With the recent Oscar-winning film, aoeBohemian Rhapsody,a the music of Queen is more popular than ever. In 2002, many of those hits were compiled into a rock musical experience, WE WILL ROCK YOU, which will be hitting the road once again for a North American tour starting September 3 in Winnipeg, Canada.
Performances began July 30 at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater for the New York premiere of Make Believe by Bess Wohl, directed by Michael Greif. The new play from the Continuity playwright is a look inside the minds of children, their parents, and the mysteries of childhood that haunt us forever.
Make Believe features a company made up of Kim Fischer (Then She Fell, Mrs. Fletcher), Susannah Flood (The Cherry Orchard, Plano), Ryan Foust (Mary Page Marlowe), Harrison Fox (NY stage debut), Maren Heary (NY stage debut), Brad Heberlee (Mrs. Murray’s Menagerie, A Life), Casey Hilton (NY stage debut), and Samantha Mathis (Being Frank, Nomad Motel)
In Make Believe four kids, ages 5 to 10, are playing a game of house when their parents inexplicably disappear. Thirty-two years later, their search for answers continues.
The production will officially open August 15.
Wohl returns to 2ST following the Second Stage Uptown production of American Hero. Her other plays include Continuity, seen earlier this year at Manhattan Theatre Club, Barcelona, Touched, In, Cats Talk Back, and Small Mouth Sounds, as well as the musical Pretty Filthy, which she co-wrote with composer/lyricist Michael Friedman and The Civilians. Make Believe debuted at Hartford Stage in 2018.
Flip through photos from the production below:
On Tuesday morning, the cast of Hadestown performed on Good Morning America. Before the performance, the shows stars Reeve Carney and Andre De Shields made theannouncement that Hadestown is heading out on a national tour
1895 Bert Lahr (née Irving Lahrheim), the future stage and screen clown, is born in New York. Following an early career in Vaudeville, Lahr enjoys a widely successful career on Broadway in such musicals as Du Barry was a Lady and Foxy. Lahr is best remembered by today’s audiences for his performance as the Cowardly Lion in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.
1921 Lynn Fontanne has her first major hit in the starring role of Dulcy, a comedy by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly. Despite her success, she rarely performs without future husband Alfred Lunt again.
1981 Ira Levin’s thriller Deathtrap becomes Broadway’s longest-running show of that genre, as it plays its 1,445th performance. Featured in the cast of the production at the Music Box Theatre are Farley Granger, Elizabeth Parrish, Ernest Townsend, and Marian Seldes. Deathtrap opened at the Music Box on February 26, 1978, with Seldes, John Wood, and Victor Garber in the cast. Tony nominations were awarded for the play, director Robert Moore, and actors Seldes and Garber.
1997 Mere Mortals and Others, the Off-Off-Broadway success which played at Primary Stages, moves to Off-Broadway’s John Houseman Theatre. The follow-up to playwright David Ives‘ comic compilation of one-acts All in the Timing, Mere Mortals combines six other one-acts as directed by John Rando. The six plays comprising the show are: Mere Mortals; Speed-the-Play; Foreplay, Or, The Art Of The Fugue; Degas, C’Est Moi; Dr. Fritz; and Time Flies.
2001 “I love you, Butthead,” Monica Lewinsky confessed she told then-President Bill Clinton in a phone conversation with her confidante, Linda Tripp. A collection of such illuminating details from the infamous Lewinsky incident which almost led to Clinton’s removal from office, are gathered into a play with the unfortunate title Snatches. The comedy, adapted verbatim from the women’s taped talks by Laura Strausfield, begins performances at the 78th Street Theatre Lab Off-Broadway.
2011 The New York premiere of Yeast Nation (The Triumph of Life), a new musical by Urinetown‘s Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis, starring Harriet Harris, begins performances as part of the 15th annual New York International Fringe Festival. The production sells out its entire run at La Mama ETC before the first performance.
2014 Jeremy Jordan and Laura Michelle Kelly star in the world premiere of Gary Barlow, Eliot Kennedy, and James Graham‘s musical Finding Neverland, opening at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Diane Paulus directs the work based on the 2004 film about Peter Pan playwright J.M. Barrie. The production transfers to Broadway in 2015, with Matthew Morrison replacing Jordan in the role of J.M. Barrie.
2017 Writer, director, and actor Joseph Bologna dies at age 82. Onstage, Bologna was known for his collaborations with wife Renée Taylor; the couple wrote and co-starred in a number of Broadway shows that touched on the comedic side of romance and marriage, including Lovers and Other Strangers, It Had to Be You, and If You Ever Leave Me…I’m Going With You!
