Theater Talk Welcomes STREETCAR Cast and More This Weekend

A Streetcar Named Desire stops at THEATER TALK for Tony Awards weekend, with stars Blair Underwood and Nicole Ari Parker, joined by producer Stephen C. Byrd, discussing the historic Broadway production with series co-hosts Michael Riedel of the New York Post and executive producer Susan Haskins. Also on board in a separate interview is comedian-character actor-writer Rob Bartlett, most recently seen in the revival of How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

This THEATER TALK premieres Saturday, June 9 (2012) at 8:30 PM on CUNY TV*, repeated Sunday 6/10 (12:30 PM) and Monday 6/11 (7:30 AM, 1:30 PM, and 7:30 PM). The show will be available for online viewing following the broadcasts at www.cuny.tv.

And on Sunday, June 10 at 7:30 PM on CUNY TV, as a special lead-in to the Tony Awards telecast on CBS at 8 PM, THEATER TALK reprises its Tony Predictions 2012 show in which the co-hosts, joined by Jesse Green of New York Magazine, Michael Musto of The Village Voice, and Patrick Pacheco of the Los Angeles Times agree and disagree about who will win the evening’s major awards.

The current revival of A Streetcar Named Desire features the first African American cast to perform the play on Broadway. Producer Byrd and actress Parker both share how Tennessee Williams always wanted to see the play with a black cast; the production, they say, has been a journey of “letting the ghosts go.” Underwood shyly deflects comments about the vocal reaction from the audience when he takes off his shirt. Bartlett, following the Streetcar segment, concedes that he will never be a romantic lead – “unless it’s a production of Marty.”

THEATER TALK is jointly produced by not-for-profits Theater Talk Productions and CUNY TV. The program is taped in the Himan Brown TV and Radio Studios at The City University of New York (CUNY) TV in Manhattan, and is distributed to 70+ participating public television stations nationwide. THEATER TALK is made possible in part by The New York State Council on the Arts, The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The TDF/TAP Plus Program, The CUNY TV Foundation and The Friends of THEATER TALK. [*CUNY TV, the City University of New York television station, is carried in New York City’s five boroughs – on Channel 75 on Time Warner and Cablevision, Channel 77 on RCN, and on Channel 30 on Verizon FiOS. The show is available online anytime at www.cuny.tv and www.theatertalk.org, and via audio-only iTunes podcasts.