In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I consider the question of why classic big-cast plays are vanishing from America’s stages—and offer some suggestions for what to do about it. Here’s an excerpt.
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Three years ago, an unknown ensemble called the Bedlam Theatre Company set up shop in a grubby off-off-Broadway house and performed George Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan,” which calls for some two dozen actors, with a cast of four. It was the most improbable Shaw revival I’d ever seen—and the most exciting.
Today Bedlam is a major name in New York theater, as well as a sign of the times. Our cash-strapped drama companies have been increasingly disinclined in recent years to revive budget-busting big-cast plays like “Saint Joan.” I first took note of that tendency in this space in 2013, and it’s grown even more pronounced since then. To be sure, Broadway does exhume big-cast classics on occasion: “A Streetcar Named Desire,” for example, has been done there nine times, most recently in 2012. But the only plays of that kind that get done with any regularity nowadays, whether in New York or by regional companies, are such well-worn single-set chestnuts as “Streetcar,” “Death of a Salesman,” “Our Town” and “You Can’t Take It With You.” Fine plays all—but there’s more to large-scale theater than familiar staples.
The success of Bedlam’s blazingly imaginative reworking of “Saint Joan” pointed to one way for cash-conscious drama companies to present big-cast plays without dynamiting their bank accounts: Cut the casts by doubling, tripling and quadrupling the roles. Other companies have grappled with the same problem by teaming up to mount expensive shows that they couldn’t afford to produce separately.
One way or another, though, American theater is urgently in need of new solutions to the big-cast problem. Essential parts of the theatrical repertory are falling into disuse. In the hope of moving them out of the warehouse and back onstage again, I offer this list of six significant large-cast plays, only one of which has been seen on Broadway in the past two decades, that deserve to go to the top of the priority list. No, they’re not cheap to do—but they have solid track records of audience success….
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Read the whole thing here.
Vivien Leigh stars in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, adapted for TV by Ellen M. Violett, directed by Henry Kaplan, and originally telecast in England in 1959 on ITV Play of the Week: