All stories by Holger Syme on BroadwayStars

Thursday, January 1, 2015

2014 in Review by Holger Syme

As quiet as it’s been on here lately, and although I have seen all of three plays in the last two months, 2014 was actually a pretty exciting year in theatre for me: Still: there are…

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 06:10PM[SHARE]
Thursday, November 20, 2014

The Veils of Collaboration by Holger Syme

I just remembered this essay, which I wrote a few years ago but never managed to get in sufficient shape for publication. It still isn’t quite right, and I’ve mostly moved on to …

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 01:46PM[SHARE]
Sunday, November 9, 2014

Fact and Factitiousness: Theatre History and Irresponsible Scholarship by Holger Syme

Generally, I think of the posts I write on my blog as related to but separate from my academic work. With the exception of a few conference papers and a handful of other pieces, what I publi…

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 08:51PM[SHARE]
Sunday, October 5, 2014

Bloody Family (Philip McKee et al. / Theatre Centre, Toronto, October 2014) by Holger Syme

Bloody Family is the kind of show I ought to love unreservedly. It’s a new performance based on an old — perhaps the oldest — play, it’s committed to its own theatric…

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 06:27PM[SHARE]
Thursday, September 25, 2014

Theatre without Critics? by Holger Syme

What is the Factory Theatre up to now? It seems that for their season opener, Adam Lazarus and Guillermo Verdecchia’s The Art of Building a Bunker, the Factory will not invite critics …

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 06:23PM[SHARE]
Sunday, August 10, 2014

Streetcar Named Desire (Tennessee Williams / Benedict Andrews, Young Vic, London, August 2014) by Holger Syme

I’m working on a longish thing about Jamie Lloyd’s quite brilliant Richard III and won’t have time for a proper write-up of this much-anticipated Streetcar Named Desire (st…

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 09:40AM[SHARE]
Thursday, August 7, 2014

Medea (Euripides/Ben Power/Carrie Cracknell, National Theatre, London, August 2014) by Holger Syme

This was the most disappointing piece of theatre I’ve seen at the NT in quite a few years. Almost as bad as Frankenstein, and without that show’s mildly worth-it first ten minute…

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 10:20PM[SHARE]

The Nether (Jennifer Haley/Jeremy Herrin, Royal Court, London, August 2014) by Holger Syme

I still have to write things about the Munich Residenztheater Faust, and about the RSC White Devil, and perhaps about the RSC Two Gents, but the backlog is getting out of hand, so I’ll…

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 01:02PM[SHARE]
Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Ira Glass Can't Relate to Shakespeare? Good. by Holger Syme

"This American Life" host Ira Glass went to Central Park to see King Lear with John Lithgow in the title role. He thought Lithgow was "amazing." He also, a bit more controversially, thought …

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 07:40PM[SHARE]
Friday, July 25, 2014

Where is the Theatre in Original Practice? by Holger Syme

"Original practices," a phrase coined, apparently at Shakespeare's Globe, in or around 2002, refers to concerted efforts to explore, in a theatrical setting, "certain stage conventions of la…

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 07:44PM[SHARE]
Thursday, May 15, 2014

German Theatre and Realism by Holger Syme

The theatre trip I’m on right now is as exhilarating as it is exhausting, and I have nowhere near enough time to write about what I’m seeing. I’ll probably do a short-form …

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 10:31AM[SHARE]
Friday, May 2, 2014

Alles Weitere Kennen Sie aus dem Kino (Martin Crimp/Katie Mitchell), Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg (May 2014) by Holger Syme

The curtain opens, and I think I’m in the Lyttelton. No way this is a German set. The proscenium is completely closed off — a picture frame around a photo-realistic replica of th…

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 10:52PM[SHARE]
Wednesday, April 30, 2014

In Praise of the Proscenium Stage by Holger Syme

There is a conviction that haunts the English theatre: that proscenium stages create distance. That they create a fourth wall. That they are ultimately, somehow, undemocratic. And that all t…

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 08:31PM[SHARE]
Friday, April 25, 2014

Kabale und Liebe (Schiller/Simon Solberg), Schauspiel Köln, April 2014 by Holger Syme

I’ve just embarked on another marathon in German theatre. This year, I partly want to see just how marked (if at all) the difference are between theatre in Berlin and the rest of the c…

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 09:29AM[SHARE]
Wednesday, March 26, 2014

My Trouble with Practice-as-Research by Holger Syme

This is a set of thoughts and questions I produced for a workshop on (performance) Practice-as-Research (organized by Andy Kesson and Stephen Purcell) at next week’s Shakespeare Associ…

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 10:33PM[SHARE]
Monday, February 17, 2014

Secret Theatre: Show 4 (Hayley Squires/Ellen McDougall), Lyric Hammersmith, Feb 2014 by Holger Syme

