April De Angelis comedy, to be premiered in Hampstead, explores life of actor at a time when married women were ‘legally dead’
She was known as the Queen of Drury Lane and the first truly respected female actor in theatre, achieving an astonishing level of celebrity at the end of the 18th century.
But despite her notoriety there are no contemporary biographies about Sarah Siddons, who was labelled by her contemporaries as “tragedy personified”.
Continue reading...Kathy Burke and Daniel Kaluuya among alumni of her London school, credited with making stars of often working-class students
Tributes have been paid to Anna Scher, an influential drama teacher who taught actors including Kathy Burke, Daniel Kaluuya and Adam Deacon, after the announcement of her death on Sunday, aged 78.
Scher, who had taught children in north London to act for more than 50 years, has been credited with creating numerous stars, and was known for championing people from a working-class background. The Anna Scher Theatre (AST), which started as a drama club in January 1968, has a long list of well-known alumni, including Pauline Quirke, Linda Robson, Martin Kemp, Natalie Cassidy, Patsy Palmer, Sid Owen, Jake Wood, Reggie Yates and Brooke Kinsella.
Continue reading...The US author of Sex and the City will appear on stage in London in early 2024 before going on a UK-wide tour
Candace Bushnell, the real-life Carrie Bradshaw, is bringing her one-woman show to the West End for the first time.
The bestselling author – whose newspaper column inspired the hit TV drama Sex and the City – will also tour the UK, sharing her philosophy through stories of fashion, literature and sex.
Continue reading...Oak floorboards discovered at St George’s Guildhall, King’s Lynn, believed to be only surviving stage from Shakespeare’s time
Boards trodden by the Bard have been discovered under layers of flooring at England’s oldest medieval guildhall as it undergoes a big refurbishment.
The 600-year-old oak floorboards are believed to be the only surviving stage from William Shakespeare’s time.
Continue reading...The Hollywood star will appear alongside Andy Serkis and Louisa Harland in David Ireland’s black comedy
Woody Harrelson is to return to the London stage in a new production of David Ireland’s controversial black comedy Ulster American this winter.
Harrelson will star as a hotshot American actor in the satire, with Lord of the Rings’ Andy Serkis playing an English theatre director and Derry Girls’ Louisa Harland taking the role of a playwright from Northern Ireland whose drama about a violent Protestant activist the trio are about to stage.
Continue reading...Coogan will follow in Peter Sellers’ footsteps to play multiple roles in stage adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satirical war film
Steve Coogan is to star in Armando Iannucci’s stage adaptation of the satirical war film Dr Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
The play, set to open in London next autumn, reunites the pair who worked together more than 30 years ago on the BBC radio comedy On the Hour, in which Coogan played Alan Partridge, and on subsequent Partridge projects.
Continue reading...Rest of audience applauds after people causing ‘disturbance’ removed from Dominion theatre on Saturday
Theatregoers were escorted from a London performance of Grease the Musical by police on Saturday night, to cheers of approval from the rest of the audience.
Footage posted online shows eight police officers and staff from the Dominion theatre lining the stairway in the balcony as audience members chant “out, out, out!”.
Continue reading...Actor and writer posted yesterday after performing her show Sunsets to one audience member
An actor who went viral online after she posted a tearful tweet about performing her one-woman show to an audience of one at the Edinburgh festival fringe has played to a sell out crowd only 24 hours later.
The actor and writer Georgie Grier received messages of support from comedians including Jason Manford and Dara Ó Briain when she posted on Twitter on Thursday afternoon: “There was one person in my audience today when I performed my one-woman play, ‘Sunsets’ at #edfringe. It’s fine, isn’t it? It’s fine …?”
Continue reading...Gillian Slovo’s play at National Theatre uses words of survivors of 2017 fire at west London tower block
People must be jailed for what happened at Grenfell Tower, the award-winning author Gillian Slovo has said, as her play about the disaster prepares to open at the National Theatre in London.
Slovo, who gained international recognition with her novel Red Dust, set in South Africa’s post-apartheid truth and reconciliation commission, has used dialogue gleaned verbatim from interviews with 10 of the survivors for the play, which has left actors in tears after preview performances. In an interview with the Guardian she said: “Without jail time, how’s it going to stop anybody else doing this in the future?”
Continue reading...The I Should Be So Lucky singer will play a ‘specially created character’ in the touring show which will feature a string of pop hits by the songwriting trio
Kylie Minogue is to step back in time for a new musical featuring the songs of Stock Aitken Waterman that shot her to chart success in the late 1980s. The Australian singer, currently enjoying a summer hit with Padam Padam, will “digitally appear” throughout the tour of the show, playing what is described as “a specially created character unique to the musical”.
I Should Be So Lucky: The Stock Aitken Waterman musical is written and directed by Debbie Isitt whose series of Nativity! films also inspired a stage musical. The show uses more than 25 numbers created by the songwriting and production trio Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman, including the title song from 1987 which brought Minogue her first UK No 1 hit.
Continue reading...Jodie Comer and Tom Stoppard led a big night for Brits, while J Harrison Ghee and Alex Newell triumphed in a ceremony affected by the writers’ strike
Leopoldstadt and Kimberly Akimbo won big at this year’s history-making Tony awards, with the writers strike affecting the format and content of the ceremony.
