Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Typical of overreacting school boards...
The Associated Press reports that the Richland School District in Johnstown, PA, canceled its February 2012 production of Kismet following concerns…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 01:56PMTuesday, September 20, 2011
So what do we think of Signature's announcement of five playwright residencies?
Annie Baker, Will Eno, Katori Hall, Kenneth Lonergan, and Regina Taylor [will] be charter members of a progra…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 09:46AMMonday, September 19, 2011
-Riedel surveys the Broadway trend of touching up (and dumbing down?) already-running big shows for the tourists. As with Billy Elliot, these seem to be mostly cases of translation from Engl…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 09:53AMFriday, September 16, 2011
"Every time I see some kid on the subway watching The Godfather on his iPod, I think, 'Fuck it, I want to do a play.'"
-Ethan Hawke
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 03:53PMSome video on the new Porgy and Bess out of Boston. (And pace Riedel, it is still coming to Broadway.)
It's from WGBH's "Greater Boston" tv show. Full 30-minute(!) segment here, but this pa…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 10:57AMWednesday, September 14, 2011
After a near collapse of the finish of their '09-'10 season, Roundabout Theatre has stumbled into another programming embarrassment right out of the gate this year. (I guess big cheese Todd …
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 07:26AMMonday, September 12, 2011
Guardian's Molly Flat celebrates the theatre's unique showcasing of the gifts of older actors:
Theatre, largely unbound by Hollywood's obsession with youth, has always been a good place t…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 01:20PMFriday, September 9, 2011
“I am deeply honored by this news, and wish my mother and father were alive to hear it!...All that education, allowance, tuition, voice lessons, summer jobs, scholarship application dead…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 01:11PMWednesday, September 7, 2011
Unless you retreated into a total theatre news blackout in August, you probably have heard about (or even read) Stephen Sonhdeim's snarky takedown of the team behind the new "revised" and Br…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 11:03AMTuesday, September 6, 2011
While I've been away I did some writing for American Theatre's special feature marking the Tennessee Williams centennial. You'll have to buy the print mag to read my overview of some recent …
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 12:34PMTuesday, August 16, 2011
Yes, I'm on a blog "sabbatical," but I simply must mark the passing of that great stage actor, John Wood, who served as veritable muse to Tom Stoppard and other 60s & 70s British stage a…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 12:49AMFriday, August 5, 2011
Apologies for being AWOL the last few days. I realize it's probably time for my usual August break anyway. So I will lay low for the next few weeks and hopefully return here by the end…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 01:44PMTuesday, August 2, 2011
Two critics check out some big North American theatre fests.
London's Michael Billington travels to Canada to check out Stratford and Shaw--and is very pleasantly surprised!
San Francisco'…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 03:00PMMonday, August 1, 2011
"I put thirty-four years into this firm, Howard, and now I can't pay my insurance. You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away--a man is not a piece of fruit!"
-Willy Loman, Death of a…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 04:24PMFriday, July 29, 2011
Spiderman: Turn Off the Darkphoto: Sara Krulwich, New York Times
Makes the show look exciting, huh?
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 01:15PMWednesday, July 27, 2011
Laura Barnett in the Guardian testifies to the occasional benefits of seeing theatre in a foreign language--i.e. a language you don't understand--and without simultaneous translation.
Becaus…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 11:28AMTuesday, July 26, 2011
'Swounds! Get a load of the latest action flick from Hollywood action/disaster-flick director Roland ("Independence Day") Emmerich:
The film, penned by John Orloff, stars Tony Award wi…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 12:23PMMonday, July 25, 2011
Lee Tracy, The Front Page, 1928
As we take in the morass of sleaze unearthed every day by the ongoing NewsCorps scandal in the UK, it's good to remember there's some ripping good plays…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 12:16PMThursday, July 21, 2011
"Twenty wigs, fifteen hairpieces, fifteen beards, five pairs of sideburns, two joke beards, one set of eyebrows and twenty liters of blood."
-Prop storage for the Royal Shakespeare Compan…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 11:37AMWednesday, July 20, 2011
New York State's new Gay Marriage law will change countless lives in the NYC theatre community for the better.
But perhaps none more so than these two troopers:
AVENUE Q's same-sex puppets …
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 11:31AMTuesday, July 19, 2011
"Lev Tolstoy sincerely loved Chekhov, but did not like his plays. He told Chekhov once, 'A playwright should take the theater-goer by the hand, and lead him in the direction he wants him to …
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 03:56PMMonday, July 18, 2011
That's how much £9,000 is when converted into US dollars.
£9,000 is the figure that the London drama schools are appearing to raise their annual tuition to, in the wake of the economic cr…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 03:50PMFriday, July 15, 2011
I vaguely remember the name of critic Donald Lyons being quoted on various show ads in the 90s. Alas the former NY Post reviewer he has just passed away at 73, but he turns out to have quite…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 11:24AMThursday, July 14, 2011
Producer Ken Davenport does the math:
In the 1950s, 69% of all new musicals opening on Broadway had cast sizes greater than 30.
In the 1960s, 67% had cast sizes greater than 30.
In the 1970s…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 12:51PMWednesday, July 13, 2011
"Fiorello La Guardia called the New York City Opera 'The People's Opera.' The People's Opera and The Public Theater make sense together. Free Shakespeare in the Park is one of our great ci…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 09:54AMTuesday, July 12, 2011
A new website, Kickstarter, helps people raise money for "creative" projects. No "charities" or "causes" allowed--but it doesn't appear to rule out nonprofit 501(c)(3) endeavors under certai…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 04:40PMMonday, July 11, 2011
King's Head Theatre in London is staging what they're claiming to be the premiere of a "lost" Oscar Wilde play, Constance.
Sounds exciting, but we should approach with caution. The text's p…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 12:01PMFriday, July 8, 2011
-Somehow in these cash-strapped times, Rocco's NEA has come up with a whole $30K (!) to help fund a new "Open Captioning Initiative" to help TDF install English- (not foreign-) language surt…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 11:40AMThursday, July 7, 2011
"The dead rabbits used for the performances in Britain were part of a scene illustrating the contrast between court and countryside, where life was harsher and people hunted and prepared t…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 10:25AMWednesday, July 6, 2011
As if to placate critics of the behemoth Atlantic Yards gentrification project, Bruce Ratner announces he'll include a "cultural programming" in the big Barclay's Center sports arena to be c…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 10:36AMTuesday, July 5, 2011
Maybe it's different in these United States, but in the UK, the theatre profession turns out to be worse than a high school locker room:
Bullying at work is more common in the arts than in …
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 11:17AM 
