The winners of the Drama League Awards and the Chita Rivera Awards were announced this past week (see results below), and the Obies will be held tonight. But they and all the other awards this season prompt a question: How does one define excellence in theater?
“I’ve become increasingly convinced that as a field we do not have a cohesive definition of excellence,” writes Chad Bauman, the managing director of Milwaukee Repertory Theater, in an article in American Theatre.
So he asked his colleagues across the country, and got some 50 responses – but the question he asked was about excellence in a theater as a whole (regional theaters in particular), not about individual shows. So the answers about excellence in individual shows didn’t get much more specific than “artistic quality.” All did agree that courage counts – such as not being afraid to play with form.
Four years ago, in an article titled Divining Artistic Excellence , theater artist and historian Lynne Connor pointed out that, while the concept of excellence can refer to something semi-tangible such as “the sophistication of a play’s dramatic arc,” more often people conflate excellence with taste, “something far less tangible and thus far less quantifiable.” And what determines taste? “Personal taste in everything from beer to Shakespeare comes about through a combination of biology, past experience, cultural norms, and individual predilections.”
She concludes: “We need to find productive ways to invite audiences of all tastes (and all economic and ethnic backgrounds) to join in the conversation about (the struggle over) meaning and value.”
Below: Summer theater festivals 2018. A Sondheim show closing, and another opening. A new play about Gloria Steinem, a new musical about a Marilyn Monroe film. The new seasons at BAM, Atlantic, and City Center. Also: tapped out on Broadway, tripped up at Harry Potter.
The Week in New York Theater Awards
2018 Drama League Awards
Musical: The Band’s Visit
Play: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts 1 & 2
Musical Revival: My Fair Lady
Play Revival: Angels in America
Distinguished Performance: Glenda Jackson
(2018 Drama League Award Nominations)
2018 Chita Rivera Awards
Theater Awards
Outstanding Choreography in a Broadway Show
Sergio Trujillo, Summer: The Donna Summer Musical
Outstanding Ensemble in a Broadway Show ( a tie)
Carousel
Mean Girls
Outstanding Male Dancer in a Broadway Show
Tony Yazbeck, Prince of Broadway
Outstanding Female Dancer in a Broadway Show
Ariana DeBose, Summer: The Donna Summer Musical
Outstanding Choreography in an Off-Broadway Show
Zach Morris & Jennine Willet, Ghost Light
Outstanding Female Dancer in an Off-Broadway Show
Monica Bill Barnes, One Night Only
Outstanding Male Dancer in an Off-Broadway Show
Robert Fairchild, Frankenstein
FILM AWARDS
Theatrical Release
The Greatest Showman – Choreographed by Shannon Holtzapffel and Ashley Wallen
Documentaries
Anatomy of a Male Ballet Dancer – Directed by David Barba and James Pellerito
(2018 Chita Rivera Award nominations)
The Obie Awards
Livestreamed on their Twitter feed starting at 7 p.m. Monday, May 21
The Week in New York Theater Reviews
Our Lady of 121st Street
Somebody has stolen the dead nun’s body in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s 2002 play, revived as part of his Signature season. It is a production smartly cast and competently directed by Phylicia Rashad. The script exhibits some of Guirgis’s familiar street energy, full of harsh, foul-mouthed humor; it even touches on some of his usual themes (living with sorrow and regret; betrayal; spiritual redemption.) But “Our Lady of 121st Street” is less substantive and less satisfying than many of his other plays.
Maple and Vine
In the original 2011 production of Jordan Harrison’s prescient play, a married couple overwhelmed with the stresses and complications of their lives in the city, leave their high-powered jobs behind, as well as their lattes and laptops, for a simpler world – the one that existed in 1955. A cult has re-created the world of 1955 in a gated community in the Midwest.
In the 2018 revival of “Maple and Vine” at the Flea, the actors and the audience enter another world as well – the world of the deaf.
Bump
Bump, a play by Chiara Atik that is as entertaining as it is informative, intertwines three different threads about pregnancy and childbirth – the most surprising of which turns out to be based on a true story.
Rise
Now that the hard-working, good-looking students of Stanton High School in dreary Stanton, Pennsylvania have put on the musical “Spring Awakening” in the season finale of “Rise,” it will be the last show they ever do. NBC has canceled the TV series. Lou Mazzuchelli, the drama teacher played by Josh Radnor, will disappear from your TV after only two months and ten episodes…Here’s more or less a recap of the series and the final episode. If the summary sounds like a soap opera, the low-key intelligence of the acting, writing and directing offers a different experience when watching the show…
The Week in New York Theater News
12 Summer theater festivals in NYC in 2018
The Play That Goes Wrong will close August 26, after 27 previews and 585 performances. Then it will go on national tour.
