Hamilton received more Tony nominations than any show in its 70 year history. Other things are happening besides the Tony Award nominations, and other theater awards – including some two dozen plays and musicals opening in May – but who’s noticing?
Week in New York Theater Awards
2016 NYC Theater Award GuideSurvey: What are YOUR picks (not predictions) for the 2016 Tony Awards?
Hamilton may not be a complete sweep at the Tonys
New York Drama Critics Circle Awards: Shuffle Along, The Humans
Alana Arenas (performing in the Public Theater’s Head of Passes) and Ben Platt (in Second Stage’s Dear Evan Hansen) win the Actors Equity Foundation Clarence Derwent Awards for promising newcomers.
Lois Smith and Bill Camp win the annual Richard Seff Award presented by the Actors’ Equity Foundation to a veteran male and female character actor for the best performance in a supporting role in a Broadway or Off-Broadway production.
New York theater artists Lynn Nottage and Taylor Mac are among the 21 performing artists to snag $275,000 Doris Duke Performing Arts Awards.
Week in New York Theater Reviews
© Julieta Cervantes
George C. Wolfe’s revival of the 1921 all-black musical is cataclysmically entertaining…That, however, refers to the musical numbers. Wolfe’s ambition to tell the story behind the musical…quickly starts feeling as if he were a PhD student defending his thesis about the significance of this ‘sadly neglected’ musical…Luckily, Wolfe the savvy showman often wins out over Wolfe the passionate pedant, and there are moments of ‘Shuffle Along’ that are as electrifying and sublime as any this season on Broadway.
The title character in the musical Dear Evan Hansen is a clinically anxious high school student who is so friendless that he can’t get any classmates to sign the cast on his broken arm, except an even worse misfit named Connor. But then Connor commits suicide, and his death turns Evan’s life around.
In other hands, it might be difficult to suspend disbelief in the series of unlikely, near-satiric events at the heart of this original musical..[But] Composer/lyricists Benj Pasek and Justin Paul have fashioned a tuneful, affecting pop-rock score. Director Michael Greif has created a first-rate, resonant production…Beneath the fanciful plot, ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ digs towards some insights into several aspects of human nature; the show acknowledges that even good people see a tragedy through the prism of their own needs, and sometimes use it to their own advantage.
Week in New York Theater News
The first Tony Awards casualty: Disaster, with just one nomination (Jennifer Simard as a guitar-singing, slot-playing nun) says it will close Sunday, having played 32 previews and 72 regular performances.
Finding Neverland to close August 21, after 33 previews and 565 performances
Stars that will performing June 3rd in @TheBwayLeague/ @united‘s #StarsintheAlley at Shubert Alley pic.twitter.com/bBH52kD6kX
— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) May 2, 2016
2014/15 most diverse season on NYC stages so far, says latest #AAPAC report https://t.co/ohwBfV5jdL pic.twitter.com/jPvjRXwpTE
— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) May 3, 2016
It was an affair with a subordinate, against policy, that led to Jed Bernstein’s resignation as president of Lincoln Center, the institution finally reveals.
Alan Cumming writes and performs in “Max & Alan,” inspired by German Expressionist Max Beckmann’s life & death in NYC. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art on December 10
Always great Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks 2016: plays by Julia Jarcho, Eric Dufault, Ethan Lipton
An Interview with Renee Elise Goldsberry
Sam Rudy, Hamilton’s “Gatekeeper” (i.e. publicist.)
Savion Glover and Judith Jamison discuss race, dance and “Shuffle Along”
Why I chose a small play over the big screen, by Lupita Nyong’o
Inspired reaction by The Humans to the Tony nominations for featured actors Reed Birney and Jayne Houdyshell
