Broadway // Current

Ashlee Simpson Wentz Does Roxie Hart AGAIN!

Ashlee Simpson-Wentz might be done on Melrose Place, but she is moving on to a whole... more

MacKenzieFox
added this
1 day ago
|
0 comments

'Brighton Beach Memoirs" Closes on B'Way after 1 Week

http://www.variety.com/VR1118010685.html To which I say, "Good." That play sucks.... more

St_Alia_10191
added this
9 days ago
|
0 comments

Scarlett Johansson To Star in "A View from the Bridge" Broadway Show

Scarlett Johansson is set to follow in the footsteps of Sienna Miller, Jude Law, Hugh... more

Amy_Grindhouse
added this
14 days ago
|
0 comments

Famed Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber Diagnosed With Cancer

Famed Broadway composer Andrew Lloyd Webber had been diagnosed with cancer, according... more

GossipandGab
added this
16 days ago
|
1 comment

Sienna on Broadway

Sienna Miller is drop dead gorgeous with an amazing pair of legs. That said, the... more

amn532
added this
18 days ago
|
1 comment

Run DMC: The Musical

Paula Wagner (producer, Mission: Impossible, Vanilla Sky, The Last Samurai) is meeting... more

emmaboswood
added this
20 days ago
|
0 comments

Jesse Tyler Ferguson: Crass & Charm

Get to know the adorably charming Jesse Tyler Ferguson of "Modern Family."

chapinyoung
added this
22 days ago
|
1 comment

Broadway stage manager hit with peeping charge

NEW YORK — A stage manager on the Broadway production of "South Pacific" has been... more

knews121
added this
24 days ago
|
0 comments

Why British Black Producers are Heading for Broadway

"Broadway is more than just the theatre. It is one of the major elements in New York’s economy. When Broadway is down, New York is in trouble. Broadway is always all-hands-on-deck.

This has helped to create in the under-subsidised American theatre a long and distinguished history of black practitioners who have worked in the cauldron of the commercial sector, who, in fact, would not dream of working anywhere else.

Through a network of theatres, critics who write about black theatre, and showcases such as Black2Broadway, ideas are forged, relationships made, money is raised, all aimed at the Great White Way.

This vigour and “Yes we can” spirit creates the inevitable hits and misses, but, above all, everyone steps up to the plate. Thus Broadway has been re-invigorated, even re-invented by productions like Allen’s, born in an open environment of the possible.

Here in Britain, we, too, have a smaller but just as determined and talented cadre of producers and would-be producers full of zeal who work in the commercial realm or in a mixture of the commercial and subsidised.

Unfortunately, we have a problem that America does not: British theatre along with many theatre critics too often only recognise the subsidised theatre as the place and indeed home of “proper” black theatre practitioners.

Of course, this is never said aloud and would be vigorously denied, but the fact is evident. Like an exclusive club, the subsidised theatre “chooses”, and its choices, while largely artistic, can also have other criteria. These other criteria can often determine the content of a play or production, that content playing a large part in whether the production happens at all.

This approach can sometimes limit the scope of the work, causing the young in particular to self-select before approaching a subsidised theatre. The mature and the mid-career who might have other things to say that might be off the grid are not encouraged. This creates an environment of “the Chosen”, as well as a serious talent drain...""Broadway is more than just the theatre. It is one of the major elements in New... more

St_Alia_10191
added this
1 month ago
|
0 comments

Jude Law Opens in "Hamlet" on Broadway

Photographs from opening night for William Shakespear's "Hamlet" on Broadway at the... more

ebindelglass
added this
1 month ago
|
0 comments

Tony Roberts’s Illness Attributed to Seizure

The daughter of the actor Tony Roberts said that he had a minor seizure during a... more

tcmfan08
added this
1 month ago
|
0 comments

Next To Normal's Twitter Campaign Wins Online Award

"The Twitter campaign for "Next to Normal," much buzzed-about due to its unusually... more

St_Alia_10191
added this
1 month ago
|
0 comments

Does David Mamet still matter?

No. Er, sorry, here's the essay...

"A decade ago, the critic John Heilpern, who recently left his post at the New York Observer, published a collection of theatrical reviews and musings entitled "How Good Is David Mamet Anyway?" In the titular essay, Heilpern concluded: "The dramatist of early superior plays such as American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross has long since settled for dramatically less. Mr Mamet now merely prefers to provoke." A new play, Race, will make its Broadway debut in November. Mamet has remained typically tight-lipped about its plot, but theatre gossip doyen Michael Riedel has ferreted out a script and called it "Speed-the-Plow in blackface". It apparently concerns two male lawyers – one black, one white – and their female legal assistant, who take on a racially charged rape case.

It would be foolish to argue against Mamet's genius. I first read him at university and I remember feeling amazed and even a little appalled at his dialogue: funny, fast, pitiless, often profane. (I also recall feeling upset that he penned so few roles for women.) Watching my classmates perform scenes from his work proved equally surprising. Mamet's writing was lively on the page, but it was revelatory when spoken aloud – even by student actors. In performance, those rapid, rancid exchanges somehow uncovered a remarkable and unsettling depth of character. Those depths weren't pretty – they were grasping and craven and cruel – but, to my cynical 17-year-old soul, they seemed very true.

Last year, the Village Voice published an essay by Mamet entitled "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'," in which he claimed that he now repudiated his former beliefs that "the government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart". I won't deny Mamet's conversion experience, but if he has ever believed that "people are generally good at heart," it has gone unremarked in his plays. His distrust of human decency remains one of his most distinctive writerly characteristics.

So, people are not good. Here's the question: are Mamet's recent plays? The ones written since Heilpern published his essay do seem dramatically less significant and not even particularly provocative. I will admit to having enjoyed Mamet's adaptation of Harley Granville-Barker's The Voysey Inheritance, but feeling unsatisfied with Boston Marriage, a trifle about gilded-age lesbians.

As for his most recent plays, November and Romance, I read the scripts and elected not to attend. The political satire November is amusing, but shallow and innocuous. Much less funny was the courtroom-set Romance – a melee of gay jokes, Jew jokes, and an elderly ecdysiast. In a damning review, the New York Times depicted the frantic farce as positively soporific.

Perhaps Heilpern and the New York Times will hail Race as a return to form. We shall see. Only one thing's for certain – Mamet himself is unlikely to care (at least publicly). Near the close of Keep Your Pantheon, the troupe's leading actor contemplates his own mortality. Death can't be all bad, he reasons, if it involves a voyage to "that happy land … where there are no more critics".No. Er, sorry, here's the essay... "A decade ago, the critic John Heilpern, who... more