In just two weeks' time, the most magical of comedies A Midsummer Night's Dream will be brought to life on the Epstein Theatre stage by Daniel Taylor Productions Ltd from Tuesday 25th to Saturday 29th April.
The Cherry Orchard is Anton Chekhov's masterpiece about a family on the edge of ruin-and a country on the brink of revolution. The story of Lyubov Ranevskaya and her family's return to their fabled orchard to forestall its foreclosure captures a people-and a world-in transition, and presents us with a picture of humanity in all its glorious folly. By turns tragic and funny, The Cherry Orchard still stands as one of the great plays of the modern era.
Millburn, New Jersey's Playhouse since 1938 receives this year's Regional Theatre Tony Award.
MOTOWN: THE MUSICAL is a jukebox musical that premiered on Broadway in April 2013, receiving four Tony Award nominations. Based on Berry Gordy's 1994 autobiography To Be Loved: The Music, the Magic, the Memories of Motown, it tells the story of how he founded and ran the Motown record label. It also touches on his relationships with Diana Ross (Allison Semmes), Marvin Gaye (Jarran Muse), and Smokey Robinson (Jesse Nager). Digging deep into the Motown catalog, the show contains over 60 songs. With that many songs one would expect a pretty thin book; however, by wisely placing most of the focus on Gordy (Chester Gregory) and Ross' relationship and the rise and fall of Motown, we are given a compelling portrait of both Gordy and the music industry. MOTOWN: THE MUSICAL is a celebration of the Motown sound… that sound that joined black and white America in ways nothing else has equaled before or since...that magical period in our past when we were invited to go dancing in the street to a brand new beat.
It's Halloween weekend and every dramatic personage and theatrical type we've ever encountered is caught up in the annual rush to find just the right costume for their holiday revelries (we confess we've never had the knack for coming up with Halloween get-ups - not since we went in drag to a party at the First Baptist Church as the age of 12…tongues were wagging, we are certain, but we lived to tell about it, so it couldn't have been that bad). In the meantime, there are all sorts of onstage happenings this weekend to keep you otherwise engaged should the difficulty of selecting your costume prove to be too much.
There's the definite feeling of autumn in the air that makes you want to gut a pumpkin or at least have a pumpkin spice latte, chances are you are definitely going to need a sweater in the early morning hours, and it's past the perfect time for you to pick out a Halloween costume. Luckily, theater companies are well into their new seasons and there's plenty of shows to entertain you while you take time off from berating yourself for wearing that same tricked-out Star Wars costume you wore the past fwo-and-one-half years.
Appropriately enough, the supposedly haunted Plummer Auditorium in Fullerton is currently playing host to the happy spooks of 3-D Theatricals' regional production of THE ADDAMS FAMILY, which continues performances at this historic theater through October 25 before migrating south to the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center for shows October 31 - November 8. Filled with gleeful, cheese-tastic one-liners and catchy, cleverly written tunes from Andrew Lippa (The Wild Party, Big Fish), this seemingly underrated stage musical gem is a lively, highly-amusing little comedy that celebrates individual uniqueness while poking lots of giddy fun at fragile family dynamics, pointing out that even the most creepy, kooky, mysterious, and spooky beings among us face the same kinds of OMG-drama that so-called 'normals' do. As an added bonus, 3DT's production features a stellar cast led by TV's Bronson Pinchot as Gomez and Broadway vet Rachel York as Morticia.
We're back! After an extended absence due to The Last Five Years (we directed it to boffo notices from our critical colleagues), The 2015 First Night Honors (which played to SRO crowds at Chaffin's Barn in September) and a sense of overwhelming malaise and ennui (we are ever so dramatic at times), BWW Nashville's Critic's Choice is back on the interwebs, offering you our insights and advice on the shows that are coming up and what you should try to find time to see - or to avoid at all costs, depending on our perspective.
Pearl Buck, the Nobel Prize winning author, once wrote that 'if you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.' Which is what Australian Ballet Artistic Director David McAllister has attempted with his new production of Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty, which will premiere in Melbourne, Australia, on September 15 2015, before touring to Perth from October 7-10, and Sydney from November 17-December 16.
I consider OUR TOWN, which is now being performed at Blank Canvas, to be one of the greatest plays of the 20th century. It not only won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938, it has become one of the most performed and studied plays in the English language. It, along with Arthur Miller's DEATH OF A SALESMAN, Eugene O'Neil's LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, Tennessee Williams' STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, and William Inge's DARK AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS, continue to be listed as the best written modern American plays by theatre experts.