Tom Stoppard’s sprawling family drama Leopoldstadt was named best play, winning against Cost of Living and Fat Ham. Producer Sonia Friedman called it Stoppard’s “most personal masterwork”, and Stoppard said that throughout his career he has noticed “the theatre writer getting decreasingly devalued in the food chain”.
Continue reading...This year’s big winners including Jodie Comer, Suzan Lori-Parks and J Harrison Ghee
Best musical
& Juliet
Kimberly Akimbo – WINNER!
New York, New York
Shucked
Some Like It Hot
Best performance by an actor in a leading role in a play
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Topdog/Underdog
Corey Hawkins, Topdog/Underdog
Sean Hayes, Good Night, Oscar – WINNER!
Stephen McKinley Henderson, Between Riverside and Crazy
Wendell Pierce, Death of a Salesman
Actor was helped off stage from her one-woman show Prima Facie after city’s poor air quality prompted breathing issues
Jodie Comer stopped her one-woman show Prima Facie on Broadway because of breathing difficulties owing to New York’s air crisis.
According to eyewitnesses, the award-winning star of Killing Eve, tipped to win a Tony award this weekend, was 10 minutes late for the matinee performance. After three minutes of the show, she announced that she couldn’t proceed.
Continue reading...Golden Globe and Tony-winning actor will star as Willy Loman in a Melbourne production directed by Neil Armfield
It has been more than a decade since the Golden Globe-winning Australian actor Anthony LaPaglia appeared on stage – and almost quarter of a century since he triumphed on Broadway, winning a Tony award as Eddie Carbone in A View From the Bridge.
Next month the Los Angeles-based Without a Trace actor will return to Australia to begin rehearsals on another Arthur Miller classic: the 20th-century masterpiece Death of a Salesman, directed by Neil Armfield.
Continue reading...The Ghanaian playwright and novelist, who also served as her country’s education minister, focused on the modern African woman
The Ghanaian writer and academic Ama Ata Aidoo, whose work focused on the modern African woman, has died aged 81.
Ata Aidoo, whose fans included Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, rejected the idea of what she described as a “western perception that the African female is a downtrodden wretch”, said the BBC.
Continue reading...Ennosuke Ichikawa taken to hospital but mother and father died after taking overdose
The world of Japanese kabuki, a classical form of Japanese theatre that combines highly stylised movement and unusual vocalisation, has been rocked after the popular actor Ennosuke Ichikawa was taken to hospital and his parents found dead.
Ennosuke was found by his manager collapsed at his home in Tokyo along with an apparent suicide note and taken to hospital.
Continue reading...Roald Dahl Story Company announces new shows, including a large-scale circus and a reading of The Magic Finger
A slate of Roald Dahl adaptations has been announced, including a family musical based on The Enormous Crocodile, a reading of The Magic Finger and a large-scale circus show featuring many of the author’s most famous characters.
The three shows will join the new musical The Witches, co-produced by the National Theatre and readying for its debut in November, while a further four creations have been commissioned by the theatre division of the Roald Dahl Story Company and are under development.
Continue reading...The actor, who has previously starred as Hamlet at the Young Vic, is to play Lady Macbeth among a wave of star-powered Shakespeare productions this year
Cush Jumbo is to play Lady Macbeth this winter in a production at London’s Donmar Warehouse that reunites her with David Tennant, her co-star in the Channel 4 TV series Deadwater Fell.
Earlier this month it was announced that Tennant would take on the title role in Max Webster’s production of Macbeth, expected to be one of this year’s hottest tickets. Jumbo’s casting marks her return to the Covent Garden theatre where she played Mark Antony in an acclaimed all-female production of Julius Caesar in 2012, directed by Phyllida Lloyd.
Continue reading...The actor will head up an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play An Enemy of the People once the hit HBO drama has ended
Jeremy Strong is going from a corporate boardroom on TV to a whistleblower on Broadway.
The actor who plays Kendall Roy in the HBO television series Succession has signed on to play a man who tries to expose water contamination in a Norwegian spa town in Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play An Enemy of the People.
Continue reading...The musical will close on 4 June, after receiving mixed reviews from US critics and failing to receive a nomination at the Tony awards
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bad Cinderella is to close on Broadway just over 10 weeks after its official opening night. The show, which did not receive any nominations at this year’s Tony awards, has announced that “the ball must come to an end” and that it will bow out at New York’s Imperial theatre on 4 June. Ticket sales have dipped despite a low average price for a big Broadway musical ($54 for last week). It will have played 33 previews and 85 performances.
The musical is a retooled version of Cinderella, which ran for just under a year (including a Covid-related break in performances) and suffered heavy losses at London’s Gillian Lynne theatre. Lloyd Webber was criticised for the manner in which some current and future Cinderella cast members learned of its closure in 2022 via social media and for his suggestion, in a letter read out at its final night, that opening a new musical during the pandemic “might have been a costly mistake”. (He later issued a statement saying his words had been misunderstood and that he was proud of the show.)
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