The Lyric Hammersmith's "Secret Theatre" project has been much discussed, praised, and derided, and I won't try to recap the project itself " my knowledge of what the company has been up to …

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 07:27PM[SHARE]

Happy Days (Beckett/Natalie Abrahami), Young Vic, Feb 2014 by Holger Syme

A really quick post, because I’m not really competent to write anything like a serious piece on a Beckett play. Three bits I can say: 1. I can’t recall the last time a play made …

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 05:53PM[SHARE]
Saturday, February 15, 2014

Duchess of Malfi (Webster/Dromgoole), Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Feb 2014 by Holger Syme

The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the Globe’s new indoor space, is really as small as all the reviews say. I thought the critics were exaggerating, but no: it’s tiny, a mere 40 by 55 …

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 08:49AM[SHARE]
Sunday, February 2, 2014

London Road (CanStage; Alecky Blythe & Adam Cork / Jackie Maxwell, Jan. 2014) by Holger Syme

I saw the original production of London Road at the Cottesloe in 2011, was blown away by it then, and wrote about the show in the early days of this blog. It remains one of my favourite piec…

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 03:17PM[SHARE]
Sunday, January 26, 2014

Performance and Authorship by Holger Syme

A couple of days ago, Howard Sherman, a US “arts administrator and producer,” “communications, marketing, and branding consultant,” and “theatre pundit” p…

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 01:19PM[SHARE]
Tuesday, January 21, 2014

In Praise of Actors, Part II (Mark Rylance) | dispositio by Holger Syme

It may be a bit contrary of me to say that Rylance is the single most remarkable " really, the only remarkable " thing about the current Broadway productions of Twelfth Night and Richard III…

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 05:06PM[SHARE]
Friday, January 17, 2014

In Praise of Actors (Richard III and Twelfth Night on Broadway; King Lear at BAM) by Holger Syme

Three of the shows I saw in New York had something in common: all were remarkable and memorable although none of them took an especially interesting, inventive, innovative, least of all radi…

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 04:27AM[SHARE]
Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Steven Moffat Does It Again by Holger Syme

Needless to say, this is a spoilerfest. I had my problems with all of Season 3 of Sherlock, to be honest. “The Empty Hearse” was overstuffed with endless montages of swooping sho…

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 04:33AM[SHARE]
Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Theatre and Anti-Intellectualism by Holger Syme

One of the most striking aspects of my current New York theatre binge: the programs theatres hand out around here. Or rather, don’t hand out. Judging from the standard-issue brochure, …

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 01:17PM[SHARE]
Saturday, January 4, 2014

Midsummer Night's Dream (Theatre for a New Audience / Julie Taymor, New York) by Holger Syme

Visually, this is a stunning production. The Polonsky Shakespeare Center, opened this season, is a remarkable space — a broad and deep thrust four stories high, configurable with all s…

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 02:50AM[SHARE]
Friday, November 29, 2013

Winners and Losers; Storytelling; Theatre by Holger Syme

A fairly hasty post, but if I don’t write it now, I won’t have time to write it at all, and I’d like to write it. This morning, Michael Wheeler published an interesting pie…

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 03:20AM[SHARE]
Monday, November 25, 2013

Do We Have a Problem with Actor Training in Canada? by Holger Syme

This isn’t a post so much as a call for responses. In some of the comments on my “Youth Problem” post, both on the blog and on Facebook, a thread was emerging that suggeste…

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 12:54AM[SHARE]
Saturday, November 23, 2013

Past Text, Present Performance (Apropos After Miss Julie, Red One Theatre Collective, Toronto) by Holger Syme

First things first: Red One Theatre’s production of Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie, directed by David Ferry, is pretty great. It’s gritty, intense theatre, unafraid and …

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 04:05AM[SHARE]
Friday, November 1, 2013

Canadian Theatre has a Youth Problem by Holger Syme

A couple of weeks ago when I was in Vienna, attending a congress celebrating the 125th anniversary of the Burgtheater’s current home, an utterly over-the-top theatre palace and one of …

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 06:22AM[SHARE]
Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Romeo and Juliet on Stages by Holger Syme

For your delectation, a small collection of trailers, reports, and cast interviews from a fairly rich array of recent productions of Romeo and Juliet, mostly from English- and German-speakin…

SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 12:33AM[SHARE]

All that Chat

2025-2026 BROADWAY SEASON
Jun 12, 2025: Call Me Izzy - Studio 54
Sep 16, 2025: Art - Music Box Theatre
Oct 08, 2025: Beetlejuice - Palace Theatre
Nov 13, 2025: Oedipus - Studio 54
Nov 16, 2025: Chess - Imperial Theatre
Mar 23, 2026: Giant - Music Box Theatre
Apr 06, 2026: Becky Shaw - Hayes Theater
Apr 16, 2026: Proof - Booth Theatre
Apr 26, 2026: Drama Desk Cut-Off