Birth Place: Forestville, NY, USA
The York Theatre Company (James Morgan, Producing Artistic Director; W. David McCoy, Chairman of the Board) will honor Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway songwriters Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick with the 18th Oscar Hammerstein Award for Lifetime Achievement in Musical Theatre on Monday, November 23rd.
Shubert Organization Chairman Philip J. Smith and President Robert E. Wankel have intervened in the ever growing public feud between Michael Feinstein's All About Me and Dame Edna: It's All About Me.
Christine Andreas, whose career spans 30 years of Broadway brilliance from Oklahoma, On Your Toes and My Fair Lady to The Scarlet Pimpernel, makes a return visit to the Orange County Performing Arts Center November 12 ? 15 in Samueli Theater. Andreas, accompanied by her husband, composer and pianist Martin Silvestri, will perform her new show Two for the Road, which includes beautiful and distinctive renditions from the American Songbook, Broadway gems and original compositions.
Australia's most honored, beloved, (and Tony-winning) housewife, Dame Edna Everage, is proud to welcome producers Robert G. Bartner and the Ambassador Theatre Group on-board her new Broadway extravaganza It's All About Me.
Australia's most honored, beloved, (and Tony-winning) housewife, DAME EDNA EVERAGE, is proud to announce her triumphant return to Broadway in IT'S ALL ABOUT ME, a glorious celebration of everything Edna. Performances for this extra special and very limited run engagement will begin on March 6 at a Shubert Theatre to be announced, with an opening set for March 23 according to The New York Times.
In case this is your first time reading one of my reviews of a Broadway revival of a classic musical, allow me introduce you to my personal prejudice. I completely abhor the now very common practice of revising the book and messing with the score of any musical theatre piece after the authors are deceased. If a composer, bookwriter or lyricist is around to approve of changes, that's swell, but all too often their estates will allow anything from the sparse, but significant, tweaks to South Pacific to the wholesale revisions of The Pajama Game and The Music Man. Even more deplorable is the practice of letting these changes go uncredited, as was done in the three examples just cited, giving audiences no clue that what they are watching is not wholly the musical the original authors wrote.
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.
'Only the great deserve the darts of satire,' proclaimed an advertisement for the New York leg of the Bolshoi Ballet Company's 1936 American tour, a classy reply to the spoofing they were receiving from George Balanchine's dance piece La Princesse Zenobia, a highlight of George Abbott and Rodgers and Hart's Broadway hit On Your Toes.
In the latest edition of Opera News, Michael Portantiere asks Stephen Schwartz, Adam Guettel, Jason Robert Brown, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Michael John LaChiusa, Stephen Flaherty and Stew for their opinions on the difference between opera and musical theatre.
Perched above the stage in their private bleacher section, just beyond an outfield fence graffitied with the musical's title, conductor Rob Berman and his 25 piece Encores! Summer Stars orchestra might be mistaken for the conservatory cousins of Brooklyn's legendary Dodger Sym-Phony. But instead of serenading umpires from the Ebbet's Field grandstands with double forte arrangements of 'Three Blind Mice,' the musicians of director John Rando's cracker-jack production of Damn Yankees - a 1955 musical that opened in the early weeks of the baseball season that saw Brooklyn beat the Yankees for the borough's only World Series championship - treats 21st Century audiences to that thrilling sound of a Broadway Golden Age orchestra. The detailed movements and textures contained within Don Walker's orchestrations, whether giving comic accents to the pepper-upper 'Heart,' setting a satirical mood for the pseudo-vamp 'Whatever Lola Wants' or lifting a slow ballad like 'A Man Doesn't Know' with phrases that search the mind of the singing character, help bring majestic touches of artistry to this rousing vaudeville disguised as a book musical.
1959 was a heck of a good year for Broadway overtures. The majestic trumpet fanfare and lowdown bump and grind of Gypsy's is generally regarded as the best in musical theatre, but there was also the rousingly rhythmic curtain-raiser to Fiorello! and, my personal favorite, Philip J. Lang's beautiful interpretation of Bob Merrill's music for Take Me Along, which touches on so many moods of the show while continually building the toe-tapping climax of The catchy title tune.
Tommy Tune, the nine-time Tony Award-winning performer and choreographer will be honored as a 'Living Landmark' along with five other individuals in November by the New York Landmarks Conservancy.
With his hit show, The Marvelous Wonderettes, still going strong in New York and having just opened in Chicago, writer/director Roger Bean took a break this weekend to come check out the first regional production of his work here in Coral Gables at the Actors' Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre.
Northeastern University Center for the Arts presents forum with producer/director, featuring song selections by Judy Kaye and Tom Wopat
The York Theatre Company (James Morgan, Producing Artistic Director; W. David McCoy, Chairman of the Board) will honor Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway songwriters Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick with the 18th Oscar Hammerstein Award for Lifetime Achievement in Musical Theatre on Monday, November 23rd. The award will be presented to them by Alice Hammerstein Mathias, daughter of Oscar Hammerstein II.
Veteran Broadway star Christine Andreas will sing the role of Lilli Vanessi accompanied by the Silicon Valley Symphony for three concerts of Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate, from October 16-18 at the California Theatre in San Jose. Richard White will sing opposite Andreas, in the role of Fred/Petruchio.
Veteran Broadway star Christine Andreas will sing the role of Lilli Vanessi accompanied by the Silicon Valley Symphony for three concerts of Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate, from October 16-18 at the California Theatre in San Jose. Richard White will sing opposite Andreas, in the role of Fred/Petruchio.
Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF), the not-for-profit foundation of Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), announces the establishment of The Zelda Fichandler Award to recognize an outstanding director or choreographer who is making a unique and exceptional contribution through his or her work in regional theatre.
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