Acclaimed director Sam Gold will adapt the Shakespeare tragedy with new music from hitmaker and Taylor Swift collaborator Jack Antonoff
West Side Story’s Rachel Zegler and Heartstopper breakout Kit Connor are set to play Shakespeare’s tragic lovers Romeo and Juliet on Broadway.
Romeo + Juliet will premiere later this year from Tony award-winning director Sam Gold, who has previously taken on other Shakespeare plays such as Macbeth, Othello and King Lear.
Continue reading...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”.
Continue reading...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
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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.)
Continue reading...Actor’s gesture draws gasps and cheers at charity auction, held after a performance of Jackman’s hit musical The Music Man
Nicole Kidman has surprised both Broadway audiences and Hugh Jackman by bidding US$100,000 (A$150,000, £83,000) for a hat signed by Jackman after a performance of her former co-star’s musical The Music Man.
During an auction for the charity Broadway Cares/Equity Fights Aids after the performance on Saturday, Kidman made her presence known by shouting her bid of $100,000 for the hat, which led to gasps and cheers in the crowd, then a standing ovation.
Continue reading...Whodunnit running in the West End since 1952, interrupted only by Covid, will open in New York in 2023
The world’s longest-running play, The Mousetrap, is to finally make its Broadway debut. The announcement was made on Friday to mark the 70th anniversary of the London production of Agatha Christie’s whodunnit.
The only surviving piece of the original set from 1952, a mantelpiece clock, will be lent from London for the run in New York when it opens in 2023. The play will be co-produced by The Mousetrap’s UK producer, Adam Spiegel, and US producer Kevin McCollum, whose credits include Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights and the Broadway outings of the British am-dram spoof The Play That Goes Wrong and the musical Six.
Continue reading...Broadway’s longest-running musical never fully recovered from the pandemic shutdown and will close next February
The Phantom of the Opera, Broadway’s longest-running show, is scheduled to close in February 2023.
The musical – a fixture on Broadway since 1988, weathering recessions, war and cultural shifts – will play its final performance on Broadway on 18 February, a spokesperson said on Friday. The closure will come less than a month after its 35th anniversary. It will conclude with an eye-popping 13,925 performances.
Continue reading...The award-winning writer, whose hit musical originally opened on Broadway in the late 60s, died in New York City of cardiorespiratory arrest
James Rado, the award-winning co-creator of Hair, has died at the age of 90.
The writer, whose hit musical launched songs such as Aquarius and Let the Sunshine In, died peacefully in New York City surrounded by family. The cause of death was cardiorespiratory arrest, as confirmed by longtime friend, publicist Merle Frimark.
Continue reading...Broadway transfers of West End shows were out in front at this year’s celebration of the best of New York theatre
Broadway transfers of West End adaptations of The Lehman Trilogy and Company have dominated this year’s Tony awards, which were seen as a return to relative normal after Covid-impacted ceremonies.
It was a big night for British talent in New York, with the Broadway transfer of The Lehman Trilogy winning best play, best director and best actor in a play. “This play was written as a hymn to the city of New York but, like the Lehman brothers themselves, our show started thousands of miles away,” said playwright Ben Power, who adapted the show from Italian novelist and playwright Stefano Massini. His version made its debut at London’s National Theatre in 2018.
Continue reading...From Line of Duty to Mare of Easttown, a new generation of performers are breaking through. Meet the actors, models and presenters leading a revolution in representation
In the middle of last winter’s lockdown, while still adjusting to the news of their newborn son’s Down’s syndrome diagnosis, Matt and Charlotte Court spotted a casting ad from BBC Drama. It called for a baby to star in a Call the Midwife episode depicting the surprising yet joyful arrival of a child with Down’s syndrome in 60s London, when institutionalisation remained horribly common. The resulting shoot would prove a deeply cathartic experience for the young family. “Before that point, I had shut off certain doors for baby Nate in my mind through a lack of knowledge,” Matt remembers. “To then have that opportunity opened my eyes. If he can act one day, which is bloody difficult, then he’s got a fighting chance. He was reborn for us on that TV programme.”
It’s a fitting metaphor for the larger shift in Down’s syndrome visibility over the past few years. While Call the Midwife has featured a number of disability-focused plotlines in its nearly decade-long run – actor Daniel Laurie, who has Down’s syndrome, is a series regular – the history of the condition’s representation on screen is one largely defined by absence.
Continue reading...The American composer and lyricist, who has died aged 91, shaped the musical artform with his wise, witty and extravagantly clever work
Stephen Sondheim achieved such acclaim – for deepening the content and extending the lyrical ingenuity of musical theatre – that, from the age of 50, each major birthday was celebrated with tribute concerts in London, New York or both.
Watching the composer-lyricist of Sweeney Todd and Follies at such events – taking a bow, with his wry smile – it was impossible not to reflect on our luck in coinciding with the life of someone who would clearly stand in the history of the genre alongside such geniuses as Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Weill, Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein.
Continue reading...When his Broadway show became a global phenomenon, the rigours of daily performance kept the actor and songwriter grounded. Then Disney and Hollywood came calling. Now, the ‘musical theatre fanboy’ has returned to his first love
About halfway through Tick, Tick ... Boom!, the new movie directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the patrons of a diner in 90s New York all turn to the camera and sing. The movie, Miranda’s directorial debut, is based on the autobiographical stage show of the same name by Jonathan Larson (creator of Rent) and tells the story of Larson’s late 20s as a struggling writer and waiter. Andrew Garfield is extraordinary in the lead, but it’s the people around him who make this particular scene; as the number unfolds, it becomes apparent that every extra in the diner is a legend of musical theatre, from Bernadette Peters, to Brian Stokes Mitchell (a veteran Tony award winner), to Roger Bart (original cast, Tick, Tick ... Boom!), to Jim Nicola (former artistic director of the New York Theatre Workshop) to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of Joel Grey, chasing the waiter for the bill. “I don’t know that I’m the guy you hire to make your next Marvel movie,” Miranda says, speaking via video from his office in uptown New York, “but I am the guy you hire to make this musical about a guy who wrote musicals.” It is simultaneously funny, moving and monstrously self-indulgent – or, as Miranda puts it, “about as musical theatre nerdy as it can get.”
