For sixty-two years, from 1955 to 2017, one of the unique attractions of Steinau was the Holzköppe marionette theater, which performed in the Marstall, a historical building which had originally served as the horse stables for the nearby Steinau Castle. The word Holzköppe means ‘wooden heads’ in the local dialect, Read More …
If only I understood a bit of Czech, I would have gone to a play at this lovely old theater which was just a couple blocks from my hotel in the Prague district of Vinohradech. I would love to have seen their staging of Friedrich Schiller’s play Marie Stuartovna (Mary Read More …
When I was in Belfort I couldn’t see a show at the municipal theatre Le Granit, because it was closed for the summer vacation. But I did find out a few things about it. For one thing, I learned that Le Granit is a scène nationale, meaning ‘national stage’. I Read More …
From the local newspaper, L’Est Républicain, which I read each morning during a leisurely breakfast in the hotel garden, I learned that every summer the city of Belfort sponsors a “festival of humor” called Les Rigolomanies de Belfort, consisting of six comedy shows on six Thursday evenings in the 867-seat Read More …
Not far from the Hegel House is the cleverly-named Renitenztheater, a cabaret theater that was founded in 1961. To understand the name, you have to know that lots of German towns have something called a Residenztheater, meaning the former official court theater at the Residence of the local duke, prince, Read More …
Looking through my photos of the Lucernaire from the past few years, I see that sometime between 2014 and 2019 the wording over the entrance was changed. It used to read Centre national d’art et d’essai (National center for art and experimentation), but now it just reads Théâtre Lucernaire. This Read More …
In the summer of 1595 — or maybe it was 1596, nobody knows for sure — a young English playwright woke up from a weird and wonderful dream and started writing it all down as fast as he could, before the dream faded. In this dream the Duke of Athens, Read More …
Besançon’s municipal theater was designed in 1775 by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, the architect who also built (for example) the Rotonde de la Villette in Paris. In an age when most theaters were horseshoe shaped, which meant that many of the seats offered little or no view of the stage — La Read More …
With seats for 570 spectators in its main auditorium, the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet is the smallest lyric theater in Paris. The nearby Garnier Opera seats three times as many people, and the Bastille Opera seats well over four times as many. Though the entrance to the Athénée is tucked away Read More …
This state-of-the-art 21st century theater was inaugurated on January 19, 2002 with a performance of the opera La traviata, by Giuseppe Verdi, and for the next three years this was Milan’s main opera venue while the historic Teatro alla Scala was being restored and restructured. In fact, the Teatro degli Read More …