The Program Launch for the second half of 2015 shows that the Independent Music Theatre team comprising Luckiest Productions (David Campbell, Lisa Campbell and Richard Carroll), Neglected Musicals (Michelle Guthrie), and Neil Gooding Productions, the driving force behind Hayes Theatre Company, have no intention of slowing down are staying true to their vision to provide a permanent home for small-scale musical theatre and cabaret.
'If music be the food of love, play on.' Even before the invention of the musical comedy (more on that later), William Shakespeare knew the importance of music in telling stories on stage. For our March feature, my colleague Jeff Walker and I thought that instead of marking the Ides of March with songs about murder, betrayal, and fate, we would focus on the synergy between showtunes and Shakespeare.
Below are March's events at Bookworks. For more information visit, bkwrks.com/event.
Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's Pulitzer Prize-winning play YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU opens tonight, September 28, 2014, at the Longacre Theatre (220 West 48th Street), after 32 previews. The production is directed by six-time Tony Award-nominee and Drama Desk Award winner Scott Ellis (The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Twelve Angry Men, 1776) and will play a 19-week limited engagement.
The Jewish Museum and The Film Society of Lincoln Center will present the 23rd annual New York Jewish Film Festival at the Film Society's Walter Reade Theater and Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, Jan. 8-23, 2014.
Back on April 1, when he posted his third compilation of delayed cabaret reviews from shows staged during the winter, BroadwayWorld.com's lead New York cabaret reviewer promised Number 4 would come with arrival of summer. Okay, so he missed his self-imposed deadline by a couple of weeks. but here's yet another catch-up column with critiques of a half dozen spring shows performed by Bryan Batt, Dawn Derow, Lynly Forrest, Dennis McNeil, Anastasia Barzee, and Nina Hennessey.
A new CD, The Hours Begin to Sing, with songs by American composers performed by soprano Lisa Delan, has just been released on the PentaTone Classics label (PTC 5186 459).
Russia's profound and far-reaching impact on 20th-century culture will be explored at the 2013 annual Bard SummerScape festival, which once again offers an extraordinary summer of music, opera, theater, dance, film, and cabaret, keyed to the theme of the 24th annual Bard Music Festival, Stravinsky and His World. Presented in the striking Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and other venues on Bard College's bucolic Hudson River campus, the seven-week festival opens on July 6 with the first of two performances of A Rite (2013) by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and SITI Company, and closes on August 18 with a party in Bard's beloved Spiegeltent, which returns for the full seven weeks. Complementing the Bard Music Festival's exploration of “Stravinsky and His World,” some of the great Russian-born composer's most captivating compatriots provide key SummerScape highlights. These include the first fully-staged American production of Sergey Taneyev's opera Oresteia; the world premiere of an original stage adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's seminal novel The Master and Margarita; and a film festival titled “Between Traditions: Stravinsky's Legacy and Russian Emigré Cinema.” Together, SummerScape's offerings will continue Bard's yearlong tenth-anniversary celebrations for the Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center, which commence with a month of special performances in April.
Apparently, it is Elvis Week in Nashville (at least according to the fine folks at Loveless Cafe), so before we head out to the theater for a full weekend of show openings and the like, a trip to West Nashville for a slice of the Loveless' Elvis pie is in order (for the uninitiated, that's peanut butter, banana, bacon and homemade whipped cream-the four basic food groups, according to The King.), so before we slip into a diabetic coma, here's installment #7 of Music City Confidential, all the news that's fit to print from onstage, offstage, backstage and beyond…
Orson Welles was very much the leader of the Mercury Theatre Company, despite his relative youth. He became, in fact, a Broadway legend...
The opposites attracting plot is probably as old as romantic comedy itself, but even if Rooms: a rock romance follows familiar paths, the Paul Scott Goodman (book/music/lyrics) and Miriam Gordon (book) two-person musical is such a buoyant, funny and upbeat affair that the clichés of the story are conquered by the cleverness and exuberance with which the story is told. Under Scott Schwartz's swift and breezy direction, the 90-minute one-act scoots the audience along on an immensely enjoyable ride.
The Metropolitan Room, deemed the best cabaret room in New York by New York Magazine, has announced its upcoming November calendar.
An original cast member off and on B'way and in London, Ann rejoined the show for its final months.
Today's Broadway Blogs on BroadwayWorld.com from Tuesday, March 17, 2009.
Today's Broadway Blogs on BroadwayWorld.com from Sunday, March 1, 2009.
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