by Webmaster | Apr 25, 2019 | New Musical News Feed
The cast of the Toronto production of Dear Evan Hansen appeared on Breakfast Television Toronto April 25 to talk about the new mounting and sing from the Tony-winning musical. Led by Robert Markus (in the title role) and Stephanie La Rochelle (who plays Zoe), the company sang the Act 1 closer “You Will Be Found.”
The Toronto sit-down production began performances March 5 at the Royal Alexandra Theatre and features an all-Canadian cast; joining Markus and La Rochelle are Jessica Sherman as Heidi, Sean Patrick Dolan as Connor, Claire Rankin as Cynthia, Evan Buliung as Larry, Alessandro Costantini as Jared, and Shakura Dickson as Alana. Rounding out the company are Wicked alum Zachary Noah Piser as the Evan alternate, as well as understudies Erin Breen, Malinda Carroll, Jay Davis, David Jeffery, Laura Mae Nason, and Kaitlyn Santa Juana.
The musical, featuring a Tony-winning book by Steven Levenson and a Tony-winning score by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, continues its run at Broadway’s Music Box Theatre. A U.S. national tour launched in September. A London bow is slated for fall 2019.
Production Photos: Dear Evan Hansen in Toronto
by Webmaster | Apr 23, 2019 | New Musical News Feed
1905 Sir Henry Irving‘s production of The Merchant of Venice was to have opened the annual Shakespeare Festival at Stratford-upon-Avon. But Irving was taken ill and Frank Benson and his company presented their version instead.
1944 Helen Goes to Troy and on her way stops at the Alvin Theatre on Broadway. Jarmila Novotna is the Face in this version of Jacques Offenbach‘s La Belle Helene. Erich Wolfgang Korngold adapts the music for Gottfried Reinhardt and John Meehan Jr.‘s libretto. It runs three months.
1977 Al Pacino stars in David Rabe‘s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel. The revival, first mounted by the Theatre Company of Boston, plays on Broadway at the Longacre Theatre for more than 13 weeks.
1997 The new John Kander–Fred Ebb musical Steel Pier opens on Broadway at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. Featured in the cast of the show centering on marathon-dancing in The Depression of the 1930s are Karen Ziemba, Gregory Harrison, Daniel McDonald, and Debra Monk. The production also marks the Broadway debut of future Tony Award winner Kristin Chenoweth. Following mixed reviews and a shut-out (from 11 nominations) at the Tony Awards, the show closes on June 28, after only 76 performances.
2008 Hairspray librettists Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan fashion a musical from another John Waters film, Cry-Baby, set in the world of “Squares” and “Drapes” in 1950s Baltimore. Mark Brokaw directs a cast that includes James Snyder, Harriet Harris, and Elizabeth Stanley, performing a score by Broadway newcomers Adam Schlesinger and David Javerbaum. It plays 68 performances at the Marquis Theatre.
2011 A revival of Born Yesterday, Garson Kanin‘s hit 1946 comedy about a rough-edged chorus girl named Billie Dawn, who refines herself in the context of a world of politics, greed, and corruption, opens on Broadway at the Cort Theatre. Doug Hughes directs the production, which stars Nina Arianda, Jim Belushi, and Robert Sean Leonard.
2012 A new generation of Broadway theatregoer gets exposed to the classic songs of composer George Gershwin and lyricist Ira Gershwin when the musical Nice Work If You Can Get It—which borrows the brothers’ show tunes from the ’20s and ’30s—opens on Broadway at the Imperial Theatre. Inspired by the Gershwins’ 1926 musical Oh, Kay!, the production stars Kelli O’Hara as a bootlegger who falls for a tipsy playboy, played by Matthew Broderick.
2013 John Logan‘s I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers, starring Bette Midler, opens on Broadway at the Booth Theatre. Directed by Joe Mantello, the production casts Midler as legendary Hollywood agent Sue Mengers (1932–2011).
2014 Alan Cumming, who won a 1998 Tony Award for his portrayal of the sexy and seductive Emcee in Cabaret, returns to Broadway in a revival of the musical, opening at Roundabout Theatre Company‘s Studio 54. Once again directed by Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall, the new production co-stars Michelle Williams as Sally Bowles.
2016 The musical Waitress, based upon the 2007 motion picture about a small town waitress and pie maker who dreams of escaping her loveless marriage, opens at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. The production features an all-female creative team, including a score by singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles, and direction by Diane Paulus. Jessie Mueller stars.
