117 stories from The Playgoer
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…
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…
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'…
"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…
Spiderman: Turn Off the Darkphoto: Sara Krulwich, New York Times
Makes the show look exciting, huh?
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…
'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…
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…
"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…
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 …
"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 …
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 economi…
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…
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…
"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…
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…
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…
-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…
"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…
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…
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 …
To get you through the fireworks and barbeque...
-How do you build a traveling Elizabethan playhouse in the Park Avenue Armory? Take a sneak peak at the RSC's summer home in NYC.
-Two more…
NYT's Erik Piepenburg takes us backstage to the world of the "Star Dresser":
Depending on the size of the cast, a Broadway show can have anywhere from one to as many as 15 dressers, whose…
Kevin Spacey as Richard III, directed by Sam Mendes, now playing at London's Old Vic.
Part of the final season of Mendes' trans-Atlantic "Bridge Project," the production will come to BAM in…
The past decade may be noted in future theatre histories as the period video projection went mainstream in stage design. Theatermania's Solange de Santis profiles its use in current hits The…
