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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
In addition to the Arena, the ancient Romans had a smaller theater on the other side of the Adige River in Verona, with stone steps built into a hillside. This theater was excavated and reconstructed in the nineteenth century and is used today for spoken drama — especially Shakespeare in Read More …
There are several hundred lively small theaters scattered around Paris and vicinity. Some of them disappear after a few years, but this one in the Marais district has been going strong since 1980, presenting “the great authors and their great works, classical or contemporary.” The play I saw here was Read More …
In Paris back in 2011 I saw an insightful theatrical revue about the Second Empire, the eighteen-year period from 1852 to 1870 when Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte ruled France as Emperor Napoléon III. The musical spectacle “Hugoffenbach” combined texts by Victor Hugo (1802-1885), expressing his outrage at Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s seizure of power, Read More …
Meiningen is a small city in southern Thüringen which advertises itself as “The Theater City.” It has an impressive theater building with six Corinthian columns, dating from the year 1909, and a unique theater tradition going back to the middle of the 19th century. From 1866 to 1914 Meiningen was Read More …