Keala Settle, Jessie Mueller and Kimiko Glenn in Waitress. (Photo by Joan Marcus) So I arrived in New York on an uneventful flight late on Saturday morning, and two and a half hours later I was sitting down to my first show — the penultimate preview of a new musical, Waitress, based on the 2007 film of the same name that starred Keri Russell as a diner waitress and pie-baking … [Read more...]
Postcard from Broadway, No. 1: 12 shows, 13 if I’m lucky
Another year, another spring trip to Broadway, timed to coincide with the annual Easter Bonnet Competition, which in turn is timed to coincide with the end of the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS fund-raising period which, not coincidentally, occurs just before the season’s Tony Awards deadline. The Bonnet Competition — about which I will talk more in a few days — is a snarky … [Read more...]
Veteran Broadway musical director Paul Gemignani offers insight at Dramaworks
Palm Beach Dramaworks takes its motto, “Theater to think about,” seriously, as seen in its current mainstage production, The History Boys. But it also likes to slip in some entertaining education in its ancillary programs, like Dramalogue, a series of live interviews, lectures and roundtable discussions that introduces the audience to some of the behind-the-scene artists who … [Read more...]
Broadway veteran Reams bows in ‘Dolly!”’ –- with a twist
Last season, Lee Roy Reams was a sensation at Boca Raton’s Wick Theatre, playing drag queen Zaza in La Cage aux Folles. So it was probably inevitable that managing executive producer Marilynn Wick would say to him, “I’ve got to have you back next year. What do you want to do?” Reams said, “I want to do ‘Hello, Dolly!,’” a show that he had directed numerous times before. … [Read more...]
Broadway reviews, continued: ‘Finding Neverland,’ ‘It Shoulda Been You,’ ‘Wolf Hall’
With the same umbrage that it greeted the arrival of the Disney machine two decades ago, the theater community has turned a cold shoulder to Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who has muscled his way onto Broadway with Finding Neverland, a musical adaptation of his 2004 film. The show received absolutely no Tony nominations, but audiences are flocking anyway to this mawkish … [Read more...]
Postcard From Broadway No. 9: “Hand to God”
Hand to God, the wickedly irreverent new comedy by Robert Askins, will likely not win the Tony Award for best play (though I do think it will be nominated). But if there were a category for best advertising campaign, it would win “hands” down. You see, in most of the Playbills for other shows, Hand to God has an ad specifically commenting on that show. For instance, in the … [Read more...]
Postcard From Broadway No. 2: ‘Finding Neverland’
Arrived in New York on Saturday, to gorgeous, crisp, sunny weather. But Sunday turned downright cold and rain is expected today. Sunday evening I saw Finding Neverland, the new musical based on the 2004 movie that starred Johnny Depp as J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, and Kate Winslet as the widow whose four kids inspired the timeless fable of the boy who never grew up. … [Read more...]
Postcard From Broadway, No. 1: A stopover in D.C. for ‘The Originalist’
Like Neil Simon's alter ego, Eugene Morris Jerome, I am Broadway-bound, with 11 shows lined up to see in nine days. I arrive today and will soon be in a theater, seeing the musical adaptation of Boris Pasternak's great Dr. Zhivago. (Fill in your own punch line.) But before New York, I spent a week in my hometown of Washington, D.C. While there, I went to Arena Stage, the … [Read more...]
Postcard From Broadway No. 4: Theaters dark, but Legos illuminating
Mondays are even harder to find a show to see than Sunday nights. In fact, with most of the city’s museums closed, it was shaping up as a day without art. Until... After breakfast, I was walking the streets around Times Square when I spied a poster for the Discovery Museum and “the world's largest display of Lego art.” It seems there is a guy named Nathan Sawaya, a lapsed … [Read more...]
Broadway’s Brian Stokes Mitchell does Jupiter
A decade ago, Tony Award-winning performer Brian Stokes Mitchell was asked to help out The Actors Fund, the national social service provider to theater professionals. Fast forward ten years and now he is chairman of the fund’s board of directors. So he is busy raising money for the fund with a series of five benefit concerts at major regional theaters across the nation. That … [Read more...]