Category: theatre

“After 36 years of operations and a recent move to a new, high-tech space at Seattle University, Empty Space could not raise the funds it needed to continue the 2006 season. The three-production 2007 season, announced earlier this month, also will be scrapped.”

A Colorado judge refuses to lift a state ban on smoking for theatre productions. The judge “ruled the act of smoking, even in performance, ‘is not inherently an expressive behavior,’ and therefore does not qualify for free-speech protections under the U.S. constitution. The plaintiffs had argued that any action performed on a stage – from a gesture to body language to smoking – communicates a meaningful artistic expression that must be protected.”

“Of all these disciplines the one that demands the most expertise, weirdly enough, is writing the book to a musical. It requires more wit, wisdom, appreciation of structure, character, musicality, rhythm, the most deftness and, lastly, that most underrated of artistic virtues, humility.”

Increasingly, off-Broadway hits making the transition to Broadway are doing more than minor tweaking in between shows. Some are asked to change nearly everything that made the show appealing in the first place. “Urinetown and Avenue Q showed it was possible to go Broadway without shedding one’s eccentric or unconventional Off Broadway appeal.” But that hasn’t changed Broadway’s insatiable appetite for commercially safe, non-controversial theatre, and many are left wondering whether a move to Broadway is even worth the trouble.

Two of the unions locked in a dispute with the Toronto production of Blue Man Group have made a deal wit the show. But other unions say it’s not a good deal. IUn any case, the show is scheduled to close in a couple of months.

The latest jukebox musical hits Broadway – dance set to the music of Bob Dylan. “Mr. Dylan’s songs have been entrusted to the great choreographer Twyla Tharp, the woman who gloriously redeemed the jukebox genre with ‘Movin’ Out,’ a narrative ballet set to songs by Billy Joel. Ms. Tharp is one of the bona fide, boundary-stretching geniuses of modern dance. And when a genius goes down in flames, everybody feels the burn.

“Actors across the UK have won a £50 a week pay rise, bringing the minimum rate for commercial theatre in the regions to £350 and paving the way for similar wage increases in the small-scale and subsidised repertory sectors.”

Colombia is a country best with poverty and corruption. And in Bogota there is a thriving theatre scene dealing with issues. “A strong sense of frustration, hopelessness and fear is creating a disbelief in reality.”

The U.S. Library of Congress has inducted the personal archive of late Rent composer Jonathan Larson into its collection. (Larson, whose rock musical is one of the most successful new shows of the last two decades, died of an aneurysm shortly before the show’s Broadway premiere in 1996.) Larson is “the first of a younger cadre of Broadway songwriters to have his manuscripts, letters and other materials preserved at the library alongside those of Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter and Leonard Bernstein.”

The winner of Canada’s $100,000 Siminovitch Prize in Theatre says that she was completely burned out and planning to take a break from the stage entirely when news of her big win arrived…