The Thing About Men - 2003 - Off-Broadway Articles Page 3

Laguna Playhouse and Lythgoe Family Panto have announced that OLIVIA SANABIA (Amazon's “Just Add Magic,” Disney's “Coop and Cami Ask the World”) will star as “Dorothy” and BARRY PEARL (“Grease”) will star as “The Wizard” in THE WONDERFUL WINTER OF OZ: A HOLIDAY PANTO, written by Kris Lythgoe, choreography by Mason Trueblood, musical direction by Andy Street and directed by Bonnie Lythgoe. 

 RED BULL THEATER has announced that Tony Award winner Santino Fontana will lead its all-star benefit performance of Your Own Thing, the 1968 hit Off-Broadway rock musical inspired by Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

CHELSEA TABLE + STAGE will present The Golden Girls Live: On Stage! on Saturday, September 24 at 9:30 PM. The show was created almost twenty years ago by Peter Mac and John Mac as a loving drag tribute to everyone's favorite sitcom.

Red Bull Theater has announced details of its 20th season, including two Off-Broadway productions; a new season of OBIE Award-winning Revelation Readings (offered both in-person and online), and much more.

William Shakespeare's joyous and popular comedy Much Ado About Nothing will open at Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, the professional theatre on the campus of DeSales University. The show previews July 13 and 14, opens July 15, and runs through August 7 in the Schubert Theatre at the Labuda Center for the Performing Arts.

A staged reading of award-winning playwright Marisela Treviño Orta's Latinx fairytale The River Bride will be presented for a limited engagement July 1 to July 3 at Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, the professional theatre on the campus of DeSales University in Center Valley, PA.

Popejoy Hall will present two musicals still running on Broadway as well as a couple of well-known stars as part of its 2022-2023 season. The season includes 21 shows overall with a total of 50 performances from October 6, 2022 through June 11, 2023.

Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival opens the iconic Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical A Chorus Line. The show previews June 22 & 23, opens June 24 and will run through July 10 at the Labuda Center for the Performing Arts on the campus of DeSales University.

American Musical Theater Live continues to carry Broadway's flame in Paris.

Never before produced comedy with two female older leads, and four men of varying ages, it's a laugh-out-loud dysfunctional love fest.

Opera star Michael Kelly willed this piece into existence and, now, it comes into the light. Read the story of how it happened in this new interview with BroadwayWorld Cabaret.

LAGUNA PLAYHOUSE is set to present one of the longest running Off-Broadway productions of all time, I LOVE YOU, YOU’RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE!, book and lyrics by Joe DiPietro, music by Jimmy Roberts, musical direction by  Ricky Pope, directed & choreographed by Paula Hammons Sloan.  Comments Executive Producing Director Ellen Richard, “The song ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed’ from this joyous musical is what our subscribers and audiences will undoubtably have as we welcome this extraordinary cast and creative team to the Playhouse stage!”  I LOVE YOU, YOU’RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE! begins previews on Wednesday, April 20; will open on Sunday, April 24 at 5:30pm and perform through Sunday, May 8, 2022 at the Laguna Playhouse, 606 Laguna Canyon Drive in Laguna Beach.

This week I saw productions of two decades-old musicals, each written by one of theatre's great composer/lyricists, which, in their original productions, ran a combined total of nine performances on Broadway.

Joining Ralph Fiennes (Robert Moses) in the world premiere of David Hare's Straight Line Crazy are Alisha Bailey (Mariah Heller), Samuel Barnett (Ariel Porter), David Bromley (Stamford Fergus), Al Coppola (Walter McQuade), Siobhán Cullen (Finnuala Connell), Ian Kirkby (Lewis Mumford), Alana Maria (Shirley Hayes), Dani Moseley (Carol Ames), Guy Paul (Henry Vanderbilt), Helen Schlesinger (Jane Jacobs), Mary Stillwaggon Stewart (Nicole Sawyer) and Danny Webb (Governor Al Smith).

The phrase “No one is irreplaceable” was shattered this past week when composer/lyricist/GOD of American musical theatre Stephen Sondheim passed away at age 91. Simply put, Sondheim was unique, groundbreaking and a true original that many tried to copy and never could.

