Category: theatre

“Whether you live in New York or Newport Beach, Berlin or Shanghai, you’re likely to be within driving distance of at least one Disney musical in the next 12 months. All that competing Disney product has some observers predicting trouble. There is that question of whether the Disney (musicals) will cannibalize each other.”

Playwright David Hare is bringing his new play straight to Broadway. But why? It is the only new play opening there this fall. “Though much of his professional success has been in America, until now – with Stuff Happens and The Vertical Hour – he has never felt comfortable writing about it. What he’s most famous for are his dissections of British life, yet America has played a crucial part in his political – and theatrical – education.”

Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, a major hit in both book and movie form, isn’t faring as well on the stage. A recent trial run in Boston played to half-empty houses, and ticket sales are alarmingly slow for the Broadway production as well. “The problem, sources say, is that the show’s target audience – straight males in their 20s and 30s – would rather be caught in a gay bar than at a Broadway musical.”

“There are your everyday whims, and then there are the whims of a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. The writer in this case is Suzan-Lori Parks, who decided one afternoon in 2002 that she would write a play a day for a year. Ha! Neat idea. Well, four years later those plays are about to be presented in what may be the largest and most elaborate theatrical premiere ever, involving some of the most prominent institutional theaters in the country.”

Hollywood star Cate Blanchett has accepted a position as co-director of Australia’s Sydney Theatre Company, along with her husband, director Andrew Upton. “Blanchett revealed that both she and Upton were on three-year contracts, each of which has a three-month ‘slot-out’ clause in-built into the contractual arrangement, to allow either one of them to take three months out each year should they wish to pursue other activities.”

“There is no wedding, no romantic interest and no plot to speak of. Instead the reader of Karl Marx’s epic work, Das Kapital, is treated to a lengthy treatise on the division of labour and capitalist modes of production, offered up in long, convoluted sentences. Yet none of this has deterred a German theatre group from achieving the seemingly impossible: bringing the huge classic on economic theory to the stage.”

The Twyla Tharp/Bob Dylan collaboration, The Times, They Are A-Changin’, which opened on Broadway to blistering reviews last month, will close November 19 after only 28 performances. “The first major casualty of the new theater season, it will lose its entire $10 million investment.”

Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater, having just moved into a huge new complex on the city’s riverfront, has announced a restructuring of its upper management. The job of managing director will be split in two, and longtime CEO Joe Dowling’s position as top man at the Guthrie will be clearly codified.

“Musical theatre has rarely been more buoyant in London, with 25 productions on show and reports of box-office records — such as Wicked earning nearly £800,000 in its first week. But while Sir Tim praised shows such as Billy Elliot and Blood Brothers, he said that there is no evidence of a new generation of writing talent.”

So Tim Rice thinks the new generation of musicals is lacking. “Indeed, Shaftesbury Avenue is so stuffed with nostalgic revivals, Disney spectaculars and ropey rock compilation shows that one is inclined to agree with him. Except, you have to wonder if Rice isn’t at least partially responsible for them all.”