The Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the New York Drama Critics Circle Awards will both be announced later today, capping the week’s theater award windfall: first the Theatre World Award Winners , then 2023 Tony Award Nominations, last night the Lucille Lortel Award Winners. But if we’re in for a solid month of theater awards, until the Tony Awards on June 11th, theater itself continues:
May 2023 New York Theater Openings
Broadway on the Cheap: How To Get Rush and Lottery Tickets
The Week in New York Theater Reviews
“shadow/land,” the first of playwright Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s planned ten-play cycle about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, was first produced two years ago (a year into the COVID-19 shutdown) as an audio drama…Now the same director, Candis C. Jones, has created a new production, on stage at the Public Theater, so radically different – and yet so essentially the same – that the productions feel like a useful lesson in the theatrical arts. Full Review
The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window
There’s something of an inside joke tucked into Lorraine Hansberry’s rarely-produced second Broadway play,…The group of 1960’s would-be idealists, iconoclasts and intellectuals who hang out in the Greenwich Village apartment of Sidney and Iris Brustein (Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan) include a painter, a prostitute, a protester — and a playwright….Anne Kauffman’s production of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” transferred to Broadway at the last minute, officially opening on the last day that it could be considered for the Tony Awards in the 2022-2023 season. It worked: It’s been nominated for Best Revival of a Play, but just one other category. This is surely less recognition than the producers had hoped for. Still, the show’s existence on Broadway for a ten-week run has changed the dynamic Full Review
Like the earlier work [about climate change at BAM], “Dimanche” is 75 minutes long, largely wordless, and full of clever stagecraft meticulously executed, integrated with video, using humor and spectacle to comment about climate change. “Dimanche” is more direct about the effects, and thus, although as entertaining as a masterful circus act, more devastating. And it also has some magnificent puppetry! Full Review
The Week in New York Theater News
Joel Grey and John Kander will receive Lifetime Achievement Tony Awards — at 197 years so far, two long and fruitful lifetimes.
First Tony casualty: Bob Fosse’s Dancin’ will close May 14th, having played 17 preview performances and 65 regular performances.
It is one of eleven eligible shows that received no Tony nominations, five of them still running. The others are: 1776, A Beautiful Noise, Bad Cinderella, The Collaboration, The Kite Runner, Mike Birbiglia Old Man & The Pool, Peter Pan Goes Wrong, Pictures from Home, Thanksgiving Play, and Walking with Ghosts.
The Original Broadway Cast Recording of “New York, New York” will be released digitally on Friday, June 9. CD and vinyl versions are planned for later this year. Unlike many cast recordings, the album features the show’s complete score, comprising 90 minutes of music, including orchestral interludes
This Week’s Theater Video
The entire cast of the current revival of Sweeney Todd (directed by Tom Kail, also director of Hamilton) joined Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Broadway’s Hamilton to perform a special mash-up of songs from the two shows
A music video for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s specially commissioned Anthem for the Coronation of Their Majesties King Charles III & Queen Camilla, ‘Make A Joyful Noise,” based on verses from Psalm 98,
