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The Theatre Portal

Ancient Greece theatre in Taormina, Sicily, Italy

Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance. It is the oldest form of drama, though live theatre has now been joined by modern recorded forms. Elements of art, such as painted scenery and stagecraft such as lighting are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience. Places, normally buildings, where performances regularly take place are also called "theatres" (or "theaters"), as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον (théatron, "a place for viewing"), itself from θεάομαι (theáomai, "to see", "to watch", "to observe").

A theatre company is an organisation that produces theatrical performances, as distinct from a theatre troupe (or acting company), which is a group of theatrical performers working together. (Full article...)

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Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (1 May 1875)
Trial by Jury is a comic opera in one act, with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert. It was first produced on 25 March 1875, at London's Royalty Theatre, where it initially ran for 131 performances and was considered a hit, receiving critical praise and outrunning its popular companion piece, Jacques Offenbach's La Périchole. The story concerns a "breach of promise of marriage" lawsuit in which the judge and legal system are the objects of lighthearted satire. Gilbert based the libretto of Trial by Jury on an operetta parody that he had written in 1868. The opera premiered more than three years after Gilbert and Sullivan's only previous collaboration, Thespis, an 1871–72 Christmas season entertainment. In the intervening years, both the author and composer were busy with separate projects. Beginning in 1873, Gilbert tried several times to get the opera produced before the impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte suggested that he collaborate on it with Sullivan. Sullivan was pleased with the piece and promptly wrote the music. Critics and audiences praised how well Sullivan's witty and good-humoured music complemented Gilbert's satire. The success of Trial by Jury launched the famous series of 13 collaborative works between Gilbert and Sullivan that came to be known as the Savoy Operas.

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Gielgud performing in Much Ado About Nothing
John Gielgud (1904–2000) was an English actor and theatre director who, along with Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier, dominated the British stage for much of the 20th century. A member of the Terry family theatrical dynasty, he became a star in the West End and on Broadway by the 1930s, appearing in new works and classics. He began a parallel career as a director, and set up his own company at the Queen's Theatre, London. Though he made his first film in 1924 and had successes with The Good Companions (1933) and Julius Caesar (1953), he did not begin a regular film career until his sixties. He appeared in more than 60 films between Becket in 1964 (his first Academy Award nomination) and Elizabeth in 1998. As the acid-tongued Hobson in Arthur (1981) he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He earned a Golden Globe Award and two BAFTAs, and had the rare distinction of winning an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Tony. He broadcast more than 100 radio and television dramas and made commercial recordings of many plays, including ten of Shakespeare's. He was knighted in 1953 and was president of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art from 1977 to 1989.

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Arthur Miller
The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it is so accidental. It's so much like life.

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