2017 Anastasia, a new musical based on the 1997 animated film, opens on Broadway. The film’s original songwriters, Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, write 16 additional songs for the stage version, and Terrence McNally provides the book. Christy Altomare stars in the title role. The production runs 808 performances at the Broadhurst Theatre.
Today’s Birthdays: Blanche Ring 1871. William Castle 1914. Cindy Adams 1930. Shirley MacLaine 1934. Barbra Streisand 1942. Eric Bogosian 1953. Aidan Gillen 1968.
Watch highlights from the 2017 Broadway production of Anastasia:
by Webmaster | Apr 22, 2019 | New Musical News Feed
The Roundabout Theatre Company revival of All My Sons officially opens on Broadway April 22. In Arthur Miller’s 1947 drama, the Keller family is forced to confront a host of secrets in the years following WWII.
Jack O’Brien directs a company led by Tony and Oscar nominee Annette Bening, Tony-winning playwright and performer Tracy Letts, and American Psycho star Benjamin Walker as Kate, Joe, and Chris Keller, respectively.
The company also includes Francesca Carpanini as Ann Deever, Hampton Fluker as George Deever, Michael Hayden as Dr. Jim Bayliss, Jenni Barber as Lydia Lubey, Nehal Joshi as Frank Lubey, and Chinasa Ogbuagu as Sue Bayliss.
Read reviews for the revival below.
am New York (Matt Windman)
Broadway News (Elizabeth Bradley)
Daily Beast (Tim Teeman)
Deadline (Greg Evans)
The Hollywood Reporter (Frank Scheck)
Los Angeles Times (Charles McNulty)
Newsday (Barbara Schuler)
New York Stage Review (Melissa Rose Bernardo)
New York Stage Review (David Finkle)
The Stage (Naveen Kumar)
Time Out New York (Helen Shaw)
Variety (Frank Rizzo)
The Wrap (Robert Hofler)
Check back for updates.
All My Sons is playing a limited engagement the American Airlines Theatre, where performances began April 4.
The design team for All My Sons is made up of Douglas W. Schmidt (sets), Jane Greenwood (costumes), Natasha Katz (lights), John Gromada (sound), Jeff Sugg (video and projections), Tom Watson (hair and wigs), and Bob James (original music).
Production Photos: All My Sons on Broadway
by Webmaster | Apr 21, 2019 | New Musical News Feed
Writers and composer-lyricists Matt Gould and Griffin Matthews barrel head on into the difficult and the uncomfortable. They want to find “the hardest thing to say” and wrestle it into a piece of theatre.
“Telling a deeper truth” is the goal, according to Matthews. “If it’s easy to say something, you shouldn’t put it onstage. The most dramatic is the hard stuff.”
Those who saw their documentary musical Witness Uganda—or its renamed Second Stage Off-Broadway production Invisible Thread—or Gould’s work on the Broadway-bound Lempicka know that firsthand.
“You have to write something that keeps you up at night,” Matthews says. What was keeping him and Gould up at night was their relationship. During the time they were dating and writing what became Witness Uganda, gay marriage became legal. “One day we couldn’t get married, the next day we could get married,” Matthews recalls. “It’s like, ‘Wait, we’re supposed to get married now? What does that mean?’ The event sparked a whole conversation about, ‘Who are we? What is this generation?’” The pair knew they should be writing about this because they didn’t know the answers.
The two come from opposite backgrounds: Matthews is an African-American Christian man from Pittsburgh, Gould is a white Jewish-American man from New York City. As they grappled with the gulf between their respective roots, they found common ground during a trip to Germany when they took Matthews’ grandfather, who had liberated Dachau, to visit the hallowed ground for his 80th birthday. Gould had lost ancestors to the Holocaust. Suddenly it hit them: blacks, Jews, gays, all would have been killed on that land 70 years ago. The branches of their family histories are intertwined. And so they began what would become The Family Project, a musical told in vignettes as a song cycle.
Now married, Gould and Matthews served as artists on campus through Stockton University’s inaugural Broadway Arts Lab, visiting and lecturing in courses across departments—from “Jewish Stories and Storytelling” to “Black Lives” to “Small Business Management”—and mounted a workshop presentation of The Family Project with students in the theatre department on campus before transferring it to NYU Tisch. “The people who are most honest are the students,” says Matthews. “If you get a group of students together and they’re paying attention, we know we’ve got something.”