The Tooting Arts Club production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street will play its final performance at the Barrow Street Theater on August 26, 2018. It opened March 1,2017
Gloria: A Life,” (@GloriaThePlay), a new play by Emily Mann about Gloria Steinem, will open October 18, produced by Daryl Roth at the Daryl Roth Theater. The all-female team behind it includes director Diane Paulus.
A new Merrily We Roll Along is coming Off-Broadway, opening in Feb at Laura Pels Theater. Fiasco Theater in collaboration with Roundabout will present the Sondheim/Furth musical w/ new material from the original George S. Kaufman/ Moss Hart play
A musical adaptation of The Secret Life of Bees, with book by Lynn Nottage (Sweat) and music by Duncan Sheik (Spring Awakening) is one of six new shows in Atlantic Theater’s 2018-2019 season
Free performance of Runaways (the 2016 City Center #EncoreOffCenter production), June 12, the Public’s Delacorte Theater in Central Park
Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, October 3 to December 23
Theater
The Bacchae………………………….. SITI Company, Anne Bogart, Aaron Poochigian
Measure for Measure………………… Cheek by Jowl, Pushkin Drama Theatre,
Declan Donnellan, Nick Ormerod
Jack &………………………………….. Kaneza Schaal, Cornell Alston
Falling Out…………………………….. Phantom Limb Company
The Good Swimmer………………….. Heidi Rodewald, Donna Di Novelli, Kevin Newbury
The White Album…………………….. Early Morning Opera, Lars Jan, Joan Didion
NERVOUS/SYSTEM…………………. Andrew Schneider
Strange Window: The Turn of
the Screw………………………………. The Builders Association, Marianne Weems
Physical theater
Humans……………………………….. Circa, Yaron Lifschitz
Espæce……………………………….. Aurélien Bory, Compagnie 111
A new musical adaptation of the 1959 Marilyn Monroe film “Some Like It Hot” is aiming for Broadway in 2020, with songs by Marc shaiman and Scott Wittman (Hairspray) and book by Matthew Lopez (The Legend of Georgia McBride.)
In celebration of its 75th year, City Center will feature an Encores! season that includes: Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam, Rodgers & Hart’s I Married An Angel, Jules Styne’s High Button Shoes + Victoria Clark in Weill/Gershwin Lady in the Dark
The design of the aisles in the Lyric Theater, home of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,has caused audience members to trip and be injured,. (I also noted the trippable design, as well as poor management, in my review!)
The “Angels Fund” is providing $5 tickets to @angelsbway for clients of @BCEFA , @GMHC, @CallenLorde, @sageusa, @LGBTCenterNYC and other NYC LGBTQ & HIV/AIDS service organizations. pic.twitter.com/tEltiO0vII
— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) May 17, 2018
Panel including @domorisseau & @diepthought on the art vs. the artist, and this moment in our culture.
At @SignatureTheatr (in between matinees and evening shows) pic.twitter.com/UbFBQ1ZKQp— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) May 19, 2018
Playwrights Say Never Again to School Shootings
(Sadly, Ruthie Ann Miles lost the baby she was carrying at the time of the crash that killed her four-year-old daughter.)
Please keep Ruthie Ann Miles in your heart. If you pray, or meditate, please focus on sending her peace, courage and an awareness of the love that is being sent to her and her family.
— Laura Benanti (@LauraBenanti) May 17, 2018
RIP Patricia Morison, 103. She originated the role of an overemotional diva in the Broadway musical “Kiss Me, Kate,” starred on stage opposite Yul Brynner in “The King and I” and appeared in films alongside Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. pic.twitter.com/hdnLe5YMbG
— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) May 21, 2018
‘Don’t think! Don’t think! Just do it!’ Advice of Harold Guskin, acting coach to the stars (Rachel Weisz, Kevin Kline, Glenn Close and James Gandolfini ) who died last week at 76.https://t.co/H8Mw5m4PPo pic.twitter.com/7msozQRyYK
— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) May 17, 2018
RIP playwright Tom Murphy, 83
Three tap numbers, in Spongebob, Escape to Margaritaville and Mean Girls, “share a severely limited tap vocabulary, the same few steps fixed in the same rhythms and accentuations, like guidebook phrases memorized by a tourist.”
On Saturday Night Live, Tina Fey mocks herself — and promotes her show — by pretending to want to perform in Mean Girls
