as much as the play, is worth the price of admission as it wrestles at Lincoln Center with ‘The Coast of Utopia,’ Tom Stoppard’s beguilingly complex resurrection of Russia’s 19th-century intelligentsia. … Between the acts, overheard snatches of audience dialogue burnished the evening as characters were plumbed or at least kept straight. ‘Who was Alexander Herzen, precisely?’ (Ah, the playwright’s tease: Come back for the next two parts to see Herzen dramatically intuit the terror of a revolutionary future.) ‘I guess I’ll have to read Isaiah Berlin’s essays on these guys.’ (Homework, gladly self-assigned, the ultimate compliment to Stoppard.)”

The Actors’ Temple, a Manhattan synagogue, is turning to theatre to help make ends meet. “Recently — say, oh, during the last half-century — this temple, with a declining membership and a vanishing budget, has not been doing so well. So starting with an official opening night tomorrow, the Actors’ Temple, for the first time in its 89-year history, will be moonlighting as an Off Broadway theater. … The first show, ‘The Big Voice: God or Merman?,’ is about a Roman Catholic from Brooklyn and a Baptist from Arkansas who find spiritual solace in musical theater and each other.”

“Jennifer L. Nelson, the founding artistic director of African Continuum Theatre Company, announced yesterday that she is stepping down from the top job at [Washington, D.C.’s] most visible black theater group. With the theater moving into a new phase with a permanent home, Nelson says its stability and visibility are giving her a chance to pursue her own creative interests.”

Should a Broadway revival that’s nothing more than a carbon copy of the original show be eligible for a Tony Award? The reemergence of A Chorus Line and Les Miserables in stagings that look identical to their originals has many in New York’s theatre world asking the question, and the producers may not like the answer.

As anyone who’s ever tried to co-write anything can tell you, collaboration can be more trouble than its worth. So why would anyone even try to write a play with four other people? “The playwrights were initially wary… Two things, however, won them over. Firstly, there were the social opportunities, [and] secondly, there was curiosity to see how other people write.”

“The truth is that it is not the current raft of musicals that are killing the straight play in the West End but the theatre buildings themselves, most of which were built in the 19th century and are entirely unsympathetic for contemporary drama. Modern audiences raised on the intimacy of TV and film are entirely correct to be disinclined to spend £37.50 to see a live performance that from row P in the stalls appears to be taking place in another county. … As for the straight play, well it’s alive and well, it is just happening in places other than the West End – in the subsidised sector and in studio and fringe spaces.”

“Last week, audiences hyperventilated over the latest [musical], Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Sound of Music, while at Amy’s View there was appreciative but reserved applause. It is not all disaster for straight drama: Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll is still doing okay and it will be a real surprise if Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon does not at least run its course. But they are not doing anywhere near as good business as the musicals – and producers, in their more pessimistic moments, talk about straight drama being an endangered species in the West End. Perhaps we get the theatre we deserve. Straight drama will close unless people go and see it.”

It was a dynamite Thanksgiving weekend for Broadway, as several shows saw record ticket sales. “‘Wicked’ took in a mammoth $1.7 million, a new all-time Broadway record… Another record was set at the August Wilson Theatre where ‘Jersey Boys,’ the Four Seasons musical, grossed $1.18 million.”

Do plays based on historical fact have a responsibility to tell the whole truth? “If not for the sake of historical accuracy, they’re at least bound by their audiences’ prior knowledge of the real people. In one sense, that limits the artistic parameters available to the actor. But by narrowing the options, it can also open new creative opportunities.”

Latino actors face an uphill climb finding roles in an American theatre and film scene dominated by white culture. In Los Angeles, the problem is particularly egregious. But two local actors are looking to turn the situation around, renovating a vacant theater and launching a new company with the aim of demonstrating to Hollywood the untapped talent that exists in its own backyard.