Category: theatre

“The copying of Broadway productions — or, more precisely, what constitutes the copying thereof — is a suddenly prominent issue that pits the economic interests of theater directors and choreographers against the interests of writers and composers. Right now, it’s the writers and composers who get the bulk of the royalties when Broadway shows such as ‘Urinetown’ or ‘The Producers’ are licensed to other producers. But… directors are now after a piece of that lucrative pie.”

“In ‘La Tempête,’ the much buzzed about French-language production of ‘The Tempest’ from the Montreal’s 4D Art, are 10 actors. Four of them (those playing the roles of Prospero, Miranda, Ferdinand, and an Ariel/Caliban hybrid) appear live. The six others are virtual characters, their video images (with sound) projected onto the back wall; at times, projected off curved mirrored surfaces, they look three dimensional. The high-tech wizardry is as cool as it sounds.”

Sarah Kane is a polarizing playwright. Some call her great, while others link her high posthumous profile more or less directly to her suicide. In any case, there is “the creeping correlation of Kane’s suffering with her talent (pace Plath). … There are kinds of plays you can’t say you find lethal without people assuming that you loathed them because they were too visceral, too truthful for you. And I suspect critics are increasingly afraid of being thought uncool if they express disgust with brutality on stage.”

“‘Writing one’s mind’ was Virginia Woolf’s own description of her experimental 1931 novel, The Waves. But how do you put on stage an extended prose-poem made up of a group of interior monologues? … Like Woolf’s book, this version traces the inner lives of six characters from childhood in 1893 to early middle age in the 1930s. In the process, the production uses a variety of devices: speech, sound-effects, video-images, even rhythmic dance-movements. But although fragments of the solitude and discontent of the sextet emerges, there seems to me something extravagantly pointless about trying to give Woolf’s words a physical reality.”

Fashion is not only invading television and museums; it’s on the New York stage, too, in the form of Paul Rudnick’s play, “Regrets Only,” whose central character is based on the late designer, Bill Blass. Rudnick says he’s surprised by the public’s fashion savvy — but should Rudnick have been a little more savvy about who Blass was? Cathy Horyn, who edited Blass’s memoir, seems to think so.

Actors Delta Burke and Leslie Jordan were scheduled to appear on a local TV talk show in Nashville this week to promote the plays they are starring in. But once the show’s producers realized that the plays (both of which have won several prestigious drama awards) contained gay themes, the stars were told not to bother showing up. The station explained that its viewers are “very conservative,” and it didn’t want to risk offending them.

Suzan-Lori Parks’ 365-plays project has launched. “But in spite of the group-hug dynamic, doubts about the artistic coherence of the whole project have crept in. With low or non-existent production budgets and truncated rehearsal times, there’s no guarantee that every production will be as good as the next, or that it will be what Parks intended. Then there’s the issue of how audiences will perceive the playwright’s work.”

A dispute has sprung up between the creative team behind the Broadway production of the award-winning musical, Urinetown, and presenters of separate productions of the show in Chicago and Ohio, over the use of staging, set design, and lighting elements that the Broadway team says belong to them. “[The] arguments concern a controversial area of intellectual property: creative input into a production beyond the script and music. While choreography is specifically protected by law, the situation for stage direction is not as clear.”

“The Theatre of Neptune In New France,” considered Canada’s first play, premiered on the water in a Nova Scotia harbor. “Now, four centuries later, a controversy has developed about whether the play — written by colonial lawyer and historian Marc Lescarbot — is simply a quaint if valuable historical precedent or whether it’s an implicitly racist tract aimed at subverting aboriginal peoples, the native Mi’kmaq.”

Seattle’s Empty Space Theatre recently shut its doors after a 36 year run. “One wonders how a vital company went from announcing a next season one day, to closing up shop a couple weeks later. And why the recent emergency-funding drive didn’t save it.”