2018 Gettin’ the Band Back Together, a musical about an out-of-work banker who reunites his old high school rock band, opens on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre. The show has a book by producer Ken Davenport and the performance group Grundleshotz, and songs by Mark Allen. It runs 40 performances.
More of Today’s Birthdays: Buddy Rogers 1904. Barbara Bennett 1906. Gene Raymond 1908. John Beal 1909. Claudia McNeil 1917. James Carpinello 1975. Euan Morton 1977. Wesley Taylor 1986.
Watch Yeast Nation creators Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis talk about the musical:
1881 Birthday of Cecil B. DeMille, who begins his career as a Broadway actor in shows including Hearts Are Trumps and To Have and To Hold, and as a Broadway playwright and producer. He later heads west to become one of the pioneering movie moguls of Hollywood.
1892 Alfred Lunt is born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After graduating from Carroll College and scratching plans to be an architect, Lunt soon finds himself enjoying a career in the theatre, making his Broadway debut in 1917’s Romance and Arabella and achieving stardom in 1919 with Clarence. In 1922 Lunt marries actor and future stage partner Lynn Fontanne. Among their many credits together are Design for Living (1933), I Know My Love (1949), and The Visit (1958).
1915 Choreographer and director Michael Kidd is born in New York. His Broadway choreography and/or directing credits include Finian’s Rainbow, Guys And Dolls, Destry Rides Again, and The Goodbye Girl.
1982 Nebraska-born actor Henry Fonda dies at age 77. Fonda graced both the stage and the screen, earning a Tony Award in 1948 for his performance in the title role of Mister Roberts. He also starred on Broadway in Two for the Seesaw and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.
1987 Paul Portner’s farce Shear Madness opens for a 12-week run at Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center. The show later changes to an open-ended run and becomes the longest-running show in the nation’s capital. The improvisational whodunit transports the action of the play to present day Georgetown at the Shear Madness Hair Styling Salon. The performance culminates nightly with an audience vote on who is guilty and who isn’t. To date, it has run more than 13,000 performances.
1999 Though it technically started at the beginning of June with Natalie Merchant‘s special concert engagement at the Neil Simon Theatre, the 1999–2000 Broadway season begins in earnest today when John Pielmeier‘s thriller Voices in the Dark opens at the Longacre Theatre. Judith Ivey stars as a radio talk show host who finds herself menaced by a mysterious caller while staying in an isolated Adirondack cabin.
2001 Take Flight, a musical based on the lives and adventures of famous aviators, opens at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center. Christiane Noll plays Amelia Earhart in the show written by Richard Maltby, Jr. and David Shire (Big) and Marsha Norman (The Secret Garden).
2003 Broadway theatres dim their lights this evening to honor the life of tap-dancing actor singer Gregory Hines, who died of cancer August 9 at age 57.
2010 The world premiere of Paul Weitz’s Trust—starring Zach Braff, Bobby Cannavale, Sutton Foster, and Ari Graynor—opens at Off-Broadway’s Second Stage Theatre.
2013 The Public Theater‘s world-premiere musical Love’s Labour’s Lost, penned by Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson collaborators Michael Friedman and Alex Timbers, opens at the Delacorte Theater as part of Shakespeare in the Park. The cast includes Daniel Breaker, Colin Donnell, Rachel Dratch, Rebecca Naomi Jones, Patti Murin, and Bryce Pinkham.
2014 Stage and screen acting legend Lauren Bacall dies at age 89. She won two Tony Awards for Best Actress in a Musical, for her performances as Margo Channing in Applause (1970) and Tess Harding in Woman of the Year (1981).
More of Today’s Birthdays: Jane Wyatt 1911. Kurt Kasznar 1913. William Goldman 1931. Dana Ivey 1941.
Watch highlights from Michael Friedman and Alex Timbers’ 2013 musical Love’s Labour’s Lost:
The Promhas ended its Broadway run today, August 11th, after 23 preview and 310 regular performances. Following the final curtain call, Casey Nicholaw and Caitlin Kinnunen took the stage to give speeches, honoring the show and the cast. Watch the emotional video
Since the beginning of summer 2019, Broadway has bid farewell to a whopping eleven productions. Some were pre-scheduled. limited runs others long-running favorites all equally missed. Before the end of August, six more will take their final bows.