Imagining Miranda as the steward of an alternate Marvel universe – Comic-Con, but for musical theatre geeks – restores him to what, prior to the opening of Hamilton in 2015, was his quieter role in the cultural landscape: as the champion of a much-loved, much-mocked art form that rarely troubled mainstream popular culture. Hamilton changed all that. The show not only won 11 Tonys, a Pulitzer, and more than $850m in box office receipts, it conferred on Miranda a singular status, variously crediting the 41-year-old with reanimating history, diversifying Broadway, and provoking children all over the world to memorise large chunks of lyrics about America’s revolutionary politics, some of them concerned with the restructuring of the national debt. (“Hey yo, I’m just like my country / I’m young, scrappy and hungry / And I’m not throwing away my shot” – still being hammered out at a million barmitzvahs). The most surprising thing about all this, perhaps, is that Miranda, appearing today in his customary flat cap and goatee, has the boundless enthusiasm and apparent absence of cynicism of the aspiring artist still untouched by success.
Continue reading...The filmed Broadway show has crash-landed early on the streamer with hilariously awful songs, a musical mess to rival Cats
Logically, it makes perfect sense that Diana: The Musical should exist. After all, Diana, Princess of Wales lends herself extraordinarily well to musical theatre. Hers was a story of wealth and betrayal, of high camp and tragedy, plus she also happened to be an enormous fan of the medium. If you built a time machine and used it to tell Diana that she would one day get her own Evita, she would be absolutely thrilled.
However, Diana died a quarter of a century ago and will never get to see Diana: The Musical. Some people get all the luck.
Continue reading...This filmed version of the Broadway show, with its accidental comedy and cringeworthy lines, is a guilty-pleasures singalong in waiting
And … so … it’s … springtime for glamour and victimhood, winter for Windsors and Charles. Netflix have now given us the filmed version of the entirely gobsmacking and jawdropping Broadway show Diana: The Musical, shot at the Longacre theatre on West 48th Street last summer with no audience while the show itself was on pause due to the Covid pandemic. And while you’re waiting for Pablo Larraín’s movie Spencer, starring Kristen Stewart as Diana, this will have to do. Although there is a danger it will cause you to hyperventilate.
Not since the Cats movie have I literally shouted from my seat: “What? What? WHAT?” Only by having Diana ride on stage on the back of a Jellicle cat could this be more bizarre. If it was deliberate satire it would be genius, but it’s not. It’s a saucer-eyed retelling of the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, with bobbing chorus lines of footmen and flunkies who with a costume change morph into step-in-time phalanxes of snarling tabloid hacks, while Diana solemnly warbles downstage about her loneliness and determination in a pool of follow spotlight.
Continue reading...The adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s musical picked up 10 awards in a ceremony that also acted as a comeback for New York theatre
Moulin Rouge! swept the board at the 2021 Tony awards, picking up 10 trophies during a ceremony that also acted as a celebration of the return of Broadway.
The adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 Oscar-winning musical, which reopened on 24 September, became the first Australian-produced show to win a Tony for best musical, beating Jagged Little Pill and Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.
Continue reading...The long theatre shutdown in New York has taken its toll on the industry but a renewed and reinvigorated outlook towards diversity could have a major impact
When Ruben Santiago-Hudson walks on stage at the Manhattan Theatre Club on Tuesday night, the electric charge between actor and audience will spark back to life. Then the healing will begin.
“It is the balm that we all need right now, not just on stage, but in our city,” says Santiago-Hudson, writer, performer and director of Lackawanna Blues, one of a record seven works by Black playwrights opening on Broadway this autumn. “It’s a necessity, it’s in us as human beings. Theatre has always been the great gathering place – church and theatre.”
Continue reading...The Broadway favourite, who died of complications from Covid last summer, is remembered by his wife and co-star
When you’re on Broadway and suddenly find out that your show is closing, you feel this wave of sadness. As a cast member, there was nothing you could have done to save it. You didn’t write the script; you didn’t call the shots. You just had to show up, and smile, and dance, and perform, and give it your all every day. Your cast has become like your family, the theatre like your home, and your dressing room like your own personal bedroom in that house, your space filled with photos, cards, and memories. After your last show, you have to take that all down, pack everything into a box, and walk out of the theatre as it goes dark.
Related: Nick Cordero: Broadway star dies aged 41 of coronavirus complications
Continue reading...After more than two decades of distinguished work in the US theatre as an actor, director and teacher, and appearances in a dozen or so films, Olympia Dukakis, who has died aged 89, became hugely famous overnight by winning the best supporting actress Oscar in 1988 for her performance as Cher’s mother in the romantic film Moonstruck (1987).
The course of her career suggests that her ambitions never lay in the direction of Hollywood. Her theatrical credits read like the canon of classic and modern plays: she had roles in plays by Euripides, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, Lorca, Pirandello, Brecht, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, on and off Broadway, as well as in various regional theatres across the country. In films, she took on several character roles, making an impression in scores of pictures for more than half a century.
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