RSC Plans 6-Week Summer Sojourn In NYC The company will bring five plays to the Park Avenue Armory, where they will perform on "an exact copy of the company's Royal Shakespeare Theater, which is being built in Stratford. The reproduction will be shipped in pieces to New York and assembled in the Armory's monumental Drill Hall, which has 55,000 square feet of uncolumned space." The New York Times 02/19/10

email this story | Posted 02/08/10@06:40PM

Plays Top Musicals In Olivier Award Nominations "After years when big musicals ruled London's West End, new plays and revivals of classics dominate the nominations announced today for this year's Olivier theatre awards. The Royal Court took the lion's share, with 15 nominations." The Guardian (UK) 02/08/10

email this story | Posted 02/08/10@08:24AM

Hollywood Stars Feature Big In London Theatre Nominations "Hollywood heavyweights feature strongly in the race for Britain's 2010 Laurence Olivier theatre awards, with Rachel Weisz, Jude Law, James Earl Jones and Keira Knightley among the nominees announced Monday." CBC 02/08/10

email this story | Posted 02/08/10@08:03AM

The "Glee" Effect "In the US there has already been a rise in membership of show-choirs like the fictional one that Glee revolves around, and a live tour is planned for the cast. But will Glee leave an indelible mark on television? Musicals are a difficult genre to get right on TV." The Guardian (UK) 02/07/10

email this story | Posted 02/07/10@09:56PM

A First For Melbourne Theatre "When Marion Potts takes over as artistic director of the Malthouse Theatre company at the end of this year, she will make history as the first woman to assume creative control of one of Melbourne's major theatre troupes." The Australian 02/06/10

email this story | Posted 02/07/10@10:10AM

Has Toronto Theatre Been Diminshed? "Isn't it a little embarrassing that the City of Toronto website is still claiming that Hogtown is 'the third-largest English-language theatre centre in the world'? While Toronto may have indeed vied for that unscientific title in the 1990s, it's decidedly been in the dust in the past 10 years." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 02/06/10

email this story | Posted 02/07/10@10:01AM

Possible Strike At Shaw Festival "Contract negotiations had been proceeding between both sides for over a year but ran into rough water late last fall over the festival's desire to cut health benefits for workers without compensation, the union said." Toronto Star 02/05/10

email this story | Posted 02/05/10@08:36AM

South Coast Rep Theatre To Get New Leaders "Martin Benson, 72, and David Emmes, 71, won't be retiring, the theater said in a statement, but will continue under the title of founding directors, advising their successor and taking "an active role" in finding and developing the new plays that have been South Coast's leading claim to fame." Los Angeles Times 02/05/10

email this story | Posted 02/05/10@06:13AM

A New, Multimillion-Pound Theatre Opens In Belfast Just days after the province announced plans for a new opera company, "Northern Ireland's theatre capacity has increased with the official opening of the £7.6 million Theatre at the Mill in Newtownabbey. Located on the northern edge of Belfast city limits, the 400-seat venue is housed in a former linen mill and forms part of a complex that also hosts the borough council's new Civic Centre." The Stage (UK) 02/04/10

email this story | Posted 02/04/10@09:51PM

Tear Down The National Theatre! Andy Field: "The National as an organisation is a wonderful, vital idea. The national theatre as a building is an anachronism: a brutal(ist) articulation of one narrow and archaic vision of theatre that, if not obsolete, is certainly one-dimensional." The Guardian (UK) 02/03/10

email this story | Posted 02/04/10@09:40PM

Pasadena Playhouse Gets Monetary Pledges "[I]t remains unclear how substantial those offers are and whether they are enough to save the institution. In its most recent blog post, the company stated that it has 'been inundated with generous messages of support and many have offered to pledge money to help keep this venerable institution operational.'" Los Angeles Times 02/03/10

email this story | Posted 02/04/10@04:55AM

Lincoln Center Theater To Build New Black Box Space - Atop The Beaumont The 131-seat venue, expected to open in 2011-12, will feature work by emerging artists, with all seats priced at $20. Preservationists argue that a building on the Beaumont's roof will despoil architect Eero Saarinen's original design; the new theater's architect, Hugh Hardy - who worked with Saarinen in designing the Beaumont in the 1960s - says the worries are misplaced. New York Times 02/04/10

