Portal:Theatre

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Ancient Greece theatre in Taormina, Sicily, Italy

Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance. It is the oldest form of drama, though live theatre has now been joined by modern recorded forms. Elements of art, such as painted scenery and stagecraft such as lighting are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience. Places, normally buildings, where performances regularly take place are also called "theatres" (or "theaters"), as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον (théatron, "a place for viewing"), itself from θεάομαι (theáomai, "to see", "to watch", "to observe").

A theatre company is an organisation that produces theatrical performances, as distinct from a theatre troupe (or acting company), which is a group of theatrical performers working together. (Full article...)

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Richard Rodgers (left) and Oscar Hammerstein II (right)
Allegro is a musical by Richard Rodgers (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (book and lyrics), their third collaboration for the stage, which premiered on Broadway on October 10, 1947. After the immense successes of the first two Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, Oklahoma! and Carousel, the pair sought a subject for their next play. Hammerstein had long contemplated a serious work that would deal with the problems of an ordinary man in the fast-moving modern world. Rodgers and he sought to create a work that would be as innovative as their first two stage musicals. To that end, they created a play with a large cast, including a Greek chorus. After a disastrous tryout in New Haven, Connecticut, the musical opened on Broadway to a large advance sale of tickets and very mixed reviews. The Broadway run, directed by Agnes de Mille, ended after nine months; it had no West End production and has rarely been revived.

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Ralph Richardson in 1949
Ralph Richardson (1902–1983) was an English actor who played more than sixty film roles and, along with his contemporaries John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier, dominated the British stage of the mid-20th century. In 1931 he joined the Old Vic, playing mostly Shakespearean roles. He led the company the following season, succeeding Gielgud, who had taught him much about stage technique. After he left the company, a series of leading roles took him to stardom in the West End and on Broadway. In the 1940s, Richardson was the co-director of the Old Vic company. He and Olivier led the company to Europe and Broadway in 1945 and 1946. In the 1950s, in the West End and occasionally on tour, Richardson played in modern and classic works including The Heiress, Home at Seven and Three Sisters. Richardson was cast in leading roles in British and American films including Things to Come in the 1930s, The Fallen Idol and The Heiress in the 1940s, and Long Day's Journey into Night and Doctor Zhivago in the 1960s. He received nominations and awards in the UK, Europe and the US for his stage and screen work from 1948 until his sudden death at the age of eighty, and earned a posthumous Academy Award nomination for his final film, Greystoke.
  • ... that John Matthews's pension was suspended because he was accused of leading a call for a theatre performance to play "Yankee Doodle" and "Hail, Columbia"?
  • ... that fans of the musical Rent would sleep outside the Nederlander Theatre to get cheap front-row tickets?
  • ... that at New York City's Apollo Theater, amateurs could be swept off the stage?
  • ... that before the Biltmore Theatre was restored in 2003, there were proposals to lease the theater to a delicatessen owner or turn it into a hotel lobby?
  • ... that despite plans to restore the Sam H. Harris Theatre in the 1990s, it became an entrance to a wax museum?
  • ... that the studios of a California TV station were converted back into a movie theater after it went out of business?

Selected quote

Ralph Richardson
Acting is merely the art of keeping a large number of people from coughing.

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