117 stories from The Playgoer
Patrick Healy's lede for today's front-page NYT story on the 10,000th(!) performance of Phantom says a lot:
"The Phantom of the Opera" will make show business history on Saturday with the 10…
Nick Cohen in the Literary Review (UK) offers some useful ways to think about censorship in the 21st century:
We cannot puncture our own myth that we are fearless seekers after truth, even …
Normally I find any pop culture take on theatre to be oddly distorted. But, catching up with a recent SNL rerun this weekend, I was pleasantly surprised to find not one, but two very f…
Steve Waters in the Guardian sings the praises of the short play:
So what is a short play, exactly? Is it simply defined by its length? I ask because as a form it's under-discussed and und…
Something interesting happening on the Rialto right now: a number of recent Off Broadway successes will be descending upon available theatres this spring just in time for Tony Time. (That ti…
English playwright David Edgar has a good, long essay in the Guardian on the UK's arts funding crisis and especially the crisis in how to argue for the arts in a time of official, imposed "a…
Not theatre thankfully. But longtime (as in: long time, 28 years) Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman gets the boot. To me, he has been indispensable and, aside from Feingold, one of…
Something about MTC's new debut Close Up Space has prompted some incisive commentary from critics on the state of new plays. While I haven't seen this particular show, I certainly find mysel…
That's what the Chinese call our drama of sittin' & chattin' on stage. Makes sense when you come from a tradition of highly physical and visual performance.
Nevertheless, they're warmin…
Remember all the buzz around Lisa D'Aamour's Detroit after its Steppenwolf premiere last year? It was a Pulitzer finalist, was published in American Theatre and was being prepped for a high …
Toronto's Kelly Nestruck writes up Robert Lepage's innovative idea to publish his latest play as a comic book:
Instead of publishing the script of his recent play, The Blue Dragon, Lepage'…
"Nothing we do sells a ticket...People on the TKTS line can't pronounce the title, and if you can't pronounce the title, you're not going to see the show."
-A producer for...Lysistrata J…
My latest for Time Out: Peccadillo's revival of Kaufman and Hart's The Man Who Came to Dinner. (Online only.)
Photo: Carol Rosegg
The current lead, Jim Brochu, is fine. But as you'll see…
If you have already subscribed to the Playgoer Twitter-feed, you'll notice I've been sending out more "bonus content" lately and plan to do more of that. More links, random political thought…
TCG's annual "Theatre Facts" survey has some sobering news for subscription-based theatre companies. As Chris Jones reports:
According to Theatre Facts 2010, the annual research snapshot rel…
And they said it wouldn't last...
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark celebrates a...um, bittersweet anniversary of that disastrous first preview, exactly one year ago today. And after all …
"[H]ow could a man who had only a grammar-school education and spoke Latin and a little Greek possibly have written something as bad as All's Well That Ends Well?"
-Eric Idle, satirically s…
These seeming transatlantic opposites are collaborating on what promises to be the weirdest Troilus yet:
The Wooster Group is teaming up with the Royal Shakespeare Company on a production of…
That's what Indie Theatre web publisher/impresario Martin Denton calls his new brainchild, Indie Theater Now, a deluxe online "bookstore" for the latest in scrappy scripts.
How does it work…
Such buzz did Charles Isherwood's online surrender to Adam Rapp create that Riedel had him on Theatre Talk this past weekend to explain.
By the way: Isherwood's piece only ran on the…
Straight outta Israel! "Pangs of the Messiah" is a play Motti Lerner wrote about the Jewish West Bank settlements...back in the 80s, believe it or not. He's now revised/updated it and …
"What I think that has happened to Mr. Mamet is that he is an artist and a contrarian, and I think that somehow, living under the shade of the Southern California palm tree engendered a ki…
My Time Out review of the Irish Rep's Dancing at Lughnasa is now available as an exclusive online bonus feature!
Ok, exclusive to anyone with a computer...
Three years after the man's death, they're still finding new stuff by Harold Pinter. Well, old stuff, really, but previously unpublished. The Guardian last week reprinted a 1960 comedy sketc…
David Cote offers a primer on who the big critics are--all around the country.