email this story | Posted 02/03/10@09:51PM

Ireland Cuts A Million Euros From Abbey Theatre's Funding "The Abbey Theatre is the highest profile casualty in the share-out of annual funding by the Irish Arts Council, losing more than €1 million of last year's grant. The cutback reflects the reduced level of state support for the arts." The Stage (UK) 02/03/10

email this story | Posted 02/03/10@09:43PM

American Psycho, The Musical Duncan Sheik, the composer and lyricist who won a pair of Tonys for Spring Awakening, is now working on a singing-and-dancing adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's notorious novel about a homicidal maniac yuppie. Los Angeles Times 02/02/10

email this story | Posted 02/03/10@09:28PM

Blackface: A Performance Device With The Power To Shock "Theater that shocks is, of course, in the eye (and mind) of the beholder, but most plays and musicals in recent decades have ignored blunt instruments like blackface. ... For the most part, shocks onstage tend to come through incendiary language, provocative plot turns and chilling frights." The New York Times 02/03/10

email this story | Posted 02/03/10@05:45AM

On Broadway, The Days Of Applauding Fabulous Sets Are Over "For the big Broadway musical, surviving the recession often means that the sets are rarely stars anymore. You don't hear many audible gasps these days when the curtain rises, or when scenery transforms to reveal a theatrical vision." New York Times 01/31/10

email this story | Posted 02/02/10@09:49PM

Feeling Uneasy About Fela! And The M-Word (Minstrelsy) Charles Isherwood: "As much as I enjoyed the show, directed and choreographed by Bill T. Jones, it left me with lingering questions about the depiction of the African milieu it evoked. In short, the emphasis in Fela! on the spectacle of African culture tilted the show a little too closely toward minstrelsy. It evoked an unsettling feeling I can't say I ever had before at the theater." New York Times 01/31/10

email this story | Posted 02/02/10@09:44PM

Checking Out The Old Globe's New Stage In San Diego "As part of a $22-million upgrade, the Old Globe Theatre demolished a 224-seat in-the-round theater and replaced it with … a 250-seat in-the-round theater. The spaces are so similar that, from your seat, you have to look closely to notice what's different. Good thing." Los Angeles Times 02/01/10

email this story | Posted 02/02/10@09:34PM

National Theatre's Phedre Screening Drew In Lower-Income Viewers "Research into the National Theatre's live screening of Phèdre last year has revealed the cinema audiences had a lower average income than theatregoers who saw the performance in the NT's South Bank home. However, 91.3% of the cinema-goers had seen a play within the last year, and 41.3% had been to the National Theatre within the last 12 months." The Stage (UK) 02/02/10

email this story | Posted 02/02/10@09:31PM

London's Royal Court Theatre To Mount Plays In Shopping Centre The company "is to present a six-month season in a disused shop in Elephant and Castle shopping centre, opening next month. The season marks the beginning of the Royal Court's Theatre Local project, which has taken three years to plan and aims to take plays into new locations and new communities." The Stage (UK) 02/02/10

email this story | Posted 02/02/10@09:26PM

British Theatre's Oxbridge Fetish Is Obstructing Diversity "Plenty of professions including law and journalism have an Oxbridge bias, and theatre criticism in particular has been, and continues to be, dominated by people who attended those universities. But why should the same be true of directors - particularly when you'd assume that it is creativity, not academic prowess, that counts on stage?" The Guardian (UK) 02/01/10

email this story | Posted 02/01/10@08:30PM

Cameron Mackintosh To Endow His London Theatres "He plans to use some of his estimated £635m fortune to endow each of his seven London playhouses with enough cash to keep them open after his death, staging only musicals and plays. The move throws down a challenge to his friend and rival Andrew Lloyd Webber to follow suit." The Sunday Times (UK) 01/31/10

email this story | Posted 02/01/10@06:19PM

Time To Ban Accents From The Theatre Stage? "A bad accent makes the suspension of disbelief a real effort for the audience because we start thinking about how the line is said, rather than the line itself. And the moment we become irritated by a poor accent, we start noticing all sorts of other deficiencies in the production - the hubris of celebrity casting, for example." The Guardian (UK) 02/01/10

email this story | Posted 02/01/10@06:42AM