Below, Matthews and Gould unlock their artistic partnership, reveal some mistakes they’ve made, talk about next steps for Witness Uganda—and why they’re back to the original title—and share details on The Family Project and a potential next musical.
In terms of building a romantic and a work relationship simultaneously, did you two decide “We’re going to work together as long as we’re together, but if we break up…”?
Griffin Matthews: It is a good question.
Matt Gould: There was just a certain amount of faith around it. It was like it was a matter of survival—for both of us, to some extent.
GM: We unknowingly stepped into a business together. [In the beginning], we had a lot of conversations about, “Are we writing partners right now or are we boyfriends right now?”
At what point do you each say to yourself “I’m a writer”?
GM: I don’t just call myself a writer. I call myself an actor, a director, a producer. I think all of us are doing all of it. But the start of writing was because I found myself feeling frustrated with the jobs I was being offered.
Matt talked about finding the people that make you better. What is it that Griffin brings out in you and your creativity that you don’t have on your own? And, Griffin, vice versa?
MG: It comes down to truth, simplicity. I think pretty much all writers, I don’t care how brilliant the world hails you as. We need someone to reflect back at us and I just think this idea of creator as genius is kind of bullsh*t. I just don’t know many geniuses. Even the ones who everyone says is a genius. Griffin has a far more commercial sensibility than I have. But by that I don’t mean he’s just write fluff. He says, “OK let’s take this crazy idea of Witness Uganda, this crazy idea about a musical about AIDS workers, but you gotta set it to a sick beat and that melody needs to be a little cuter.” I think he has a far more pop sensibility than I have. If it was up to me, it would just be weird. He helped me reach more people and that was really important to me.
GM: Matt, he walks around with a specific kind of bravery that I don’t always have. And I think part of that maybe comes from his upbringing, and the acceptance of this is something that you should do. I didn’t—not to say that my parents weren’t supportive. They were. But I feel like the world is supportive of Matt. And he has become a champion of me. I don’t mean to make everything race-related but it’s been on my mind a lot.
MG: But everything is race-related.
GM: I have to say, if you’re wondering why there aren’t more black musical creators, it’s not because we don’t exist, it’s because the business is not set up for us to succeed. He got to witness it first-hand certainly because we were in a relationship, where he was able to tell me stories about side conversations that were happening. … I say this so sensitively: I think there are a lot of false ideas about how far we’ve come. I once heard Ava DuVernay talking about her career as a director and she said, “If the door closes behind me, the door never opened.”
How hard it is to hold out and not smooth things over? At the end of the day do you say, “This is the message I’m sticking with and if that means playing smaller spaces, so be it”? Or do you cede a bit so it can reach more people?
MG: There’s always compromise, because it’s about reaching a lot of people. I also think there’s a point at which it starts to become inaccessible. That doesn’t excite me. But I also think it’s about learning how to trust when you do actually know better. Everyone was telling us “Witness Uganda is too inaccessible a title. Nobody is going to want to see Witness Uganda,” and we kept going, “I think that might be the title of our show, though.” And we didn’t trust our judgment. The smoothing became so much so that—
GM: We didn’t recognize our show.
MG: Now we get a chance to do it again in L.A. with Griffin as the director and our vision getting put into motion. It’s just about developing that third eye in such a way that yes, compromise, but no smoothing over.
What is the kernel of the idea of the story for The Family Project?
GM: We were trying to figure out if we were going to stay a couple. Witness Uganda tested every boundary that we have. When the commission happened, we were like, “I think we should write about our relationship because I don’t think we’re the only ones having relationship issues.” There’s a generation of us wondering what happens if I marry outside of my race, religion, culture. How do I speak your language? I always say, if this doesn’t work out, I’d go straight to a black man. I tell him all the time, “Go marry a Jew.” Relationships are hard enough, and now I have to figure out what you’re talking about? Now you have to figure out how to deal with my mother? By writing The Family Project, it actually healed a lot of those areas because a lot of people were like, “Us, too!”
What are the emotional beats or moments that feel central to the story, even though you’re telling it in vignettes rather than a narrative?
MG: It’s about values. When you go, “We both believe in integrity. We both believe in having integrity in our relationships, in our work, in our friendships.” So, where did that come from for you? Where did that come from for me?
GM: There’s a song called “Integrity” in the show.
