With New York's mayor pushing for size limits on sugary drinks and for keeping baby formula safely locked away until new moms are reminded of the benefits of breast milk, it seems like a good time for Bill Russell and Peter Melnick's tuneful and amusing new musical, The Last Smoker In America, which eschews debates over the health issues of tobacco use in favor of spoofing government control over personal choices.
The New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF) has announced the winners of the NYMF 2012 Awards for Excellence. Awards are voted on by the NYMF jury.
The last time the 1933 West End musical Nymph Errant was revived in New York, the Medicine Show Theatre Company advertised their production with the selling point that they haven't removed any of the show's racism. Now, while going to see a racist musical is not exactly my idea of a fun night out, there is a certain historic value to watching older musicals performed with the texts the authors wrote, opposed to the frequent occurrence of slapping their books with labels like “creaky” or “dated” and having contemporary authors make wholesale revisions to transform them into suitable entertainments for modern audiences.
Hottest Articles on BroadwayWorld.com from this weekend Sunday, July 29, 2012 - Sunday, July 29, 2012.
As Into The Woods prepares to open at the Delacorte, we take a look at the other musicals that have been a part of Shakespeare In The Park.
America may have abruptly lost its Camelot on the afternoon of November 22nd, 1963, but in the extraordinarily rich and tender new musical Dogfight, it was the night before that a pair of drops in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea began to sparkle.
When the original Broadway production of Fela! closed in January of 2011, Zuccotti Park was little more than a block-long plaza where Wall Streeters would enjoy a bit of lunchtime sun. For now, at least, the park has pretty much returned to that status, aside from the tourists taking photos of themselves at the spot now famous for birthing the Occupy Wall Street movement.
When Phil Geoffrey Bond was named Programming Director at 54 Below, it became a given that the theatre district's spanking new nightlife venue would include on its schedule Broadway-centric evenings geared for the knowledgeable musical theatre fan who appreciates both past glories and upcoming works in progress. The producer/host of the Laurie Beechman Theatre's popular Sondheim Unplugged series now makes a significant debut in the same capacities with New Mondays, dedicated to giving audiences a sampling of fresh material from accomplished theatre composers and lyricists.
Competing performances of Macbeth no longer cause riots like they did in 1849.
When the houselights went up for intermission at Gina Gionfriddo's provocative comedy of gender issues, Rapture, Blister, Burn, my immediate impulse was to ask my guest – a 1980s Columbia University Women's Studies graduate who, like myself, remembers the days when an Upper West Side liberal's coffee table was considered incomplete if not graced by a heavily earmarked volume of Susan Faludi's latest and simply saying the name “Phyllis Schlafly” at certain cocktail parties would trigger the same venomous reaction the name “Haman” would receive from the most Manischewitz-soused participants at a Lower East Side Purim spiel – if it all seemed realistic to her.
People keep asking if anyone writes original musicals anymore, but some of the biggest success stories to come out of the New York Musical Theatre Festival have been originals.
Though the team of Richard Maltby, Jr. (lyrics) and David Shire (music) hasn't had much luck when it comes to book musicals (Baby and Big, despite their admirers, struggled through disappointing Broadway runs.) when it comes to Off-Broadway musical revues, the boys are two-time champs. Their 1970s hit, Starting Here, Starting Now, was topped in 1989 by a 300+ performance run of Closer Than Ever, which is now getting a sparkling revival at the York.
Backwoods 1800s America proves an unlikely, but ideal setting for Shakespeare's As You Like It in director Daniel Sullivan's enormously entertaining Delacorte production that mixes dexterous wordplay with rowdy comedy.
By the third act of Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles' 1946 romantic comedy, Love Goes To Press, one of the play's leading characters, a female war correspondent considered tops in her field, begins discussing marriage with the handsome soldier who has captured her heart. When the stuffy British Major speaks romantically of how his love will, naturally, give up her career and go to Yorkshire to stay with his mother until they get married, the 2012 audience members around me, naturally, smirked and guffawed at the absurdity of his antiquated assumptions.
The words, “Once upon a time…,” were followed by that familiar Sondheim vamp, and Danielle Ferland skipped onto the stage just as she had 25 years ago as the original Little Red Riding Hood in Into The Woods. Sure enough, there was a wolf there to greet her, but instead of encountering Granny, The Baker's Wife and The Witch, Little Red found herself in a forest inhabited by a young French revolutionary, an elderly Holocaust survivor, a roller-skating duo and a former President of The United States.
If the Tony Awards annually strike the final chord for each New York theatre season, then the overture for the next one is undoubtedly trumpeted by The New York Shakespeare Festival's free performances at the Delacorte Theater
Fadwa Faranesh, a bright, engaging Palestinian woman living in Bethlehem, hosts a cooking program from her home kitchen, where she prepares delectable dishes like tabouli and baba ghanoush in the traditional manner the women of her culture have been preparing them for centuries. To her, food is an important connection between the past and the present.
Thomas Kail's athletic and inventively theatrical directing chops (In The Heights, Lombardi, Magic/Bird) prove a perfect match for Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens' Caribbean story-theatre musical Once On This Island. The beguiling new production gracing the Paper Mill stage is full of vibrant performances and colorful stagecraft.
It's here! The 2012 Tony Awards will air on CBS tonight, June 10 at 8pm and, as usual, BroadwayWorld.com will be your one-stop shop for all things Tonys on Tony Day, Night and Beyond!
Carrie Dunn, BWW:UK's editor-in-chief, gives the perspective from the other side of the Atlantic
Videos
.jpg?format=auto&width=365)
