Jonathan Larson News

Coming up this week, 54 BELOW, the performance venue located just below the legendary Studio 54 at 254 West 54th Street, presents some of the brightest stars from Broadway, cabaret, jazz and beyond, including four-time Tony nominee Gregg Edelman, SAG Award winner Bryan Batt, actress Molly Ringwald, BACKSTAGE, award-winner Amber Martin, Tony nominee Andrea McArdle, Tony Award winner Michael Cerveris, singer Alexander Sage Oyen, composer David Friedman and more!

A total of 35 established and emerging writers, composers and lyricists will converge on the Goodspeed campus this month to participate in the first-ever Johnny Mercer Writers Colony at Goodspeed Musicals. The writing teams, representing more than twenty new musicals, will populate the campus, creating a truly exciting environment for discovery and inspiration.

MusicalFare Theatre, Western New York's most awarded and only professional musical theatre company, announces that there will be LIMITED ONSTAGE SEATING AVAILABLE DURING THE RUN OF RENT!

We have arrived! The St. Bonaventure University group has conquered day one of the Region 2 Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival at Towson University. As a third year festival participant, I was thrilled to joined SBU Theater in four days of shows, competitions and a whole lot of Starbucks.

Pacific Coast Repertory Theatre will present Rent with Music and Lyrics by Jonathan Larson.

24-year-old performer Margot Bingham currently stars as the female lead in the hit web series In Between Men. In Between Men examines the lives of the four young men and one woman from different walks of life and of differing sexualities, who do not fit into the lives and perceptions expected of them in New York City. The web series became a major hit in its first season with over 2 million viewers in 150 countries. The much anticipated Season 2 premiere debuts on February 12th, 2013 worldwide.

New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) Artistic Director James C. Nicola and Managing Director William Russo have announced that the New York premiere of Belleville, written by Amy Herzog and directed by Anne Kauffman, will begin performances Tuesday, February 12 at NYTW, 79 East 4 Street, between Bowery and Second Avenue. Opening night is set for Sunday, March 3 at 7pm. Belleville is scheduled to run through Sunday, March 31.

Early in 2012, an unlikely series of events led two of the world's most gifted sleight-of-hand artists, Derek DelGaudio (2011 Close-Up Magician of the Year) and Helder Guimarães (2011 Parlour Magician of the Year), to share a stage. Now, due to continued high demand for tickets, DelGaudio and Guimarães' Nothing to Hide directed by Neil Patrick Harris has been extended a second time now through February 3, 2013 in the intimate Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater at the Geffen Playhouse.

Pasadena's Stage Door Inc. is greeting 2013 with the 1996 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Jonathan Larson's renown musical RENT. RENT, inspired by Giacomo Puccini's opera La bohème, tells the story of a handful of New York City's East Village artists and their struggles with life, love, AIDS, and addiction.

Rent opens tonight, January 4th, 2013 and runs Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00pm and Sunday matinees at 3:00pm, weekends through January 27th, 2013 at Stage Door Inc. Scroll below to meet the cast!

Vital Theatre Company has announced that its newest hit Fancy Nancy The Musical is making a very special homecoming back to the McGinn/Cazale Theatre. After taking an excursion--that's fancy for trip--downtown to Culture Project, Nancy returns to Vital Theatre beginning February 2nd, with performances every Saturday and Sunday at 3:30 pm, following performances of Vital's newest world premiere musical, Show Way. Performances of Fancy Nancy will close at Culture Project on January 13. Tickets are $29.50. Premium seats are available for $49.50. For reservations, visit www.vitaltheatre.org, call us at (212) 579-0528, or visit McGinn/Cazale box office Mondays-Fridays from 9-5. The McGinn/Cazale Theatre is located at 2162 Broadway at 76th Street.

Get your game on in 2013 with musical theatre classes offered by Ryan Scott Oliver, Matthew Murphy, and Georgia Stitt.

Today in 1972, Broadway veteran Taye Diggs was born. In 1996, he originated the role of the landlord Benny in Jonathan Larson's Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning Rent, which also starred his future wife, Idina Menzel. After Rent he appeared as Mr. Black alongside Idina Menzel's character of Kate in Andrew Lippa's off-Broadway production of The Wild Party. Diggs also played The Bandleader in the 2002 film version of the long-running Broadway revival of Chicago and filled in as Billy Flynn on Broadway. He also temporarily filled in for Norbert Leo Butz (an original Rent standby) as the love interest Fiyero of Idina Menzel's Elphaba character in Wicked.

Tony Award-winning Idina Menzel is in a class of performers who simply defy description. She has an extraordinary quality that must be experienced up close and personal, for it's not only the tremendously dynamic voice that impresses but a wildly disarming charisma that holds you spellbound. On New Year's Eve her 7:00 pm show at the Walt Disney Concert Hall lasted about 90 minutes, but seemed to fly by in a flash.

How do you measure a year? Bayou City Theatrics, Houston's newest musical theatre company, asks this question through their pay-what-you-will performance of RENT (book, music and lyrics by Jonathan Larson) on New Year's Eve. The show is staged in a concert-style, allowing the audience to focus on the brilliant music, by the late Jonathan Larson, which made the musical a worldwide phenomenon.

In TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN: The Smoldering Lyrics of Amanda Yesnowitz, join Amanda and a luminous lineup of performers as they heat up the eve of New Year's Eve with hot songs about love, art, angst, and beverages.

Rent opens Friday, January 4th, 2013 and runs Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00pm and Sunday matinees at 3:00pm, weekends through January 27th, 2013 at Stage Door Inc. Scroll below to meet the cast!

In TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN: The Smoldering Lyrics of Amanda Yesnowitz, join Amanda and a luminous lineup of performers as they heat up the eve of New Year's Eve with hot songs about love, art, angst, and beverages.