Tom Lehrer News

Not to sell him short on his verbal funniness, as Tom’s spoken comedy keeps everything moving at a hilarious clip between the funny songs.

In the 50s and 60s during the Cold War nuclear panic, mathematician Tom Lehrer became an international comedy sensation as he sang twisted tunes that satirized war, pornography, race, kink, death, religion, the environment, education and politics. I've been a fan of Lehrer's creative musical musings for many years. So I decided to chat with comedian and actor Allan Murray who tickles the ivories and brings Lehrer and his acid-tinged ditties to life during this year's Hollywood Fringe Festival in his World Premiere of THE LAYERS OF TOM LEHRER.

Starting this Saturday 4 September, Drag Race UK alumni Joe Black will be bringing some much-needed H&M (humour and music) to clubs around the UK as part of his eagerly awaited Decopunk tour.

Late style: You can only get there if you've been around long enough to have had an early and a middle one. Maturity, wisdom, refinement are its hallmarks. And having done things a certain way for a time, you might want to do them differently in order to arrive someplace new, someplace surprising.

Dire statistical upticks remind us that we're not quite out of the Pandemic Era. Live theater is still largely virtual; tickets are being sold for the fall but with crossed fingers the performances will actually go on.

Miranda Foster returns to Jermyn Street Theatre after her memorable roles in All's Well That Ends Well and Tonight at 8.30. Her previous work includes Hamlet (Globe to Globe World Tour), Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare's Globe),The Merry Wives of Windsor (BBC) and Festen (Bill Kenwright). 

Nicole Spano played a good show for MetropolitanZoom on June 10th and Broadway World Cabaret's newest team member was mightily impressed.

Two weeks after announcing Footprints Festival, today Jermyn Street Theatre has unveiled its full programme of 43 shows brought together to celebrate the theatre’s reopening this Summer. Running for three months from May to August this jamboree of live work comprises an exciting combination of familiar faces and new talent.

Act II Playhouse in Ambler, PA has announce their new virtual production, “Comedy Tonight!” featuring an ensemble cast of Playhouse alumni. “Comedy Tonight!” was filmed at the Playhouse with safety precautions in place for the entire cast and video production team. Streaming starts March 23rd.

Act II Playhouse in Ambler, PA announces their new virtual production, “Comedy Tonight!” featuring an ensemble cast of Playhouse alumni. 

There are just some people on this planet who naturally operate on a more creative level than the rest of us, and mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn is clearly one of those people. She is bringing her wildly inventive musical science show Science Fair: An Opera with Experiments to The Marsh on Saturday, March 6th.  Conceived and performed by Chinn with pianist Erika Switzer, Science Fair pairs luscious operatic vocals with light-hearted humor and science lectures. Chinn herself describes it as “a classical cabaret of science songs with science communication staging, including live experiments and slide shows, a little audience participation and a general sort of Bill Nye fun.” Science Fair will be available for livestream at 5:00pm PST on March 6th, followed by a post-performance Q&A with The Marsh Founder/Artistic Director Stephanie Weisman. Chinn will also appear two days prior to that on Stephanie’s MarshStream at 7:30pm on Thursday, March 4th to discuss this innovative work. For more information, visit www.themarsh.org/marshstream. BroadwayWorld caught up with Chinn last week from her home in the Hudson Valley, where she had just moved from New York City only two days earlier. A Northern California native with degrees from the Eastman and Yale Schools of Music, Shinn has enjoyed an unusually eclectic career, with credits as varied as touring around the world in Phillip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, playing Lady Thiang in The King & I on the West End, and performing with the experimental Wooster Group in New York. Given her resume, I had thought she might be fascinating to talk to, and she did not disappoint. I mean, what other opera singers do you know who do science in their spare time, just for fun? We talked about how Science Fair came to be, her passion for the creative process, and our evolving understanding around issues of racial and gender equity. In conversation, she is candid and accessible, brainy and funny, and always very, very thoughtful. Underlying everything is her enduring joy in pushing the boundaries of what it means to create musical art.

Artists and performers from around the world join National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene (NYTF) to celebrate Purim virtually from February 22-25, 2021. The Purim Celebration features a stellar, star-studded line-up of Yiddish music, Cabaret, and a special reading of the Megiles Ester (The Book of Ester) in Yiddish.

Featuring new performers with every show, the weekly, award-winning Piano Bar Live! (PBL!) streams this Tuesday, January 19 at 7:15 pm ET, with host Scott Barbarino  and guests Rick Jensen, Renee Katz, Molly Mahoney, Sean Patrick Murtagh, Randy Taylor and Parker Weathersbee, plus Mystery Guests and MORE!

Featuring new performers with every show, the weekly, award-winning Piano Bar Live! (PBL!) streams this Tuesday, January 19 at 7:15 pm ET, with host Scott Barbarino and guests Rick Jensen, Renee Katz, Molly Mahoney, Sean Patrick Murtagh, Randy Taylor and Parker Weathersbee, plus Mystery Guests and MORE!

Join York Theatre Company as they revisit the witty, wicked and thoroughly twisted world of famed satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer with a virtual reunion of their 2011 Musicals in Mufti presentation of the 1981 revue Tomfoolery.

You might not be ready to go back to indoor live theatre a?" but if you are, the Aurora Fox is ready for you.

On Friday September 18, the Aurora Fox Arts Center in Aurora, Colorado will do something it hasn't done since March 12:  host an actual audience of real, live human beings. 

After months of speculation and a thrice-developed season line up, the Aurora Fox Arts Center is elated to announce a plan for a truncated season's worth of live theatre. Consisting entirely of shows that feature small casts of six or fewer actors, the Aurora Fox's 36th season will include Cameron Mackintosh's musical revue, a?oeTomfoolery;a?? Langston Hughes' holiday song-play, a?oeBlack Nativity;a?? a?oeThe Paviliona?? by Craig Wright; a?oeQueens Girl in the Worlda?? by Caleen Sinnette Jennings; and a contemporary reboot of a Lewis Carroll classic, a?oeWonderland: Alice's Rock & Roll Adventure,a?? by Rachel Rockwell and Michael Mahler. 

Piano Bar Live! continues Tuesday, June 30th at 7:15 pm ET, following New York City's 7 O'Clock Cheer. This week's guests will be John Bronston, Kathy 'Babe' Robinson, Ruby Rims, Katie Dunne McGrath, Rick Jensen, Michael Kirk Lane, Riley Yates, Collin Yates, Scott Barbarino, Tony Javed and our weekly mystery guest.

See the lineup of upcoming online events at 92Y! Stars of the hit TV series THIS IS US, LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE, HOMELAND and more are set to appear!