The path that brought Be More Chill, the neon, energetic, inventive new musical from Joe Iconis and Joe Tracz, to Broadway was unconventional in both its trajectory and its momentum. A 2015 commissioned world premiere at Two River Theatre in Red Bank, New Jersey led to a cast album, which took the internet by storm and exponentially widened the musical’s audience; an Off-Broadway premiere at the Pershing Square Signature Center followed in 2018, quickly selling out and adding an extension to its run.
A few months later, producers gathered the company of the Off–Broadway production to deliver the news that changed everything. Not only was Be More Chill headed to Broadway—but the entire Off–Broadway cast would be going with it.
This cast would include performers like Will Roland and Jason SweetTooth Williams, who stepped into the roles of Jeremy Heere and his father, respectively, for the musical’s Pershing Square production; it also included George Salazar, Lauren Marcus, and Katlyn Carlson, who had been with the show since its premiere at Two River Theatre.
READ: An Open (Love) Letter to the Fans of Be More Chill From Star Stephanie Hsu
Now, as Be More Chill prepares for its final performance at the Lyceum Theatre on August 11, these five cast members have mined their personal stashes of behind-the-scenes photos for an exclusive look at the show’s journey from Red Bank to Broadway. Playbill posed a series of questions to each of them on the show’s legacy, both for the Broadway community and for themselves as artists who have seen the show along multiple stages of its journey to the Lyceum.
What message do you think Be More Chill will leave behind for Broadway?
Jason SweetTooth Williams: Be More Chill showed Broadway and the world that nothing is impossible. It showed it to me, as well. When people combine the power of their hearts, their collective love can move mountains (or send a little musical all the way to Broadway!)
Katlyn Carlson: This show has always felt like the little show that could. And that’s because young people grabbed onto it with so much love. We made it here because of our young fans. Broadway should welcome these young people with open arms. They have so much devotion to give to a show that loves them back the way Be More Chill does. They are the future of this industry. Listen to them; love them back.
Lauren Marcus: I hope that Be More Chill has let the Broadway community know that you don’t have to be a “normal,” cookie-cutter actor, show, personality, body type—anything, really—in order to have a huge, insane impact on audiences. I am so proud of our show and its beautiful fans and treasure every time I hear one of them (child, teen, or adult) tell me that they’ve seen themselves in our show or found musical theatre for the first time ever through our show. Something about the uniqueness of the people involved–and clearly the intense connection to an album full of music and a story that felt new and relevant to them–really got into people’s heads and stayed with them. And that’s why we’ve made it here. Because people found Be More Chill and followed it in whatever way they could. I think we may be the first show to get to Broadway the way we did, but we certainly won’t be the last.
George Salazar: I think our show will leave behind a beautiful legacy that involves art being a healing force, art inspiring art; that a good show that connects with real human beings can come back to life in spite of naysayers trying to keep it out, and that inclusive casting not only represents the landscape of our world, but has the power to inspire people who feel like outsiders to keep pursuing their dreams. There is a place for all of us and sometimes, you have to carve that place for yourself; but with a little help from good people, anything is possible.
Will Roland: I think Be More Chill has shown this industry that the voices of theatergoers matter more than perhaps previously thought! This show happened because people loved the story, the songs, the creators, the characters—not because it featured a super-famous movie star, or a pop song catalogue, or because it adapted their favorite movie. I think it also showed that there’s more than one way to tell a story about serious issues in a musical.
What is your favorite memory from Be More Chill’s journey?
Williams: One of my favorite memories (there are thousands!) is watching Joe Iconis soak up the experience of our opening night right after he came out to bow. I looked at him and he was beaming, and he said, “This is insane!” It was maybe the happiest I’ve seen him. He deserves the world, and in that moment, he had it!
Carlson: Hearing from Jerry that we were going to Broadway, on stage at the Signature, was unforgettable. Everyone was circled up, sort of knowing it was coming, but hearing those words was such an explosion of emotion. People screamed, collapsed, wept, hugged, jumped up and down. My first thought was, “I’m so happy for Joe.” And then I thought, “Oh, I’m so happy for me, too!!” To find out I would be making my Broadway debut with this show, in a role I created, filled me with a joy and pride I can’t describe.
Marcus: I have so, so many…but I think the first preview Off-Broadway remains my favorite memory. It was really the first time seeing and hearing the physical manifestation of the fandom that had built up over the four years since the New Jersey production. And while seeing numbers online was cool, hearing excited, genuine laughter and cheers from our first audience for the show in years took my breath away and moved me to tears. I couldn’t believe that so many strangers had found this thing and formed their own intense connection to it.
