What’s fun about Broadway in September — the marquees go up for the Fall season, even if the shows won’t be opening for months.
The Week in New York Theater, Sept 1 – 7
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MT @TheBwayLeague The curtain is up on #BroadwayWeek The 2-for-1 ticket program runs until 9/14. http://t.co/JxD4CGWfm7
— Jonathan Mandell (@NewYorkTheater) September 1, 2014
Theater trumps TV on exploring “the big issues,” says this UK TV journalist. True in US too?
@NewYorkTheater I hope not. YUCK. TV trumps theater on bein INTERESTING & fun to watch. If no 1 is watching, who gives a damn bout “issues?”
— Ralf (@RJPEsquire) September 1, 2014
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Jayne Houdyshell, Rosie Perez, Jonny Orsini and more join Larry David in the cast of his play Fish in the Dark, which opens on Broadway in March.
“@NewYorkTheater: @rosieperezbklyn Congrats on your fifth turn on Broadway!” thank you:)
— Rosie Perez (@rosieperezbklyn) September 2, 2014
Tonight, Andrea Martin returns as a lusty grandma upside down on a trapeze singing in Pippin
Added to 2014 Fringe Encores, which begins this week: Absolutely Filthy, Peanuts cartoon parody
Why listening to music is the key to good health (Is watching people tap dance the key to happiness?)
@NewYorkTheater it’s supposed to help with back pain? For all the music I listen to, why can’t it be helpful and cure insomnia?
— Shannon Leigh (@LVShannyLeigh) September 2, 2014
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David Hare’s “Skylight” to be revived on Broadway with Carey Mulligan as schoolteacher visited by ex, portrayed by Bill Nighy. Opens March 16 at John Golden.
Lisa D’Amour (Detroit) is finally on Broadway with “Airline Highway,” her dark comedy of pals hanging in a parking lot. Opens Apr 23
Cinderella will close on Broadway January 3, 2015 after 41 previews and 770 regular performances.
Kaley Ann Voorhees, 20 years old, will play Christine in The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway starting in December – the first to be born after the show debuted on Broadway.
Other Phantom news: Norm Lewis is staying on until Jan 31, 2015. Mary Michael Patt is succeeding Sierra Boggess from now until December.
Creativity has come to mean productivity,argues Joshua Rothman in the New Yorker, who prefers the Romantic idea of creativity
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Comedian Joan Rivers has died at age 81, a week after a routine procedure went awry.
She performed in three Broadway shows — and wrote two of them. “Acting is my true love. I would like to have been a serious actor, and I plan to in the next life. I’m going to be Meryl Streep Rivers.”
Joan Rivers’ mark on the Great White Way
Joan Rivers’ love of NYC and the theater:
There’s nothing like Broadway at night, and I try to go to Mamma Mia! if possible, because I like to watch 15,000 Japanese tourists in the audience trying to sing “Waterloo.” If you don’t go to Broadway, you’re a fool. On Broadway, off Broadway, above Broadway, below Broadway, go! Don’t tell me there isn’t something wonderful playing. If I’m home in New York at night, I’m either at a Broadway or an Off Broadway show. We’re in the theater capital of the world, and if you don’t get it, you’re an idiot.
Come in a wheelchair, and they’ll put you in an aisle. I know how to get around New York! A wheelchair will always get you a good seat. And the cast will come out to you to say hello if you’re in a wheelchair. You don’t have to go backstage. If you need a wheelchair, I usually just push a handicapped person out of one. And I love to hang around the Broadway area, because I offer the cops 50 bucks. If you offer a policeman 50 bucks, he will stop and frisk you.
The 897 selected as MacArthur Foundation “geniuses” since 1981 move more often than general population: Do creative people move more?
More than a decade ago, A.R. Gurney, who had written some forty plays over forty years, wondered whether he would be forced to retire. “I thought I had told the world everything I wanted to tell the world.” But even when he did finally come up with a new idea, he couldn’t find a producer or theater interested in it. Now, at age eighty-three, Gurney has shows in both the new Broadway season, and the new Off-Broadway season. Revivals of two of his plays open within the next two weeks—Love Letters on Broadway, and Wayside Motor Inn Off-Broadway. He has become a playwright-in-residence at the Signature Theatre, which has committed to two more of his plays, including a new one entitled Love and Money.
Ask Gurney what happened to change things around, and his answer is succinct: Off-Off Broadway saved him.
Full article about A.R. Gurney
My review of The Wayside Motor Inn
A.R. Gurney was surprised at the Signature Theater’s choice for the opening play in his playwright-in-residence season with them.
“The Wayside Motor Inn was dismissed by the critics when it opened, and it’s never really worked before,” Gurney told me in an interview
Whether this 1977 play works now depends on how satisfied you can be by a well-staged production that presents five dramatically underwhelming stories in a theatrically inventive way.
Full review of The Wayside Motor Inn
he four busboys who work in the kitchen of a tony Upper East Side restaurant in the well-acted, superbly directed new play by Elizabeth Irwin, “My Manana Comes,” bring home a cruel irony of the $30 billion New York City restaurant industry that employs about one out of every 10 New Yorkers: Many restaurant workers can barely afford to feed themselves… “My Manana Comes,” produced by the Playwrights Realm theater company at the Peter Sharp Theater, is no didactic tract on the exploitation of restaurant workers. It is a spot-on recreation of the “back of house” of a fancy restaurant.
Full review of My Manana Comes
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18-year-old @RickyUbeda11 has won @DANCEonFOX Season 11, which means he’s joining @OnTheTownNYC cast. http://t.co/Ue6jCK2g4y
— Jonathan Mandell (@NewYorkTheater) September 5, 2014
Ron Shelton of Bull Durham the musical, now in previews @alliancetheatre “Broadway is obviously everyone’s goal & intention,” “There’s no musical-theater equivalent for the closeup in a movie…That has to become a scene with a song.
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Happy 50th birthday @rosieperezbklyn,who’s giving US gifts: 1 #FishintheDark on Bway 2 @theviewtv co-host pic.twitter.com/xOnC4ru6Gr
— Jonathan Mandell (@NewYorkTheater) September 6, 2014
Allison Wiliams as Peter Pan. Who is more (and who less) likely to watch as a result of this publicity pic? pic.twitter.com/Xy3v2wXXRd
— Jonathan Mandell (@NewYorkTheater) September 6, 2014
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The Fall Arts Season, including six articles about theater.
Closing September 20th after five weeks: Revolution in the Elbow of Ragnar Agnarsson Furniture Painter
Sam Shepard on pals Hoffman & Williams; writing his first novel;how America is “on our way out, as a culture” etc
Sarah Ruhl chats with Polly Carl about her new book of essays and how theater is about language and listening
My review, and photographs, of The Winter’s Tale
Michael C. Hall (here pictured in The Realistic Joneses) will be the next Hedwig (also at the Belasco), staring October 16.
