New York theater revs up for its final stretch, with 16 of the 38 shows of the Broadway 2023-2024 season opening up over the next six weeks. I’m not even halfway through the 10 “can’t miss” Spring shows I previewed back in January – only some of which so far turned out to be “must see.”
It’s a time to anticipate the future but also contemplate the past, sometimes simultaneously. Last week marked the fourth anniversary of the pandemic shutdown of in-person theater — and the birth of a wave of innovation in digital theater; some of those innovators continue
There’s a new exhibition that reanimates (literally) Broadway’s Golden Age, and an “ephemera fair” over the weekend that made us question how ephemeral theater really is.
The Week in New York Theater Reviews and Previews
“The Notebook: The Musical” will probably not be the same kind of star-making vehicle [as the movie], but it is uniformly well-cast, with several memorable performances. The story is cleverly adapted by librettist Bekah Brunstetter, who seems almost as much guided by the TV series “This Is Us” (where she worked as a writer and producer) as by Sparks’ novel. And singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson, in her Broadway songwriting debut, delivers almost two dozen largely folk and country-inflected melodies, most of them lovely, if blandly so; only a few stand out. Little in this musical may soar, but, given the potential of the material for over-the-top melodrama, the relatively low-key approach is part of the show’s appeal. Full Review
The Effect
Jamie Lloyd’s direction is so stylized and stylish that the stagecraft seems the primary point of the production.
Corruption
As he did more successfully with “Oslo” and “Blood and Gifts,” playwright J. T. Rogers dramatizes a complicated moment in history with sophistication, humor, some clarity, even some suspense, in “Corruption,”… But his earlier plays tackled manifestly great and gripping crises – involving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the fight over Afghanistan, respectively – while “Corruption” revolves around a decade-old British newspaper scandal. On the surface, the investigation into the listening of private voice mail messages by Rupert Murdoch’s minions seems neither as inherently riveting nor as resonant.
Reanimating Theater at NYPL Lincoln Center
During the Golden Age of Broadway, theater photographer Leo Friedman used his specialized still camera to capture image after image of show after show. The action on stage was rarely still, and neither was Leo; he shot in rapid sequence.
Those bursts of images by Friedman and his partners at Friedman-Abeles studio are being put to innovative use in an exhibition…at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center entitled “Reanimating Theater: The Photography of Friedman-Abeles.” A sequence of images are digitally combined to simulate animation in scenes from each of seventeen Broadway productions that opened between 1954 and 1970
Broadway Ephemera
Marlon Brando singing “Luck Be A Lady” in rehearsal with “Guys and Dolls” composer Frank Loesser. Fifteen pairs of Liza Minnelli’s false eyelashes. A first edition of “West Side Story” signed by Stephen Sondheim. Autographed photographs – one by President Franklin Roosevelt “For Ethel Merman,” one by Gertrude Stein for the Broadway conductor of her “Four Saints in Three Acts,” one by Coco Channel for the Broadway producer of the musical “Coco.”
For which of these would you pay $10,000?
That’s the price of the Coco Chanel photograph – the Gertrude Stein is going for $4,500; FDR, $4,000; Sondheim-signed book, $2,800; the eyelashes, $1,500, the Brando photograph a mere $350. They are for sale by one of the more than fifty exhibitors who are showcasing more than 10,000 items this weekend….as part of Ephemera 44. Photo gallery with captions
Broadway Spring 2024 Previews: The Final 16
The open secret of theater in New York is that productions focus on getting attention before the reviews come out on opening night — called an advance, or a preview article, that often tells you everything about a show except whether it’s worth seeing. Linked above are such articles for most of the remaining shows of the Broadway season.
The Week in New York Theater News
Digital Theater’s Next Act. ACTA Year 4
Four years after the pandemic shut down in-person theater, giving birth to a wave of online explorations, digital theater continues, now untethered to the pandemic — certainly less publicized, in some ways more underground, but in other ways more accepted, more integrated. And some of the people and companies who first experimented are still at it, some of them bringing it to a new level
Ben Platt will play the newly refurbish Palace Theater, May 28 to June 15, to celebrate the release of his third album Honeymind. (See music video below.)
Three more Broadway shows announce their discount policies shortly before opening: The Great Gatsby, Lempicka,The Outsiders. Check out Broadway Rush and Lottery for Spring 2024 Shows
Bottom row: Alex Lin, Lenelle Moïse, Hannah Moscovitch, a.k. payne, & Ava Pickett
The 2024 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize has been awarded to U.K. playwright Ava Pickett for her play 1536. Awarded annually since 1978, The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize is the largest and oldest international award recognizing women+ who have written works of outstanding quality for the English-speaking theater.
The eight additional Finalists for 2024 The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize are:
Roxy Cook (UK-Russia) A Woman Walks Into a Bank
April De Angelis (UK) The Divine Mrs S
Rhianna Ilube (UK) Samuel Takes a Break…In Male Dungeon No.5 After a Long But Generally Successful Day of Tours
Jasmine Naziha Jones (UK) Baghdaddy
Alex Lin (US) Chinese Republicans
Lenelle Moïse (US) K-I-S-S-I-N-G
Hannah Moscovitch (CAN) Red Like Fruit
a.k. payne (US) Love I Awethu Further
