“I think we are in a slight time of shift, in that the sung through musical perhaps is now receding, and the book musical is starting to come back. It’s delicate…you have to have a theme which engages as much as you need glorious music.”
“The important thing is: what do we do about that? Because otherwise we lose all these interesting characters like Richard Burton and Richard Harris, and playwrights like John Osborne who were writing working-class stories. What happens to that? Does that just go? Or do we go back to the 30s when you had incredibly posh people trying to do cockney accents?”
“The split generally falls along professional lines. If most of a show’s performers are Equity (union) actors, that’s a Hayes show. If they aren’t, it’s a Helen, regardless of theater. Got it? … Illustrating how the ‘Helen’ and ‘Hayes’ distinctions really go show by show, not theater by theater, is the case of Arena Stage.”
“The town is so crowded … that even voices from the small independent sector have begun to wonder aloud whether the city is oversaturated. Washington also teems with competition for audiences increasingly lured by a burgeoning restaurant scene and the cyber circus of online diversions. All this adds to the special pressure faced by big troupes: They have the most seats to sell, night after night.”
“In Hedwig’s story, I found a message of resilience and self-expression. Keep going, the film screamed at me. Let your freak flag fly, no matter how much shit people throw at you. This experience was shared by millions of queer and trans kids around the world, for whom the movie and stage show became a kind of modern Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
“Bucking Broadway’s trend,” the musical’s creators – all children of Jewish immigrants, and so no strangers to discrimination themselves – “cast African-Americans to play ‘full-fledged citizens who were portrayed equitably with their white colleagues’.” And they cast a Japanese-American as the ingenue – in 1944.
Playbill looks at two decades worth of big storms, and has to go back to 1996 to find one that closed more than a very few shows. (Except for Sandy, which didn’t have any snow.)
“Broadway theatres will go dark the evening of Jan. 26 as a major winter weather system bears down on the Northeast, with anywhere from 18 to 24 inches of snow forecast to fall across the New York City area in the next 24 hours. Several productions have already canceled Tuesday performances.”
“‘Once you recite a line of Shakespeare, you are hooked for life,’ said Jeremy Shamos, board chair for Curious Theatre Company, which has an aggressive youth outreach program that includes a workshop for aspiring teen playwrights.”
“It empowers both the writer and theater to take risks to create the stories not being written. In addition, writing for a particular community––if you truly honor that audience’s needs––produces plays that are more specific, which in fact makes them more universal and ready for other productions elsewhere in the country.”
Joseph, who was a Pulitzer finalist in 2010 for Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, won the 2015 Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award, “which provides $50,000 to the winning playwright and an additional $100,000 to defray production costs for the play’s premiere.”
The famously volatile film producer “and the veteran Broadway press agent Rick Miramontez have parted ways on Mr. Weinstein’s forthcoming musical Finding Neverland after sharp words were said at their weekly planning meeting on Tuesday.”
“One of the many arguments for public and private support of this organisation, and organisations like this one, is we are the compost, the manure, the fertiliser that feeds culture worldwide.”
It seems such a good match of director and subject that you wonder why nobody thought of it sooner. George Brant’s Grounded features only one (human) character, to be played by Anne Hathaway.
A longtime resident who’d never seen the century-old New Year’s Day spectacle goes behind the scenes with one of the old-line South Philly clubs, meets the new brigades that draw from the city’s growing population of art-minded Millennials, and remarks on some of the parade’s worryingly retrograde elements. (Then she hits the after-party on Two Street.)
“I’m in a moment in my career after 10 years at the Globe where all this kind of film stuff is opening up,” he said. “It very challenging and interesting to me.”
“The 78-year-old had just begun his lines at the start of the Shakespearean tragedy when he fainted, falling off a raised platform with his crown rolling to a halt at the front of stage.” After being examined by a doctor in the audience and 20 minutes of rest, Blessed returned to the stage, apologized, and started over again.
“How do you tell somebody who’s going to spend anywhere from $175 to $500 or more, per ticket, for a show, how do you tell them ‘It’s so-so, but you can’t miss this performance’? … Unless you come out of the theater saying ‘I have to tell everybody I know they must see this show,’ the show is going to die.”
David Mirvish, lead producer of The Heart of Robin Hood: “In light of the great reception we are getting from audiences and the media in Toronto, we have decided not to rush in to New York this season.” (Think that’s all there is to it?)
Prewar theaters “had a greater capacity at the lower price levels than at the higher, a contrast to today, where there are very few cheap seats and they are all at the very back or the very front. … Seat prices have been levelled up rather than down on the grounds that all enjoy an uninterrupted view of the actor.”
“Tim Dang, producing artistic director of East West Players, has written an initiative that calls for at least 51% of those employed by Southern California theater companies by 2019 to be people of color, women or those younger than 35.”
“Debates had been raged over submission policies—closed, open, credentialed, non-existent, misleading—in private and in public, by playwrights, by academics, and by artistic staffs of organizations large and small. Everyone agreed on only one thing: there had to be a better way.”
“Jonathan Moscone is leaving California Shakespeare Theater, where he’s been artistic director for the past 15 years, and moving across the bay to join Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in the newly created position of chief of civic engagement.”
“I’ve started to suspect that occasional theatregoers want to engage with a new play sooner than I previously thought and stay engaged for a longer time. They’d like more information before they see a show. They want more things to read and watch afterward. They want to hear from the director and the playwright and the designers, possibly over drinks.”
“Actors from last year’s failed tour of the musical Copacabana are mounting legal action against the show’s producers for more than £30,000 in unpaid wages. The news comes as it has emerged that planned dates for 2015 have hit further problems.”
Michael Hollinger’s Under the Skin “started with a smirk – at a 2008 New York Times ‘Ethicist’ column, about a pair of siblings vying to supply their aging father with a kidney.” Hollinger ended up exploring a whole new concept: kidney-worthiness.
“Stephen Sondheim is the antibody of the blockbuster, the antithesis of mass taste. He writes for questing minds, disdaining sunshine, inhabiting the deep, dark woods of moral ambiguity. At his most challenging, in Sweeney Todd, he elicits our sympathies for cannibalism. At his gloomiest, in Company, he seems to conclude that man’s fate is always to be alone. Sondheim is not an easy date, never a sell-out.”
“There has been a shift of opinion against playwriting, in favour of collective methods of theatre. The very activity of playwriting has been attacked as individualistic, undemocratic and even immoral,” playwright David Edgar recently declared. Lyn Gardner begs to differ: “But even if what Edgar is saying is just a provocation, I’m really not sure that talking about an ‘anti-writer trend’ is either true or helpful.”
“Sunderland Empire has cancelled all shows this week after high winds caused the statue on the roof of its building to break loose.”
“Newspapers barely cover those theatres now – so building a career regionally is becoming harder than ever. Even with greater funding, until we can resource bloggers and journalists to make those trips and build the national profile for regional work, directors will continue to scrape by in London.”