Issue #34: November 15, 1999

• The latest Arthur Miller revival is currently at the Royale Theatre. The 1968 play The Price arrives just as Miller’s Death of a Salesman leaves Broadway to hit the road.

• Cameron Macintosh’s stunning production of Oliver! opened to rave reviews on November 9 at Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre. As mentioned before this will be the only North American stop for the production. Fortunately they have extended the engagement to January 15, 2000—good timing for the gift-giving season!

• It’s a Noel Coward love-in when many British theatre, television and film personalities take the stage at the Savoy Theatre on Sunday, December 12 to celebrate Coward’s centenary. Extracts from many plays, prose, poems and diaries will be featured at this last great celebration of the century. Richard Attenborough will be directing celebrity traffic at the event which will include Alan Bates, Simon Callow, Derek Jacobi, Imogen Stubbs, Elizabeth McGovern, Edward Fox and John Mills. The proceeds for the evening will go to The Actor’s Charitable Trust, which Coward himself was president for many years.
  
  
• Matthew Bourne’s, critical and box office triumph, Swan Lake returns to the Piccadilly Theatre, where it ran for 21 record-breaking weeks, on February 7, 2000.

• The Dublin Theatre Festival (October 4–16) was very light on Irish product this year. There was only one new Irish work, Frank McGinness’ Dolly West’s Kitchen, which was well received. One standout was the Australian premiere of Cloudstreet. It seems there is interest from several U.S. producers to bring the five-hour story to the states.

• It looks like playwright Terence McNally can join ranks with the likes of Salman Rushdie these days. Apparently British Muslims have issued an edict condemning him to death for depicting Jesus Christ as a homosexual in his play Corpus Christi. Considering the reviews the show received in New York earlier this year I doubt many will even see the piece.

• Scottish actor Ian Bannen, died in a car crash near Loch Ness in Scotland on November 3 at the age of 71. He was most recently seen on the big screen as the charming Irish con artist in Waking Ned Devine. A veteran of the English and Irish theatre, Mr. Bannen was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s initial seasons in Stratford-on-Avon in the early 60s. He made his stage debut in Dublin in 1947 then ventured to London and in 1958 he appeared in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. He also appeared in an acclaimed London revival of A Moon For the Misbegotten in 1983 followed by a Broadway run of the same the next season.