Somewhere in a world on a road less traveled, between the likes of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, American Psycho, Carrie, and the more recently conceptualized Beetlejuice lies the twisted campy world in which the characters of Evil Dead the Musical reside. First performed in 2003 in Toronto, this campy rock-filled musical made its transfer to Off-Broadway at New World Stages in 2006. In 2012 a production opened in Las Vegas as a 4-D Experience and complete with a 100 chair “Splatter Zone,” and as of 2017 making it the longest-running theatrical experience on the strip. With Book, Lyrics, and Music by George Reinblatt, Evil Dead the Musical brought Sam Raimi’s characters to life in a true blood-filled fashion. In partnership with the University of Tampa, Stageworks Theatre and Producing Artistic Director Karla Hartley made the decision to open their 2021/2022 season of Emerge with this blood-soaked campy rock-fest complete with “Splatter Zone” for the 40th anniversary of the Sam Raimi film. As theatres slowly but steadfast begin their “Emerge” out of the darkest times in recent history Karla Hartley promised one thing with Stageworks new season, “I made the conscious decision to bring you a 2021-2022 season that was big and bold. Every show this season is big. Big casts. Big sets. Big everything. Big risks. Big rewards.” As I sat in the almost completely full audience on Friday’s opening night, I can say with full confidence that Karla and friends over at Stageworks have done just what they promised and more. It would be incredibly remiss of you if you happen to find yourself without a ticket to Evil Dead the Musical as it is deathly good, and I’ll be damned if you find something any better than this for some time to come.

When you think 'haunted houses' you probably don't picture the inside of a theatre. But with an over 100 year history, many of Broadway's most famous houses are positively teeming with reports of the supernatural.

Kimmel Cultural Campus has announced the much-anticipated return of in-person performing arts across their venues: the Kimmel Center, the Academy of Music, and the Merriam Theater. On September 18, from 11 a.m. until 4 p.m., Kimmel Cultural Campus will host a grand reopening event in Commonwealth Plaza to celebrate the start of the 2021-22 season.

Tricia Thorns has been a professional actress for some 35 years and has of late added directing to her distinguished CV. Her latest production is a revival of Staircase, a two-hander from 1966 that was made into a 1969 movie starring, of all people, Rex Harrison and Richard Burton. Charles Dyer's play about two gay Brixton hairdressers starts a monthlong run at Southwark Playhouse on June 23, with Paul Rider and John Sackville as its cast. Thorns explains her attraction to the material below and to a play that, she says, has in no way aged with time. 

If you've been spending some of your pandemic downtime attempting to declutter your life and have found yourself struggling to let go of certain items of no discernable value or use, Jeff Greenwald has got just the show for you. On May 29th, the acclaimed travel writer and performer will bring his new show, 108 Beloved Objects, to The Marsh, inviting audiences to rethink how we interact with the material world. When his travel assignments dried up due to the COVID pandemic, Greenwald used that as an opportunity to embark on an inward journey around his Oakland flat, ultimately picking out 108 objects that evoked personal passages. Greenwald parts with these items and introduces an element of chance by inviting five audience members to pick one object that catches their eye from a grid of 16 images. Whether it's a toy camera or a dolphin tooth necklace, each item has its own fascinating tale to tell, leading to a series of unexpected encounters and surprising destinations that are humorous, thought-provoking and deeply personal. Immediately following the performance Greenwald will be joined by The Marsh Founder/Artistic Director Stephanie Weisman for a Q&A. 108 Beloved Objects will be streamed at 7:30pm (PDT) on Saturday, May 29. For more information, visit www.themarsh.org/marshstream. BroadwayWorld spoke with Greenwald last week from his flat in Oakland, California. This past, essentially homebound year has definitely been a strange one for someone like him who makes his living largely as a travel writer. We talked about how his original impetus to declutter his life led to this new solo show, his thoughts on why we get so attached to certain objects and what their ultimate function might be, and his challenges as a self-professed non-actor to become a successful solo performer. As might be expected for such an inveterate traveler, Greenwald is an inherently interesting interview. He is very comfortable chatting with folks (like me) whom he's never met, readily offers up little bits of insight gleaned from his exposure to so many different cultures, and isn't reticent to gently question some of his interviewer's assumptions. He also has an understated sense of humor that often lies just below the surface of his actual words.

The Warner Bros. Pictures film fuses Lin-Manuel Miranda’s kinetic music and lyrics with director Jon M. Chu’s lively and authentic eye for storytelling that captures a world very much of its place, but universal in its experience.

BroadwayWorld put together a list of all the live action musicals you can stream on Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, BroadwayHD, and Disney Plus. Are you looking for something to get your mind off… all of this? So are we. Because everyone needs some escape,

The Marsh announces the line-up for its first-ever digital global festival, MarshStream International Solo Fest, presenting performers aged 16 to 79 from across the nation and around the world, including Russia, Scotland, Israel, Canada, and Australia, as well as some of The Marsh's fan-favorites in a four day online marathon of 51 global works.

Happy Gay Pride! BWW Reviewer Peter Nason chooses the 101 greatest LGBTQ songs and anthems from 1920-2020. See if your favorite songs or artists made the grade!