May 22, 2018 Leave a comment
Eighteen minutes from The Band’s Visit, via NPR. The first Broadway musical ever to get the Tiny Desk concert treatment.
SET LIST
“Soraya”
“Omar Sharif”
“Itgara’a”
“Haj-Butrus”
“Answer Me”
May 9, 2018 Leave a comment
Here are the results of the survey in which I asked you to pick your personal preferences (not predictions) in 15 of the 26 categories in the 72nd Annual Tony Awards.
Nominated: The Children’;Farinelli and The King;Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts One and Two; Junk; Latin History for Morons
Your preference:
May 6, 2018 Leave a comment
2018 Best Musical Tony Award nominees, and 2018 Best Play Tony Award nominees
Make your pick in the survey below for 15 of the 26 categories in the 72nd annual Tony Awards, honoring Broadway’s best. The awards ceremony will take place on June 10th at Radio Music Hall in New York City. Most of it will be broadcast live on CBS.
This is for who and what YOU want to win, not who you think the Tony voters will pick — preference, not prediction. I’ll post the results later this month.
Scenes from nominees for Best Revival of a Play
May 4, 2018 Leave a comment
Some theatergoers objected to the changes in “My Fair Lady,” which made it more in line with the #MeToo era — Eliza more independent, and neither she nor Henry Higgins romantically inclined toward one another. Others objected that “Carousel” didn’t change enough — there’s still that abusive relationship between Billy and Julie
In my article in HowlRound, Broadway in a Year of Reckoning,
I look at these and six other shows that opened on Broadway during the 2017-2018 season, and how they adjusted (if at all) to our current age of reckoning, which goes beyond #MeToo, to gun violence (#NeverAgain) and racism (#BlackLivesMatter.) Indeed, we as a society are engaged in a reckoning with a range of stubbornly antiquated values that don’t (yet?) even have a #hashtag.
Full article: Broadway in a Year of Reckoning
May 3, 2018 Leave a comment
Some of the 2018 Tony Award nominees who spoke to (or at least pose for) the press. The winners will be announced on June 10th.
Click on any photograph to see it enlarged, and find out who they are.
May 2, 2018 Leave a comment
Take this quiz about the nominations for the 2018 Tony Awards, which were announced Tuesday. How well do you know the nominees. How much were you paying attention to the season?
Read more of this post
May 1, 2018 Leave a comment
Mean Girls’ and `SpongeBob SquarePants: The Musical’ lead nominations for the 2018 Tony Awards, with 12 nods each, followed by Angels in America, The Band’s Visit And Carousel, each with 11.
The winners of the 72nd Tony Awards will be announced in a June 10 ceremony, with hosts Josh Groban and Sara Bareilles, at Radio City Music Hall, broadcast live on CBS.
Complete list of the 26 categories, plus special awards, below:
April 29, 2018 Leave a comment
Yes, Denzel Washington is the reason audiences are drawn to the fifth Broadway production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, just as the hopeless drunks who inhabit Harry Hope’s saloon are drawn to Hickey, the character Washington is portraying. Hickey is a happy-go-lucky traveling salesman who arrives every year on Harry’s birthday to buy them all drinks and lift their spirits.
Hickey disappoints the barflies this year; he’s stopped drinking, and is on a mission to turn them all sober and make them face their delusions.
But, in this production directed by George C. Wolfe…the barflies themselves do not disappoint. A strong ensemble cast of 19, mostly veteran actors with familiar faces (some with familiar names), persuasively play a dive full of colorful characters..
Full review on DC Theatre Scene
April 28, 2018 Leave a comment
In the ninth Broadway production of George Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan,” director Daniel Sullivan has assembled a skillful cast of 19 to offer what feels like a straightforward history lesson about Joan of Arc, the 15th century teenage soldier turned martyr and then saint. The lesson is intelligent, competent, at times intriguing, but also talky, statically staged, and a long three hours long.
April 27, 2018 Leave a comment
In the first scene of Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties,” the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, the Irish novelist James Joyce, and the Romanian avant-garde artist Tristan Tzara are all sitting in a library in Zurich, Switzerland in 1917, when Tzara takes a manuscript he’s just finished writing, cuts it with a pair of scissors into small strips of paper, and sticks the pieces of paper into his hat. Then he empties his hat onto the table and reads some of the pieces.
It’s exactly the sort of thing that Tzara, one of the early twentieth century founders of the Dada “anti-art” movement, would do. It’s also more or less the same approach that Stoppard takes in his brilliant, clever and mind-boggling collage of a play.
Luckily, the first Broadway revival of Stoppard’s 1974 play turns this challenging exercise in virtuosity into an often-hilarious entertainment, with lively direction by Patrick Marber and a spot-on eight-member cast led by the terrific Tom Hollander. This production of “Travesties,” which originated at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory and is running at Roundabout’s American Airlines Theater through June 17th, ultimately can even provide some enlightenment, if you let it.
