Casual theater lovers might think that there’s nothing else happening beside the Tony Awards in June. They would be wrong!
June calendar of theater openings: Stonewall 50 on Stages! Fairview Returns!
Still the Tonys are the last theater awards left in the 2019 theater awards season. It’s certainly been a busy five weeks since the 2019 Tony nominations were announced, and a happy one, judging by photographs like the one below. Three of the five nominees for the Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Play are smiling together at the Tony Honors cocktail party, one of a seemingly endless series of events that will be coming to an end with the ceremony this Sunday.
What’s intriguing is how much the Tonys seem split this year in half, between what you can call downtown and uptown — conventional versus experimental. More on this in the days ahead. (Sorry!)
May Quiz
The Week in New York Theater Awards
The Drama Desk Awards: The Ferryman, The Prom, Fiddler, Waverly Gallery
Theatre World Award Winners On Their First Time, and Tough Times, and Cher
Third annual Tony Awards song compilation, available June 14, will feature one song from each of the 13 musicals in the Broadway 2018-2019:season, plus a bonus track sung by Marin Mazzie
The Week in New York Theater Reviews and Previews
Dave Malloy’s Octet: Internet Addicts Sing Their Support A Capella
A decade ago, theater director and educator Karin Coonrod conceived “More Or Less I Am,” a musical theater piece drawn from Walt Whitman’s 1855 poem “Song of Myself.” Her theater company, Compagnia de’ Colombari, has been presenting it around the city ever since, and especially during the week of the poet’s 200th birthday
Out of a surreal childhood memory of being forced to re-enact the Civil War as a game in fifth grade, Scott Sheppard and co-creator Jennifer Kidwell have fashioned a captivating work of theater that is bravely acted, inventively designed, and relentlessly surprising — dizzying in its anarchic turns from playful to hateful, satiric to sadistic.
The Play On! Festival is presenting staged readings through June 30 of all 39 of William Shakespeare’s plays “translated” into “contemporary modern English” by 36 American playwrights.
Christopher Shinn’s “Dying City,” which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Drama after it received an admired production at Lincoln Center in 2007, is being revived Off-Broadway at Second Stages at the same time that there is a Broadway production of Lanford Wilson’s older play “Burn This,” which it resembles in several ways. Both focus on a kind of unconventional love triangle involving two brothers. In both plays, one of the brothers is gay, and one of the brothers is dead. (The gay brother is the dead one in “Burn This”; the gay one is the one still living in “Dying City.”) Both also explore the effects of a death on the people left behind. But “Dying City” has a more ambitious and more stealth agenda – to bring us into a world not just of grief but of trauma.
What they also have in common is that neither revival quite works for me, for what feel like opposite reasons.
Fosse Verdon Finale: Yes that was Lin-Manuel
The Week in New York Theater News
King Lear with Glenda Jackson is closing on June 9th — the same day as the Tony Awards — and nearly a month earlier than scheduled. I liked it more than most
For the 52 weeks of the 2018-2019 Broadway season (which ended last weekend), total attendance reached 14,768,254 and Broadway shows yielded $1,829,312,140 in grosses, according to The Broadway League
.The attendance was said to be more than those of all ten major league aports teams in New York and New Jersey combined
A new program called NYC Civics and Arts Fund, overseen by
The NYC Mayors Fund, will subsidize 500 students a year to attend arts events in the city. The first partner is “What The Constitution Means to Me,” which will make tix available for the students from now to the end of its run.
The play will also embark on a national tour starting January 2020
in Los Angeles, and playing 40 weeks in 22 cities including Charlotte, Hartford, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh
Encores City Center 2020 season:
Mack and Mabel (February 19 – 23) by Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart
Love Life (March 18 – 22) by Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner
Thoroughly Modern Millie (May 6 – 10) Dick Scanlan and Jeanine Tesori, starring
Ashley Park
Enter Laughing at York Theater
is closing June 23, two weeks later than planned, which is a good thing because it’s funnier than you’d expect, with Chris Dwan
as an awkward teenager in the 1930s trying to break into show business.
Manilow Broadway —
Barry Manilow
July 26 through August 17 at Lunt-Fontanne Theatre
Exciting 2019-20 Atlantic Theater season, including new works by
Jack Thorne (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), Stephen Adly Guirgis, Ethan Coen, even a musical by Sarah Silverman and Joshua Harmon.
Coming to TImes Square in 2020: The Museum of Broadway, a “pop up museum” (meaning it won’t last) with exhibits on 1. the evolution of the theater district, 2. behind-the-scenes making of a Bway show. 3. landmark musicals
Rebecca, the decade-long saga, has a next installment, by @PhilipBoroff:
After six years, 471 legal filings, and a trial, Ben Sprecher, the producer of the aborted Broadway musical Rebecca, has settled with his ex press agent Marc Thibodeauhttps://t.co/FCyyBKQkz5 pic.twitter.com/OXV1fAwHMj
— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) May 31, 2019
Congratulations @WesTayTay (@SpongeBobBway, @mcctheater‘s #AlicebyHeart) and @Isaaccolepowell (@OnceIslandBway, @LovevilleHigh), who have announced their engagement. May they make beautiful music together. (Well, somebody had to say that.) pic.twitter.com/hMzAHC9GRn
— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) May 28, 2019
Is this a subway sign especially designed for Broadway? pic.twitter.com/hkzgXxj9S5
— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) June 2, 2019
