Tony awards 2023: Leopoldstadt and Kimberly Akimbo win big in historic night for non-binary actors

Jodie Comer and Tom Stoppard led a big night for Brits, while J Harrison Ghee and Alex Newell triumphed in a ceremony affected by the writers’ strike

Leopoldstadt and Kimberly Akimbo won big at this year’s history-making Tony awards, with the writers strike affecting the format and content of the ceremony.

Tom Stoppard’s sprawling family drama Leopoldstadt was named best play, winning against Cost of Living and Fat Ham. Producer Sonia Friedman called it Stoppard’s “most personal masterwork”, and Stoppard said that throughout his career he has noticed “the theatre writer getting decreasingly devalued in the food chain”.

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Tony awards 2023: full list of winners

This year’s big winners including Jodie Comer, Suzan Lori-Parks and J Harrison Ghee

Best musical
& Juliet
Kimberly Akimbo – WINNER!
New York, New York
Shucked
Some Like It Hot

Best performance by an actor in a leading role in a play
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Topdog/Underdog
Corey Hawkins, Topdog/Underdog
Sean Hayes, Good Night, Oscar – WINNER!
Stephen McKinley Henderson, Between Riverside and Crazy
Wendell Pierce, Death of a Salesman

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Jodie Comer stops stage performance because of New York air: ‘I can’t breathe’

Actor was helped off stage from her one-woman show Prima Facie after city’s poor air quality prompted breathing issues

Jodie Comer stopped her one-woman show Prima Facie on Broadway because of breathing difficulties owing to New York’s air crisis.

According to eyewitnesses, the award-winning star of Killing Eve, tipped to win a Tony award this weekend, was 10 minutes late for the matinee performance. After three minutes of the show, she announced that she couldn’t proceed.

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Anthony LaPaglia ‘scared and excited’ to make Australian stage debut in Death of a Salesman

Golden Globe and Tony-winning actor will star as Willy Loman in a Melbourne production directed by Neil Armfield

It has been more than a decade since the Golden Globe-winning Australian actor Anthony LaPaglia appeared on stage – and almost quarter of a century since he triumphed on Broadway, winning a Tony award as Eddie Carbone in A View From the Bridge.

Next month the Los Angeles-based Without a Trace actor will return to Australia to begin rehearsals on another Arthur Miller classic: the 20th-century masterpiece Death of a Salesman, directed by Neil Armfield.

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Japanese kabuki actor found collapsed at home alongside parents

Ennosuke Ichikawa taken to hospital but mother and father died after taking overdose

The world of Japanese kabuki, a classical form of Japanese theatre that combines highly stylised movement and unusual vocalisation, has been rocked after the popular actor Ennosuke Ichikawa was taken to hospital and his parents found dead.

Ennosuke was found by his manager collapsed at his home in Tokyo along with an apparent suicide note and taken to hospital.

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The Enormous Crocodile among latest Roald Dahl books to be adapted for stage

Roald Dahl Story Company announces new shows, including a large-scale circus and a reading of The Magic Finger

A slate of Roald Dahl adaptations has been announced, including a family musical based on The Enormous Crocodile, a reading of The Magic Finger and a large-scale circus show featuring many of the author’s most famous characters.

The three shows will join the new musical The Witches, co-produced by the National Theatre and readying for its debut in November, while a further four creations have been commissioned by the theatre division of the Roald Dahl Story Company and are under development.

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Cush Jumbo to join David Tennant in Macbeth at London’s Donmar Warehouse

The actor, who has previously starred as Hamlet at the Young Vic, is to play Lady Macbeth among a wave of star-powered Shakespeare productions this year

Cush Jumbo is to play Lady Macbeth this winter in a production at London’s Donmar Warehouse that reunites her with David Tennant, her co-star in the Channel 4 TV series Deadwater Fell.

