The performances cancelled and ticket prices refunded when performers caught COVID and had to isolate, along with, when the show did go on, the audience capacity restrictions reintroduced as omicron spread, turned the shows theatres count on as cash cows into money pits. - The Guardian
Even before Covid, the government’s (and Arts Council England’s) approach to the complex private/public ecology of the sector felt confused and outdated. Now, it feels positively antediluvian. - The Stage
The London-based company Corali does, in fact, do programs in those places, but they've also worked with Sadler's Wells theatre and the Tate galleries and created a piece about filmmaker Derek Jarman. Their latest project will see them all impersonating the singular poet Edith Sitwell. - The Guardian
The RSC has signed a three-year contract with Cunard that will see a group of actors from the company performing two programs and offering workshops on board the Queen Mary 2 beginning this summer. - Daily Mail
The work, titled Thaw and conceived by physical theatre company Legs on the Wall and Alaskan composer Matthew Burtner, "features an acrobatic performer balancing, grasping and watching her frozen home melt away." (Yes, it's about climate change.) - The Sydney Morning Herald
The world's oldest operating theatre company has pieced together what it says is the original version of Tartuffe, premiered in 1664 and promptly suppressed by the enraged Catholic Church; it was the playwright's overhauled version of 1669 which became the classic we know today. - The Guardian
Brandon Carter, a resident actor with ASC since 2018, assumes the directorship in a new management structure that the company describes as “a coequal group of individuals” running other departments such as operations, production and engagement. - Washington Post
We're not all in this together, clearly. The Broadway League "proposed to the unions representing Broadway workers that those workers take a 50 percent pay cut during so-called 'COVID pauses.'" That's not going well. - The Daily Beast
Hey, there's money, and then there's art. Rylance: "Theatre is so flexible and it’s so different from being an actor in a film. It’s a thousand times more enjoyable." - The Guardian (UK)
Erin Cronican says, "It’s a very complicated acting challenge. In rehearsals when I open up, I just start crying. We don’t want to create that situation where I’m so fragile all the time." And omicron has made it all so much more fraught. - American Theatre
"When he returned to Broadway in 1959 for the premiere of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, he was already famous" - and the play might not have been mounted without him. - Los Angeles Times
File this under Covid stories: A woman who performed with Wicked's national tour and Broadway ensemble as Elphaba's understudy but left theatre in 2015 got the call in late December, flew to New York, and stepped into the cast. - Vulture
"The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (Ruined, Sweat, Clyde's) breaks down her remarkable career and shares how, as an optimist at heart, she finds the light and resilience in unexpected stories." (audio) - WNYC (New York City)
