The mirrored chandelier that dangles ominously over Marianne Elliott's production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a true spectacle, even at a tech rehearsal. At nearly five metres wide, it's more than a third of the width of the National Theatre's vast Lyttelton stage.
The title was spontaneous, impulsive. It was inspired by Kenneth Anger. He has two films with 'Rising' in the title - 'Lucifer Rising' and 'Scorpio Rising' - and I wanted to make something in this supernatural, surreal, occultist, exaggerated, fantasy world, like his films.
Maryna, the main heroine of Twenty One, has only one wish that her soldier husband Petro comes back alive. She frantically raises tens of thousands of dollars online to buy drones, weapons and power generators for the front line.
Mara Naaman's academic career includes serving as Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Arabic at Williams College from 2007 to 2014, and she has held teaching positions at Columbia University, New York University, Hofstra University, and Hunter College.
The dream is the confusion machine I didn't have to build, a space where perception slips beyond authorship. Within Communal Dreams, influence operates as a subtle signal rather than a directive force.
A big issue with how we understand Shakespeare and how we're introduced to it is we sit down and read it. But Shakespeare's plays, like any play, are meant to be heard, to be experienced.
Under the ABS challenge system, a team begins each game with two challenges. If a player gets an umpire's call overturned, their team retains the challenge. In effect, this means a team has unlimited challenges until they get two wrong.
Carter Shocket stated, 'They kind of felt like they happened and then they were over, like it wasn't a long-lasting kind of project. It was just a flash-in-the-pan kind of thing.'
The entire indoor journey, from entry to elevator to the 100th floor, has been reimagined as a multi-sensory, immersive environment. The overhaul comes via a collaboration between experiential design firm Journey, multimedia studio Moment Factory and NYC-based design outfit SOFTlab.
On May 2, 2025, arts and cultural organizations across the country received notifications that grants and funding promised by the National Endowment for the Arts were being rescinded. This was part of a larger initiative by the Trump Administration to dismantle not just the NEA, but also other arts advocacy programs including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.
People all saw that there is something new is being attempted here that you've just got to see. I think that is its own reward. In an era where New York's storied Met Opera has faced layoffs, pay cuts, postponed productions, and a controversial financial agreement with Saudi Arabia, forward-thinking artistic direction becomes essential for survival.
Spalding Gray used to perform a show called Interviewing the Audience. The celebrated monologist would invite a stranger he had met in the lobby to join him on stage. Through a sequence of innocuous questions, he would get them to open up about their lives. At one performance, a guest broke the audience's hearts by talking about her daughter's murder. At benefit nights, people living with HIV shared their tales. Other times, the anecdotes would be eccentric or amusing.
He would refer to his father as ce salaud bourgeois (that bourgeois arsehole) and he delighted in telling me the story of being thrown out of school aged eight because he punched the gymnastics teacher who was trying to instil discipline into young boys by turning them into military martinets. Of the professions and attitudes that merited his ire the military, the church, hypocrisy, sham, inauthenticity, politicians, academics and fascists collaborateurs had a special place in his heart.
At Troubadour, we are driven by a belief in creating extraordinary spaces that inspire artists, audiences, and the stories they come together to share. The 3,000 seat venue is to be built in Greenwich Securing planning permission for the new Troubadour Greenwich Peninsula Theatre marks a major milestone for us, and an exciting new chapter in our commitment to bold, large-scale live performance.
