Charles Busch and Julie Halston will host this year's Primary Stages 25th Anniversary Gala Benefit to be held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel (109 East 42nd Street) on Monday, November 9, 2009. This year's 'Leading Ladies' Penny Fuller and Isabel Keating are set to perform and will be joined by Elysabeth Kleinhans, and celebrity guests Allison Janney, Marian Seldes and Elizabeth Wilson in helping Primary Stages celebrate their 25th Anniversary Season.
The SF Playhouse (Bill English, Artistic Director; Susi Damilano, Producing Director) are pleased to open their 7th Season with the World Premiere of Billy Aronson's First Day of School.
The SF Playhouse (Bill English, Artistic Director; Susi Damilano, Producing Director) are pleased to open their 7th Season with the World Premiere of Billy Aronson's First Day of School.
The SF Playhouse (Bill English, Artistic Director; Susi Damilano, Producing Director) are pleased to open their 7th Season with the World Premiere of Billy Aronson's First Day of School.
The SF Playhouse (Bill English, Artistic Director; Susi Damilano, Producing Director) are pleased to open their 7th Season with the World Premiere of Billy Aronson's First Day of School.
Classic Stage Company (CSC), under the leadership of Artistic Director Brian Kulick and Executive Director Jessica R. Jenen, is proud to announce its new Audience Development Initiative furthering their mission to make classical theatre accessible to audiences of all ages and backgrounds.
The Tony Award® nominated hit musical Irving Berlin'S WHITE CHRISTMAS, the stage reinvention of the beloved classic film, directed by Walter Bobbie and choreographed by Randy Skinner, with music supervision by Rob Berman, returns to Broadway!
Classic Stage Company (CSC), under the leadership of Artistic Director Brian Kulick and Executive Director Jessica R. Jenen, will present the return of its popular First Look Festival - a program of one-night only staged readings.
On November 9, Primary Stages will host 'Leading Ladies,' the organization's 25th Anniversary Benefit Gala, honoring influential women who have contributed to the theater's work over the past 25 years. The event will take place at the Grand Hyatt New York and begins at 6:30pm.
'If musical theatre doesn't address important issues, who will?,' read a t-shirt I spotted at the Broadway Flea Market several years ago. And while America's theater history is rich with important issue addressing musical dramas like Show Boat and Ragtime, when Finian's Rainbow hit Broadway in 1947 it was pretty much unheard of for a musical comedy to have its main plot centered on attacking institutionalized racism.
Although operetta wasn't completely on its way out when Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II brought Music In The Air to Broadway in 1932, the popularity of the genre was indeed waning a bit as jazzy and witty scores by the likes of George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart and Cole Porter dominated the decade's theatre music. But the creators of Show Boat, just five years earlier, weren't done quite yet.
While there isn't anything terribly wrong with the new Broadway adaptation of the 1954 movie musical smash, White Christmas, hitting New York after four years of holiday season engagements across the country, there's also quite a bit that isn't especially right about it either. Yes, it's got those glorious Irving Berlin songs like 'Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep', 'Let Me Sing and I'm Happy' and 'Blue Skies' - the kind of stuff that turns wearing your heart on your sleeve into a hip fashion statement - and Larry Blank's swing orchestrations provide choreographer Randy Skinner's dancers with a red carpet of sizzle, but too much of director Walter Bobbie's perfectly pleasant production settles snugly into a groove of innocuous entertainment that is swift, professional and rarely exciting.
Penned by a pair of downtown revue writers (Betty Comden and Adolph Green), composed by a wunderkind New York Philharmonic conductor (Leonard Bernstein), choreographed by a Ballet Theatre soloist (Jerome Robbins) and originally directed by musical comedy master George Abbott, there's never been a musical on Broadway that mixes highbrow and lowbrow with such a wondrous cacophonous clash as On The Town.
Arriving on Broadway six years after La, La, Lucille, followed-up by Yes, Yes, Yvette and inspiring Betty Comden and Adolph Green to imagine a musical named If, If, Iphigenia, No, No, Nanette is the kind of delectably frothy musical comedy confection you might not naturally associate with being the stuff of legends. And yet, quite a bit about this high-spirited romp, now getting a lovingly stylish concert reading from Encores!, has achieved legendary status.
With three different directors placing their marks on the material during its pre-Broadway tryouts and two actors who were not quite up to the vocal demands of the dramatic score playing the leads (Shirley Booth and Melvyn Douglas), Marc Blitzstein (music and lyrics) and Joseph Stein's (book) Juno, based on Sean O'Casey's Juno And The Paycock, limped into the Winter Garden in March of 1959 following high expectations (West Side Story had been ousted from the theatre to make room for it) and quickly closed up shop two weeks later.
Unless the painters have been around the past few days, a bit of graffiti on the Classic Stage Company's men's room wall reads, 'Good Theatre + Great Coffee + Clean Bathroom = CSC.' While the lobby's Everyman Espresso Café and (I would assume) some eager young intern are keeping the latter two parts of that equation accurate, director Walter Bobbie's premiere production of David Ives' New Jerusalem is indeed providing some good theatre.
Classic Stage Company (CSC), under the leadership of Artistic Director Brian Kulick and Executive Director Jessica R. Jenen, has announced details for their upcoming 2009-10 season.
The American Theatre Wing has announced an online essay contest in conjunction with the release of its original book, The American Theatre Wing presents The Play That Changed My Life: America's Foremost Playwrights on the Plays that Influenced Them, available December 1.
The Dramatists Guild of America will honor the winners of their annual awards at their annual benefit ceremony on Monday, November 2, 2009 at The Players Club in New York.
The Dramatists Guild of America have announced the winners of their annual awards, which will be distributed at an awards ceremony Monday, November 2, 2009, at The Players Club in New York.
