Earth Day is officially April 22nd, but it’s being celebrated on Broadway, Saturday April 27th, when the 30 blocks of Broadway between Union Square and Times Square will be closed to vehicular traffic.
Week in New York Theater Reviews
Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus
. “Gary” is a polarizing play. Some who’ve seen it dismiss it as sophomoric, tedious and confusing. Others praise it as clever, funny, and profound. I half-agree with both opinions. It’s the jarring juxtapositions that make “Gary” feel so original
“Hillary and Clinton” is exactly the play we do not need right now, a well-acted but irrelevant middlebrow entertainment starring Laurie Metcalf and John Lithgow as the presidential candidate and the former president during the campaign for the first Democratic primary of the 2008 election…
On Broadway, as Off, Hadestown is a hell of a musical. But it’s changed….What made Hadestown most thrilling remains – the delightful score, which mixes sweet and sexy folk, rocking jazz, and exquisite blues. And there are some improvements. There is now a sharper clarity to the tale,
Michael Stuhlbarg does a magnificent job in his performance as Socrates to convince us how infuriating it must have been to be around this “greatest thinker” who questioned everybody and everything
Can a Star Wars villain and a Soviet spy find love, sex and happiness together on Broadway?
That’s the question we’re primed to ask in the first Broadway revival of Lanford Wilson’s 1987 play Burn This, thanks to the steamy poster of the show’s stars Adam Driver and Keri Russell.
Week in Theater Awards
Drama League Award Nominations
Coming up this week:
April 23: Outer Critics Circle nominations announced
April 25: Drama Desk Award nominations announced
April 26: Chita Rivera Award nominations announced
New York Theater Awards 2019: Calendar and Guide
Dominique Morisseau on Awards Season
I want to say something about awards.
About our entire obsession with them as an industry.
In that we allow ourselves to be knighted and un-knighted by opinions and popularity contests.
That we all inhale the glue.
I wish we wouldn’t do that.
I’ve been running from this type of shit since high school.
That strange validation from others.
It takes a lot of stamina and inner power not to do that when everyone around you is doing it for you.
But if you can just be still.
Focus.
And stay in committed union with the work…
We will always have something to celebrate.
There will never be a greater A-ward, than the RE-ward of doing the important, life-changing, life-saving, soul-restoring work that we have the power to do.
Week in New York Theater News
Sea Wall, A Life, an evening of two plays that were at the Public Theater starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Sturbridge, is coming to Broadway’s Hudson Theater, July 25 to September 29
Phylicia Rashad will make her Broadway directorial debut in “Blue,” in the Spring 2020, a play in which she starred when it was first produced in 2000. Written by Charles Randolph-Wright with music byNona Hendryx,”Blue”
Mel Brooks on Broadway: The actor, writer, director, and producer will star in a unscripted show combining off-the-cuff comedy, personal stories, and film clips,June 17 and 18 at Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne Theater
Stars in the Alley will take place on Friday, May 10th at 1:00pm in Shubert Alley, featuring musical numbers by casts from 22 musicals currently on Broadway.
In arbitration, City Ballet was ordered to reinstate the dancers, Zachary Catazaro and Amar Ramasar, who were fired over inappropriate texts. … Catazaro has decided not to rejoin the company, but Ramasar, a company star who was a star in the recent revival of Carousel, plans to return after receiving mandatory counseling
Theater on Screens
Ryan Murphy will adapt ‘The Boys in the Band’ for Netflix
A TV series based on the musical Oklahoma is in the works
\“Anthem: Homunculus,”the six-hour, 10-episode, 31-song original musical podcast written by John Cameron Mitchell and Bryan Weller, begins streaming April 23 on the Luminary platform . The cast features Patti LuPone, Glenn Close, Cynthia Erivo, Marion Cotillard and Laurie Anderson as a brain tumor.
The soundtrack for John Cameron Mitchell’s new podcast Anthem: Homunculus will be available for digital download May 20 from Ghostlight Records.
Eliza Doolittles through the Century
Columbine was just one in a long line of school shootings (and far from the deadliest), several of them instantly identifiable: Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and (last year’s) Parkland. And “columbinus” (co-written by a playwright who went on to win a Tony for his play “The Humans”) is just one of an increasing number of theatrical works based on those specific massacres, and on some of the other most notorious mass shootings in the United States.
Jussie Smollett loses lead role in a planned Broadway revival
The debate over theatre trigger warnings: Are they art killers or a vital audience service?