Salazar: I think my favorite moment happened during closing week. I was singing “Michael in the Bathroom” and for a moment I remembered singing it onstage at Two River; I blinked and then was back at the Lyceum, looking at an audience full of people wearing the “CREEPS” shirt. It was a perfect retrospective moment where I really wrapped my head around this show’s journey and the insane reach it has acquired.
Roland: The day that we announced the Off-Broadway run, the internet went nuts. So many people had been begging for this show to happen, and it felt like everything was possible and the world had expanded just ever so slightly.
What lessons will you take away from your time with the show?
Williams: I’ve learned that Broadway is as challenging as it is rewarding, and in fact, the reward is augmented by rising to and overcoming that challenge. I learned what it means to deepen a character over the course of a long run and what it means to really love inside a character or characters I helped create. I learned to rely on the strength and playfulness of my cast mates when I was down or tired and learned to give those things back to them when they needed it. I learned that there is no one sweeter, more dedicated, more passionate than a Be More Chill fan.
Marcus: This may sound cheesy, but I’ve learned that miracles can and do happen. And you never, ever know where they’re going to come from. I’ve also learned that if you’re going to do a show on Broadway that is that physically intense, you must learn how to take care of your body. I sprained my ankle badly Off-Broadway and was out for three weeks (my first time missing any show); it was devastating at the time, and now I look at it as maybe one of the best things to ever happen to me. What a lesson!
Salazar: Never stop believing in the projects that you love.
Roland: I have been reminded of how much theatre means to people, especially to people who sometimes feel marginalized, ostracized, or disconnected from their communities. It’s another way to connect people, another way for us to come together and share the best parts of ourselves and see our stories reflected in new and exciting ways. For so many people, Be More Chill is the closest they’ve ever come to seeing themselves on a stage.
How has your character changed throughout the show’s journey? How have you changed?
Carlson: In the Broadway production, I got to dig into the teenage frustration and exhaustion of not being seen the way you want to be seen, of not knowing yet who you really are, or want to be. Playing with the extremity of emotion and wild mood swings I remember from my high school years, she crystallized into the sharpest, meanest, messiest, funniest version of Chloe.
I now know I’ve been given a gift that I can carry with me forever- the gift of being part of something that means so much to so many people. I never expected something like it. To feel the impact that it’s had is like a rare, precious jewel in the crown of one’s career. I wear it with pride.
Salazar: Michael Mell within the context of the play has become more nuanced and fleshed out. He feels like a real person; I lose myself every night and it feels good to lose myself to a character who possesses such unfiltered joy, forgiveness, and commitment. Michael Mell outside of the play has become this beacon of support to so many who see themselves in him. He’s become a sort of a role model and I couldn’t be prouder to have been a part of the creation of a person who means so much to so many. Being a part of something like that would undoubtedly affect a person and I’m thrilled that I’ve been changed by this character, this play, our fans, and this whole experience. I’ve become a more compassionate human, a better listener, and a better friend because of Michael. I could quote Wicked right now (and I think you know which song), but I always cry when I quote that song.
Roland: I think the biggest thing that has changed over time with Jeremy is how dynamic he is. Throughout our process we endeavored to see this boy go through the biggest possible transformation from being totally bottled up in the beginning, totally posturing and posing in the middle, and truly embracing his inner weirdness by the end. It challenged me as an actor to push as far away from my normal inclinations as possible. I still have to get myself in the right headspace pre-show and shut down a lot of things I like about myself in order to fully inhabit this boy at the beginning of his story. It’s the greatest gift I’ve ever been given.
Marcus: Brooke’s grown a bit in that we’ve really honed in on her insecurity as the beta to Chloe’s alpha, and I think we really understand her connection to Jeremy this time around. I think her heart (as well as mine) has grown about five times bigger. She’s not a mean girl; she’s a sweet, insecure girl looking for a sign that she’s just . . . good enough. Similarly, I’ve changed in that I’m starting to believe I’m good enough exactly the way I am. For this business, as an actor, body-wise, as a person.
We tell ourselves so, so many stories about who we are, and hear so many comments from people in the industry and online; and like the show reminds us in the closing number, “There might be voices in my head, but the loudest one is mine.” And you know what? That’s the one I can actually control, to some degree. And it’s the one that matters the most. So why not let that one be a nice one?