Earlier this month it was announced that Tennant would take on the title role in Max Webster’s production of Macbeth, expected to be one of this year’s hottest tickets. Jumbo’s casting marks her return to the Covent Garden theatre where she played Mark Antony in an acclaimed all-female production of Julius Caesar in 2012, directed by Phyllida Lloyd.

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Jeremy Strong to follow Succession with a return to Broadway

The actor will head up an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play An Enemy of the People once the hit HBO drama has ended

Jeremy Strong is going from a corporate boardroom on TV to a whistleblower on Broadway.

The actor who plays Kendall Roy in the HBO television series Succession has signed on to play a man who tries to expose water contamination in a Norwegian spa town in Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play An Enemy of the People.

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Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bad Cinderella to close on Broadway

The musical will close on 4 June, after receiving mixed reviews from US critics and failing to receive a nomination at the Tony awards

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bad Cinderella is to close on Broadway just over 10 weeks after its official opening night. The show, which did not receive any nominations at this year’s Tony awards, has announced that “the ball must come to an end” and that it will bow out at New York’s Imperial theatre on 4 June. Ticket sales have dipped despite a low average price for a big Broadway musical ($54 for last week). It will have played 33 previews and 85 performances.

The musical is a retooled version of Cinderella, which ran for just under a year (including a Covid-related break in performances) and suffered heavy losses at London’s Gillian Lynne theatre. Lloyd Webber was criticised for the manner in which some current and future Cinderella cast members learned of its closure in 2022 via social media and for his suggestion, in a letter read out at its final night, that opening a new musical during the pandemic “might have been a costly mistake”. (He later issued a statement saying his words had been misunderstood and that he was proud of the show.)

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David Tennant to play Macbeth at Donmar Warehouse

The actor will take to the stage as the Scottish king in December, in the last production of the London theatre’s 30th-anniversary season

Hot on the heels of the news that Ralph Fiennes will play Macbeth in a tour of repurposed UK warehouses comes the announcement that David Tennant will also star as the Scottish king at London’s Donmar Warehouse.

It is the Scottish actor’s first Shakespearean stage role since he played Richard II for the Royal Shakespeare Company, on and off, from 2013 to 2016. In 2022 he was Macbeth in a two-part BBC Radio 4 broadcast. The Donmar production will be directed by Max Webster and will conclude the 30th-anniversary season for the London theatre, which was previously home to a banana-ripening warehouse.

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Harry Belafonte, singer, actor and tireless activist, dies aged 96

Chart-topping calypso singer who supported US civil rights movement and African initiatives dies of congestive heart failure

Harry Belafonte, the singer, actor and civil rights activist who broke down racial barriers, has died aged 96.

As well as performing global hits such as Day-O (The Banana Boat Song), winning a Tony award for acting and appearing in numerous feature films, Belafonte spent his life fighting for a variety of causes. He bankrolled numerous 1960s initiatives to bring civil rights to Black Americans; campaigned against poverty, apartheid and Aids in Africa; and supported leftwing political figures such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

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Goodnight possum! Tributes to Dame Edna creator Barry Humphries

World mourns ‘unique wit’ of Australian star and inventor of vivid stage personas, who has died aged 89

Like bouquets of appropriately lurid gladioli, colourful tributes to the memory of Barry Humphries piled up this weekend as his many fans adjusted to a dimmer world without Dame Edna Everage.

Mourning Humphries, who was taken ill in Sydney last week with complications after hip surgery, means saying goodbye to his charismatic, hyper-real fictional personas: not only “the Australian housewife and superstar” Dame Edna, with her radiant, rinsed hairdo, trademark sparkling spectacles and bright gladioli, but also to the revolting Australian cultural attaché, Sir Les Patterson, and the irrepressibly dull Sandy Stone. Over decades, each of these stage characters has mischievously shaped the world’s view of Australians, satirising the stereotypical lack of taste that British “pommies” enjoy looking down on.

