Hamilton won 11 awards – best musical, book, score, lead actor of a musical, featured actor, featured actress, direction, set, costumes, lighting, and choreography — at the 70th annual Tony Awards.
Meet the Hamiltonyans
It was a ceremony that, as Barbara Streisand put it, was one of joy tinged with sorry, because of the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando in the early morning. It also reportedly attracted almost nine million viewers, the highest number in 15 years.
Here is the complete list of 2016 Tony Award winners
Here are 18 months worth of Hamiltonia — Everything Hamilton
Here is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s response to the Orlando killings, in the form of a sonnet he recited as his acceptance speech for best score
Here are 12 minutes of highlights from the 195-minute broadcast.
Here’s the full opening number
Here’s the Hamilton number, introduced by the President of the United States, the First Lady, and Common
Here’s the closing number, from Hamilton
CBS has made the full broadcast available here
Week in New York Theater Reviews
An Indian summer, as a character defines it in Gregory S. Moss’s play, is a time in late August when “ the animals, the birds, even the plants” are “a little stunned that it’s still warm outside.” Although not stunning, Moss’s play “Indian Summer,” about a teen romance at the Rhode Island seashore, is certainly warm, largely thanks to the charming, just-right four-member cast.
Don and Karla meet because their mothers share a room in a cancer hospital, in Halley Feiffer’s bawdy and tender new play, which has two attention-grabbing aspects to it:
- Its title is 22 words long — “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York City.” This barely fits a Tweet or the playbill or the marquee at the Lucille Lortel.
- It marks the first time I know of that a mother and daughter have written two separate plays evidently inspired by the same real-life event.
Andrew and Kevin Atherton in foreground
Though ‘Paramour’ features some spectacular circus acts, there’s something ludicrous about its efforts to marry them to what’s supposed to be a traditional Broadway musical…Indeed, every scene or song is accompanied by specialty acts or special effects that range from the peerless to pointless…All the dexterous derring-do acts not just as a distraction from the dopey dialogue, uninspired lyrics and largely generic music, but as the only good reason to see this show.
In “Incognito,” a pathologist steals Albert Einstein’s brain; a man who has no short-term memory keeps on asking for his wife, whom he doesn’t realize had died; two women meet on a blind date, one a lawyer, the other a clinical neuropsychologist.
These are the three threads that make up the latest play by Nick Payne. Any one of these strands might have made a satisfying and intriguing drama about the mysteries of the mind, especially the story of Einstein’s brain. But deliberately jumbled together, they make at best a challenging drama, at worst a pretentious one.
Week in New York Theater News
from left to right: Reed Birney, Jayne Houdyshelll, Cassie Beck, Lauren Klein, Arian Moayed
photograph by Jonathan Mandell
The King and I will close June 26.
The Glass Menagerie will be on Broadway again, with Sally Field, Joe Mantello, Finn Witrock. Directed by Sam Gold, it is set to open at the John Golden on March 23,2017. It will be the eighth production of Tennessee Williams play on Broadway.
Laura Linney and Cynthia Nixon will star in a Broadway revival of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes. They will alternate in the play’s two major female roles, that of the scheming Regina Giddens and her sweet, alcoholic sister-in-law, Birdie Hubbard, It is set to opens April 19, 2017 at MTC’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater. It will be the fifth production of Hellman’s play on Broadway.
Dear Evan Hansen will open December 4, 2016 at Belasco
The Front Page opens October 22, 2016 at the Broadhurst with a starry cast!
Theatergoers are now allowed to photograph inside a Shubert or Jujamcyn Bway theater before and after a show, and during intermission
RIP Peter Shaffer, Tony-winning playwright of Equus and Amadeus, 90 years old. pic.twitter.com/XGHv5v5MNP
— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) June 6, 2016
Hamilton’s Seller vs. Hamilton sellers
In a New York Times Op-Ed piece, Lin-Manuel Miranda knocked resale sites like Stub hub for gobbling up tickets with “bots: and then overcharging
Shortly thereafter, lead producer Jeffrey Seller announced that he was raising the price of 200 of the best seats in the theater at each performance to an unprecedented $849
Associated Press: “According to the plan, a total of 200 seats will sell for $849 at the Broadway box office, while 1,075 will be listed between $179 and $199 – up from the current $139-$177 range. The plan goes into effect in late January.”
The New Yorker: Online marketplaces like StubHub and SeatGeek have been a boon to people like the producers of “Hamilton,” because, although they’ve provided a venue for scalping, they’ve also made it easier for producers to discern what to charge. The prices at these sites are, in effect, fair-market ones: they show exactly what people are willing to spend to attend an event.
On his Facebook page, actor Jason Danieley called Hamilton’s steep rise in ticket price “reprehensible”
“Anything other than making a Broadway ticket affordable is destroying the live theatre.”
Others agreed, angry that Seller was price gouging in the name of fighting price gougers.
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Hadestown extended to July 31, 2016
Gillian Lynne angry about being dropped from CATS on Broadway
Helen Mirren on women’s roles and taking on Shakespeare@NYPL podcasthttps://t.co/lolnUO7Hv6 pic.twitter.com/oaWrTdUZ1r
— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) June 7, 2016
Broadway Season Analyses
Intersection of Broadway and Non-Profits Boost Creative and Commercial Growth
Broadway Embraces Diversity, but Have Things Really Changed?
Seven Thoughts on Post-Hamilton Broadway
And the winner is … the ensemble cast: How Broadway’s best acting was a group effort
