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Theatre

More truth about the theatre business

By Asides, Theatre

Gene Sobczak, exec­ut­ive dir­ect­or of Denver’s Arvada Centre on their 30% drop in attend­ance last year (follow-up quote from artist­ic dir­ect­or Rod Lansberry):

In our line of work, everything we do loses money,” Sobczak said. “It’s the nature of pro­fes­sion­al theat­er and non­profits.” Or, as Lansberry puts it: “If theat­ers made money, they would be on every corner, like Starbucks.”

So the more theat­er you do, Sobczak said, “The more money you lose. Part of our expense equa­tion is we’re los­ing more money by doing more.”

[Denver Post online]

Business and the Arts

By Asides, Theatre

Legendary quote from Australian pro­du­cer Justin Macdonnell:

Who has not been told that they need to get more people with ‘busi­ness skills’ on their board, more people with fin­an­cial, leg­al, mar­ket­ing prowess to guide and restrain the wil­ful artist – as though it were the arts that reg­u­larly had the cor­por­ate crashes, bank­ruptcies and shady dealings?

No fur­ther com­ment required.

[via a com­ment at Theatreview by Zia Lopez] 

Sir Peter Hall on directing

By Asides, Cinema, Theatre

Sir Peter Hall tells a big­ger truth in a dis­cus­sion about directing:

I’ve worked with prac­tic­ally all the great dir­ect­ors, alpha­bet­ic­ally, from Bergman to Zeffirelli. It’s won­der­ful to be involved in the mys­tery of oth­er dir­ect­ors’ work, because they’re all different.

But most will know with­in the first three or four days wheth­er it’s going to work. The inter­est­ing thing is when it’s wrong they have to go on and they can­’t tell any­body it’s wrong.

[via The Telegraph]

Tuesday Allsorts #1

By Asides, Cinema, Football, Music, The Net, Theatre

David Beckham 27 Feb 2006Why is this man smil­ing? “Er, Victoria, a pigeon’s just crapped on my shoulder.”
Presenting the first of my weekly (weakly?) lists of stuff I’ve stumbled across via the web over the last sev­en days.

Firstly, it is unlikely that I will be pur­chas­ing the new red England away top des­pite my being a prime can­did­ate (I bought the 2002 revers­able ver­sion and still wear the blue side). Even though it is un homage to the clas­sic 1966 World Cup win­ning shirt it’s still too busy for me. What is it with the little white “thing” on the right shoulder and the Umbro logo is as wide and prom­in­ent as the three lions? And they have per­severed with the tiny gold star which made the last shirt seem like it belonged to the People’s Republic of China. Anyway, on to the inter­est­ing stuff:

  • The Guardian talks to Underworld, Ray Davies, Pete Shelley, Richard X, Johnny Marr, Nick Hodgson, Rhymefest, Peter Hook, Tony Hicks, Gary Numan, Ron Mael and KT Tunstall about how some of their sig­na­ture tunes came to be:

The drum pat­tern was ripped off from a Donna Summer B‑side. We’d fin­ished the drum pat­tern and we were really happy, then Steve acci­dent­ally kicked out the drum machine lead so we had to start from scratch and it was nev­er as good.” (Peter Hook from New Order talk­ing about “Blue Monday”)

Not only is there a pre­ma­ture gear change after the second chor­us, but towards the end of the song there are a fur­ther two in a row. They’re so ill-advised that you can hear the nervous­ness in his waver­ing voice as he tries to res­ist each time. All it achieves, though, is the effect of everything going hor­ribly out of tune. I’m not abso­lutely cer­tain that the word “caco­phon­ic” exists, but that’s the most apt way to sum up this atrocity.”

255. Casting a black Desdemona along­side a black Othello is kind of miss­ing the point a bit.
256. The Montague clan are not ali­ens. No, really, they’re not.
257. No mat­ter how much homo­erot­ic sub­text has been built up over the course of the play, I will not end Richard II by hav­ing Henry pull Richard’s dead body out of a pool of water, hav­ing him pro­ceed to lie on top of it, and then roll, the one over the oth­er, all over the stage in com­plete silence until the cur­tain comes to hide them from the audi­ence’s bleed­ing eyes.

  • Finally, not only has someone in a fea­ture film got my name, he’s the title char­ac­ter – and this is a film with Bruce Willis and Ben Kingsley! Some people are used to shar­ing the same name as char­ac­ters on screen (I know an Anderson and a Harper who must be sick of it) but will be a new exper­i­ence for me.