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‘Simply the greatest’: comedians pay tribute to ‘genius’ Barry Humphries

Ricky Gervais, Rob Brydon and Matt Lucas among those paying homage to the Dame Edna Everage star who has died aged 89

Comedy stars from around the world have paid tribute to the late Barry Humphries, hailing him a “true great”.

Humphries, best known for his character Dame Edna Everage, died in hospital in Sydney on Saturday aged 89.

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Why are British audiences suddenly so out of control? – podcast

From fights at the Bodyguard musical to wild drunken antics at comedy clubs and even heckling at the opera, performers and theatre staff say crowds are getting out of hand. What’s going on?

From drunken revellers singing over emotional ballads at jukebox musicals to an opera-goer heckling a child performer, there has been a growing number of news stories since the pandemic about people behaving badly at entertainment venues. Then came the headlines about the police being called to the Bodyguard musical to quell an actual fight.

So what, exactly, is happening to British audiences, which are stereotypically seen as polite and even repressed? Theatre critic Alice Savile tells Nosheen Iqbal about her recent wild nights out at the theatre, and how front-of-house staff are finding it hard to cope. We hear from usher Bethany North on the abuse she’s experienced.

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Why Berlin’s U-Bahn musical shows no sign of hitting the buffers

The longest-running production in Germany, restaged for a new generation of theatregoers, is a curious mixture of 80s nostalgia and politics … with great tunes

The four men dressed in widow’s weeds of black bombazine had hardly stepped on to the stage when the first yelps of delight rippled through the audience at Berlin’s Grips theatre, an intimate 360-seat venue in the west of the city. By the time the quartet in drag have locked arms to kick up their heels, the mixed-age crowd is clapping in time to the oompah beat.

The Wilmersdorf Widows song is to Volker Ludwig’s musical Linie 1 (Line One) what All That Jazz is to Chicago, or Time Warp to The Rocky Horror Picture Show: the catchy showstopper that brings the house down.

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Grenfell fire: National Theatre play to tell survivors’ stories

Production is at centre of collaboration with west London community affected by 2017 disaster

The National Theatre is to stage a verbatim play based on accounts by survivors and those bereaved by the Grenfell Tower fire almost six years ago as the centrepiece of a long-term collaborative project with the west London community.

The play, Grenfell: in the words of survivors, is the work of the novelist and playwright Gillian Slovo, who spent five years gaining the confidence of community members and recording their accounts of the disaster in north Kensington which killed 72 people.

Grenfell: In the Words of Survivors will be at the National Theatre from 13 July until 26 August.

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Paris exhibition to tell story of eccentric acting pioneer Sarah Bernhardt

Petit Palais show celebrates breadth of belle epoque theatre star’s creative talents with 400 exhibits

On page 158 of a heavy, leather-bound Paris police register from the 19th century, a handwritten page headed with a photograph details the activities of a young “courtesan” called Sarah Bernhardt.

The Book of Courtesans, as it was known by the then equivalent of the vice squad, was a detailed record of high-class sex workers, often actors and dancers, who were the mistresses of princes, aristocrats and the wealthy.

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Christopher Eccleston: it would be impossible for me to become an actor today

Theatres such as now-closed Oldham Coliseum vital for northern working-class people, says actor

Christopher Eccleston has said it would be impossible for him to become an actor in today’s world, in an impassioned interview after the closure of Oldham’s Coliseum theatre.

The British actor spoke about how the closure of the historic theatre would affect the acting community and people from working-class backgrounds.

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Andrew Lloyd Webber’s eldest son, Nicholas, dies of gastric cancer aged 43

Oscar-winning composer says son, also a successful composer, died on Saturday in hospital surrounded by family

Andrew Lloyd Webber has announced that his eldest son, Nicholas, has died from gastric cancer aged 43.

The Oscar-winning composer wrote on Twitter that his son, who was also a successful composer, died on Saturday at Basingstoke hospital in Hampshire surrounded by his family.

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