Repertory theatre
Repertory can still be found in the UK in a variation of guises: in Sidmouth (12 plays), Wolverhampton (eight), and Burslem and Taunton (four each).
Organizations in Canada include North America's largest classical repertory theatre company, the Stratford Festival,[9] founded in 1953 primarily to present productions of William Shakespeare's plays.
[citation needed] The Vagabond Repertory Theatre Company was formed in March 2009 by artistic directors Nathaniel Fried and Ryan LaPlante, and currently resides and performs in Kingston, Ontario.
[3] See the Deutsches Theater, a privately owned German theatre founded in 1883 to produce plays in rep.[11] While variations appeared before, the modern repertory system did not become popular until the twentieth century.
College students and young professionals making up much of the acting company are supported by guest stars or actors who are further along in their careers.
[12] Repertory theatre with mostly changing casts and longer-running plays, perhaps better classed as "provincial" or "non-profit" theatre, has made a big comeback in cities such as Little Rock, AR, Washington, DC, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Chicago, Los Angeles, Nashville, New York, Houston, Boston, San Francisco, San Diego, Buffalo, Kansas City, and Seattle.
Some theatres only rehearse one play a day and add shows into rotation as the season progresses, like The American Shakespeare Center.
American Players Theatre has a six-week-long rehearsal period compared to Oregon Shakespeare Festival's eleven-week-long one.
[17] In Russia and much of Eastern Europe, repertory theatre is based on the idea that each company maintains a number of productions that are performed on a rotating basis.
However, many productions remain in repertory for years as this approach presents each piece a few times in a given season, not enough to exhaust the potential audience pool.
After the fall of the Soviet regime and the substantial diminution of government subsidy, the repertory practice has required re-examination.
Rotation Repertory system is still the most commonly used business model of live theatre in Eastern and Central Europe, specifically in countries such as Austria, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia and Czech Republic.
A similar term, "weekly rep," denotes a British movement started in the early 1900s that focused on shorter runs of a single new work, rather than having several plays ready to perform at any given time.
[5] These ensembles consisted of the stars and actors hired to play a very specific role as a single production toured around.
[5] Examples of rep performers who went on to become well-known are John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier, Rosemary Harris, Christopher Plummer, Harold Pinter, Peter O'Toole, Jeremy Brett, Geraldine McEwan, Vanessa Redgrave, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Michael Gambon, Imelda Staunton and Patrick Stewart.
