Noticias

The theater pieces that resonated most this year were stories of communal, collective healing—not quite feel-good but feel-connected. Curiously, several of the shows on this list staged emotional scenes of family reunifications. Seeking patterns as a critic, it’s tricky to separate the personal emotional response from trends in theatermaking, but it seems like audiences wanted catharsis in the theater in 2024. That was especially true for something like City Center’s Ragtime, which offered both an emotional indictment and hopeful vision of the nation that audiences sought out in the days following the election.

Counting and Cracking, NYU Skirball

S. Shakthidharan penned an epic in the true sense of the word: a three-and-a-half-hour play that spans half a century of Sri Lankan history, two continents, and multiple languages as it explores an Australian man’s journey to understand where he comes from. Director Eamon Flack playfully and powerfully deployed...

New York’s Public Theater announced its upcoming season at their Astor Place home as well as Central Park’s to-be-reopened Delacorte Theater where the Public will stage Twelfth Night, directed by Saheem Ali, in summer 2025.

In its 2024-25 season, the Public will feature productions by playwrights Caryl Churchill, Lisa Sanaye Dring, David Finnigan, James Ijames, John Purugganan and S. Shakthidharan. The line-up will include partnerships with theater companies Belvoir St Theatre, Kurinji, and NYU Skirball; Elevator Repair Service; and Ma-Yi Theatre Company and La Jolla Playhouse.

See the entire line-up below.

“In my 20th season at The Public Theater, I’m overjoyed to share programming that is as bold and ambitious as The Public’s mission,” said Artistic Director Oskar Eustis, adding, “The season finishes with the reopening of The Delacorte Theater. We’re counting down the minutes until we can celebrate our revitalized home with a joyful production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

Rudi Dharmalingam in ‘Wakefield’ (Photo credit: Lisa Tomasetti.)

Jungle Entertainment, BBC Studios and the ABC’s Wakefield will be among the first drama series to resume shooting after the shutdown after the producers obtained an exemption from Border Force travel restrictions for Rudi Dharmalingam.

The British actor will return to Australia on July 10 and after two weeks in quarantine will be ready to work when filming resumes on August 3.

In the eight-parter set in a Blue Mountains psychiatric hospital created by Kristen Dunphy, Dharmalingham plays Nik, a psych nurse blessed with a powerful combination of common sense and intuition.

Nik is easily the sanest person in what is a pretty crazy place but when a song gets stuck in his head, a dark secret from his past begins to intrude into his present, forming an intriguing puzzle.

Geraldine Hakewill plays a psychiatrist with Mandy McElhinney as the head nurse, Dan Wyllie...

Jason Burrows.

Jungle Entertainment CEO Jason Burrows advocates one key structural change if the Australian screen industry is to take full advantage of an expected, post-pandemic boom in demand for scripted content: Treat writers much better.

Burrows is confident Australia can produce drama which competes with the best in the world if writers are given more time for development, greater creative control, more training and mentoring and higher fees.

“If we don’t, we might as well stop making drama,” he said in a webinar with Screen Producers Australia CEO Matt Deaner yesterday.

“We should do that even it means Australia makes one less drama each year, as it will pay off in the long run for all of us.”

Too often, he says, projects go into production or pre-production without finished scripts due to numerous factors including network pressures to fill a gap in the schedule, limited development fees and investment,...

‘Wakefield’.

British actor Rudi Dharmalingam, Mandy McElhinney and Geraldine Hakewill lead the cast of newly-announced ABC drama Wakefield, now shooting across Sydney, the Blue Mountains and the Southern Highlands.

Produced by Jungle Entertainment in partnership with BBC Studios, the eight-parter created by Kristen Dunphy is set in a Blue Mountains psychiatric hospital, and described as a psychological mystery exploring the fine line between sanity and madness.

At the show’s centre is Dharmalingham’s Nik, a gifted psych nurse, blessed with a powerful combination of common sense and intuition. Nik is easily the sanest person in what is a pretty crazy place. But when a song gets stuck in his head, a dark secret from his past begins to intrude into his present, forming an intriguing puzzle that comes together as the series builds to its heart wrenching conclusion.

Starring alongside is an impressive ensemble cast including Dan Wyllie, Harriet Dyer,...

It's not TV. It's The Young Pope.

We hope HBO will pardon our repurposing of their famous catchphrase for the sake of celebrating what creator Paolo Sorrentino, star Jude Law and everyone else involved in this extraordinary pulp-prestige TV project have wrought. But hey, if the slogan fits, wear it. Flip the channels or scroll through the streaming services all you want, but you won't find anything like this. Its combination of tightly controlled tone with beautifully bizarre flights of fancy and absolutely colossal camp stands alone. It's Hannibal for lapsed Catholics.