Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

"Something for everyone" is a phrase we love to hear applied to American Theatre, and seldom has that judgment seemed more fitting than with reference to the edition you hold in your hand. Sure, theatre is the ultimate subject of all three of this month’s feature articles—but that ancient and malleable word takes on multifarious meanings as the artists, managers and commentators featured in this issue consider it from their own distinct perspectives. 

The stage adaptations on the boards in Britain and the U.S. of two of Salman Rushdie’s major works are the impetus for our candid and wickedly wry cover interview with the acclaimed (and also famously denounced) author, whose books and stories crackle with an inherent theatricality and who relishes his heralded new connection to the art form. “Maybe someday I’ll write directly for the theatre,” Rushdie muses during his recent visit to Berkeley Repertory Theatre for the first professional American production of his Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

When producer Todd Haimes speaks to Joan Channick in an equally candid but otherwise utterly different kind of interview, he’s using the T-word to mean something else—an institution: the venerable New York City theatre company that he has led for nearly 20 years, and whose struggle for economic viability and artistic credibility comprises a tale almost as intricate as a Rushdie plot. “It was not a theatre that was embraced by its community,” he says of the Roundabout at an earlier point in its history—a sentiment that would ring tellingly false in the much-altered atmosphere of that community today.

Finally, theatre is stretched in yet another linguistic direction by the wildly varied artists—actors, singers, musicians, adapters—who people arts reporter John Istel’s lively survey of new theatrical revues. The pop-music compendiums Istel describes are not only bringing great contemporary popular songwriting to the stage—as he points out, they are also opening up the theatre as an artistically viable venue for leading pop composers. And they engender a whole new set of critical concerns. “I was worried about the Deadheads,” playwright Michael Norman Mann says of the early performances of his Cumberland Blues, based on the songs of the Grateful Dead, “but within minutes they were dancing in the aisles.” Something for everyone, indeed. —Jim O’Quinn

© - 2006 by Theatre Communications Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.