The Piccadilly Theatre is to be the new home for the Peter Hall rep. company from March. The season will open with Waiting for Godot on 10th March, with previews from the 3rd. The company will consist of 40 actors, including Dame Judi Dench, Elaine Paige, Anna Cararet, Peter Bowles, Michael Pennington and Eric Sykes.
Tough talking from American Equity
American Equity is set to try to prevent British actors obtaining work permits for shows which transfer to Broadway from the West End. This is because very few American actors have crossed the Atlantic when their Broadway shows have come to the West End.
Former chief executive of Northern Arts, Peter Hewitt, is to take over as secretary-general of ACE in March. Deputy secretary-general Graham Devlin, who took over as caretaker when Mary Allen left to go to the ROH, will return to his original post.
The King's Head has lost its grant of £35,000 pa from the London Borough Grants Committee, it has been announced. The committee said that the theatre had had bad reviews (which it denies) and that the LBGC grant is not important (whereas the theatre claims it is essential). This puts the continued existence of the theatre in doubt, in spite of a gramnt from the Mackintosh Foundation which replaced money cut by LAB.
ACE has decided to put their review of the need for flytowers "on the back burner", following the howls of derision from the entire industry which greeted the story in The Stage last month. According to a spokeswoman it has not been abandoned, just "oput on the back burner" until a full review of Lottery fuding in March.
Yorkshire and Humberside Arts has awarded a grant of £60,000 to Scarborough's Stephen Joseph Theatre which will, according to a spokeswoman, make it secure "for the foreseeable future". Only last year, as reported on this site, it looked as though the SJT would have to close.
ESC director Michael Bogdanov, whose company is now based at the Tyne Theatre in Newcastle, has launched a vicious attack on the RSC for using their annual residency in the city as "a raiding exercise... for five or six weeks of the year which takes the city's money." The RSC, he said, failed to set up educational and community activities in the city during the whole twenty years of its presence in the city.