MG: There’s a song called “Don’t Wait.” Which is about my parents dealing with my grandfather for going to a nursing home and it’s like why did we f*cking wait so long? That was the way you start to break down these language differences. “OK, I’m loud and scream all the time” and “I’m calm and make jokes all the time.”
GM: Where did it come from?
MG: Oh, you come from a legacy of slavery and a legacy of racism. And the coping mechanisms behind that were is A, B, and C, different than Jews who come from a legacy of getting kicked out of wherever we lived.
GM: Side story: We were at rehearsal and we started an impromptu song called “Total Praise.” It’s a gospel song. One person started it and then built until the whole cast sang and the white people in the room were like, “How do you all know this song?” It’s like a ten-part harmony. And we were like just like “You don’t [know this song]!” Black people have root in God. We’ve been on the run for hundreds and hundreds of years; the place we all went to was church. A lot of our work—my work—deals with God. The Family Project, a lot of pieces are about God. My parents are like, “Jesus, Jesus, God, God.” Then I have this Jew and he was like. “I don’t know if there is a God,” where he was taught to question everything. We started unpacking that and thought, “This is a song.”
James McArdle, a Scottish guy played the gay, Jewish Louis in Angels in America, he illuminated something for me about why Jews are neurotic. He was like “Louis lives up there (shoulders in his ears), because Jewish people are so afraid of being kicked out everywhere.” We never know if we have to get up and go. It dawned on me, that’s why we’re always eating at a kiddish [lunch after services] as if it’s our last meal because we psychologically think “We don’t know when the next one is.”
MG: This wound up in the show.
GM: This was the first fight.
MG: He used to get so angry at me because when we sat down to eat, I would be done before he even salted his food.
GM: I went to Thanksgiving. First time, his mom dropped the food at the table and said, “What are you waiting for?” I couldn’t believe it because, at my house, the food gets laid out. We stand in a circle. We’re going to pray.
MG: This is a song in the show called “Dinner,” which is where the two families come together. The Jews are sitting there like, “Let’s eat.”
GM: And we’re like, “Let’s pray.”
In what way is it helpful to mount it with college kids and to mount it for this age group?
MG: Because college kids are so free.
GM: They’re just not cynical yet. They’re all so passionate. The deeper you go into your career, the more demons you pick up. One of my demons on this show was, “Will it ever translate for anyone else?” If I’m not standing there, Matt’s not standing there, will it work?
MG: The theatre that dropped the show said to us “It’s too personal the audiences won’t get it.” But I was with the students, doing singing exercises, talking about Family, and they were just—I say this with love, not shade—they were just puddles. Because to your point, the more personal, the more universal. They were tapping into their own lives, and I think for both of us, we were like, “Oh we can let that demon go.”
GM: It’s not about us.
MG: We say this all the time about Witness Uganda. We go over there thinking we’re teaching but we’re the ones getting taught. They gave us our show back.
What else are you guys working on? What else is happening in Matt and Griffin Land?
MG: West Coast premiere of Witness Uganda. Lempicka is having its journey.
GM: We have a baby. They put a lot of things in perspective. [Our son] Galileo feels like the most important thing happening.
MG: That’s probably another show coming. The foster show.
by Webmaster | Apr 19, 2019 | New Musical News Feed
Performances begin April 20 at St. Ann’s Warehouse for the American premiere of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. Adapted and directed by Tony winner Enda Walsh (Once) from Max Porter’s novel of the same name, the play follows a widower and his two young boys who face the sadness of their mother’s sudden death.
The play, a Wayward Production in association with Complicité, comes to St. Ann’s immediately after its London premiere at The Barbican.
Walsh directs a cast led by Cillian Murphy as the bereaved widower, marking the continuation of their collaboration following Murphy’s performances in Misterman, Disco Pigs, and Ballyturk.
Rounding out the cast of Grief Is the Thing With Feathers are David Evans (Older Boy), Leo Hart (Younger Boy), Hattie Morahan (Mum), Taighen O’Callaghan (Older Boy), and Adam Pemberton (Younger Boy).
The creative team is made up of set designer Jamie Vartan, lighting designer Adam Silverman, sound designer Helen Atkinson, composer Teho Teardo, costume designer Christina Cunningham, and projection designer Will Duke.
Grief Is the Thing with Feathers received its world premiere at Galway’s Black Box Theatre.
The limited engagement at St. Ann’s is scheduled through May 12.
Photos: A Sneak Peek at the American Premiere of Grief Is The Thing With Feathers Off-Broadway
