One large venue promoter “has promised to introduce a uniform ticket policy for disabled people who need to be accompanied by a carer after a legal challenge was launched by a wheelchair-bound customer who claimed the York Barbican had discriminated against him.”
“We were far too busy gathering family, collecting what we could from our devastated home and fleeing the city to notice that the Court Theatre – the largest theatre company in the country – was effectively dead. No home, no show.”
Lyn Gardner: “Hacking away at London funding and simply throwing it at the big regional theatres outside the M25 would be easy but not helpful. The right help needs to be targeted in the right places … Get it wrong, and we might just as well sit around burning £50 notes.”
“As two plays set amid the 1960s gay rights movement open in London, their writers, Jon Bradfield and Thomas Hescott, discuss charting gay life before their time and why theatre is a good place to explore oppression.”
On the Broadway of the 21st century, especially in the very risky and very expensive arena of musicals, it’s not enough just to have a gimmick. If you want the crowds to come, you gotta have a brand name.
“When actors only concern themselves with making something real, it usually ends up being boring for the camera and the audience, no matter how genuine it feels to the actors.”
“Are the current heads of these organizations really incapable of implementing change? No. It’s a choice. It’s passing off responsibility and accountability to the next generation.”
Virtually every category is up by mid-to-high double-digit percentages, the outdoor Shakespeare season played to 96% capacity houses, and the indoor Sam Wanamaker was built and opened without any government funding.
That is what actress Bojana Novakovic and her colleagues are aiming to find out, in an improvised theater piece performed every Wednesday night in an L.A. karaoke bar.
“Certain art forms lend themselves to the Israel-Palestine conflict: epic, despondent, near-silent cinema, say, or interminable sagas about intransigent politics. But a camp, twinkle-eyed cabaret fronted by a man in gold lamé evening dress?”
Michael Billington considers Oh, What a Lovely War.
The Apollo, where the ceiling fell in during a performance of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in December, will reopen with a new show on March 26.
Nica Burns: “I pushed past everyone into the theatre and straight into the auditorium. It was unimaginable. About 112 years of thick black dust had come down. … It was like a stricken ship – that’s the only image I can think of with all the debris.”
“There was an audible thud when Ari Loeb fell on his backside in the midst of a scrappy, eight-against-one brawl … [while] rehearsing the finale of Kung Fu, the new play by David Henry Hwang about the martial arts master Bruce Lee.”
Simon Tait: “When a plea has to go out [to the audience] for someone who can do Windows 8 and the visual still won’t go, it really doesn’t work … I don’t want to sneer at that misfortune, but to ask where the creativity sits with the technology.”
“Poetry doesn’t have such a great reputation in the theatre, although I reckon that’s changing. Even 17th-century rhyming couplets can be made to sound wonderfully conversational and witty in great translations.” And, well, Shakespeare.
Can the Globe’s outdoor Summer Shakespeare Festival be reshaped into a national center for the very best in American Shakespeare?
“Faced with uneven ticket sales that have yet to rebound fully five years after the recession, nonprofits are taking unusual, even drastic, measures. Roundabout is facing the biggest squeeze after a $5.5 million deficit last year on a $60 million budget, a loss that previously had not been made public.”
There have been countless comedies, musicals and tragedies, but only a few pure horror plays. Why is that?
The Arts Council of Ireland has engaged London-based consultants to conduct a top-to-bottom review of the Republic’s national theatre company. While the Abbey has a high reputation in the U.S., observers at home have lately found it to have serious problems with both costs and artistic quality.
“Jamie Hendry Productions, which is producing the show, set out to raise £650,000 using an online platform the company created specially for the project, with investment available at £1,000, £2,500 or £5,000.”
“I’m a populist, basically. I think a lot of culture is boring, and I like people to have a good time at my shows. There’s a sort of Roundhead bullshit around culture: the more serious and difficult it is, the more it hurts you and your audience, the more worthwhile it is. It’s a form […]
Tony Robinson recalls when the ’60s counterculture, ’70s identity politics and the closing of the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship office led to the birth of alternative theatre.
“I think theatre has realised somewhat belatedly that it can no longer provide adequate competition for kids watching videos or computer games. It has to get the liveness back, and that is the only think it trades on.”
“The reconstructions are just that — re-creations of particularly inflamed and idiotic YouTube comment exchanges — except they’re acted out by two well-dressed, middle-aged British men (or men with stellar British accents) who sit in shadowy domestic interiors populated with high-backed armchairs and baroque chandeliers.”
Almost all of the 117 English-language groups that were getting funding are seeing cuts – many as much as 7 per cent to 8 per cent – so that 11 new groups could be added to the list. What began as an exercise in the much-vaunted “generational renewal” is raising some hard questions about how […]
Dennis Kelly, who co-wrote the West End and Broadway hit, writes, “I know with absolute certainty that at that time no commercial producer would’ve gone near me. … If it was my money I wouldn’t have come near me either.”
“You get a script and a paper gown. You get $13.50 an hour. Our scripts are ten to twelve pages long. They outline what’s wrong with us — not just what hurts but how to express it. They tell us how much to give away, and when. We are supposed to unfurl the answers according […]
Marianne Weems: “When we first started a lot of people would say, ‘Is this theater?’ — Producers, presenters and audience members alike. And our response at the time was, ‘Well it is taking place in the theater,’ and obviously all that has changed.”
“Plays are stories—fairy tales and fictions, historical and magical. They are not documentaries or history lessons. To think they are such would be myopic.”