Brian Stokes Mitchell Joins Cast of LA Opera’s THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA
Broadway star Brian Stokes Mitchell will make his LA Opera debut in the company’s upcoming production ofThe Light in the Piazza.
Brian Stokes Mitchell Will Join Renée Fleming and Dove Cameron in LA Opera’s The Light in the Piazza
Tony winner Brian Stokes Mitchell will make his LA Opera debut in the company’s upcoming production of The Light in the Piazza, which will be presented October 12–20.
Mitchell will take on the role of Signor Naccarelli, playing opposite Tony-nominated soprano Renée Fleming and Dove Cameron as Margaret and Clara Johnson, respectively. Fleming and Cameron previously played those roles in the U.K. at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in June; the former will go on to reprise her work in Chicago and Australia.
READ: The Light in the Piazza, Yiddish Fiddler on the Roof and The Secret Garden Will Play Australia
With a Tony-winning score by Adam Guettel and a Tony-nominated book by Craig Lucas, The Light in the Piazza premiered on Broadway in 2005.
Mitchell received Tony, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Awards for his performance in Kiss Me, Kate. He also received Tony nominations for his performances in Man of La Mancha, August Wilson’s King Hedley II, and Ragtime, and he was recently inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. Other notable Broadway shows include Kiss of the Spider Woman, Jelly’s Last Jam, and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. In 2016, Mitchell returned to Broadway in Shuffle Along and received his most recent Tony Award for his work as Chairman of the Board of the Actors Fund.
Production Photos: The Light in the Piazza in London
Mitchell has been a special guest performer on Playbill Travel’s Broadway on the High Seas cruises. Cabins are now on sale for Broadway in the Great Northwest, Playbill Travel’s first domestic cruise featuring Kate Baldwin, Tedd Firth, Christopher Fitzgerald, Aaron Lazar, and Faith Prince (April 26–May 4, 2020), and for Broadway on the Mediterranean (August 31–September 7, 2020), featuring Audra McDonald, Will Swenson, Gavin Creel, Caissie Levy and Lindsay Mendez, and for Broadway on the Nile (December 27,2020–January 7, 2021), with performers soon to be announced. To book a suite or stateroom, call Playbill Travel at 866-455-6789 or visit PlaybillTravel.com.
Playbill Vault’s Today in Theatre History: September 10
1915 Fanny Brice is reviewed in Variety for her performance at the Palace. Variety says that when she “learns to refrain from starting to disrobe before she is out of sight of the audience, her new act will be a step—several of them, in fact—in the right direction.”
1942 Josephine Bentham and Herschel Williams‘ comedy Janie begins a 642-performance run at Henry Miller’s Theatre. Antoinette Perry directs the play about three teenage girls who throw a secret party for soldiers at a neighboring army camp.
1959 The Crooked Mile opens at London’s Cambridge Theatre. There are 164 performances of the musical by Peter Wildblood. The tale of two Soho street gangs stars Millicent Martin and Elisabeth Welch.
2000 Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s Cats closes on Broadway after nearly 18 years and 7,485 performances. The final performance is held at 6 PM for an invitation-only audience. It keeps its position as the longest-running show in Broadway history for just six years, before being overtaken by another Lloyd Webber show, The Phantom of the Opera. Cats returns to Broadway sixteen years later, in a revival starring Leona Lewis as Grizabella.
2001 Mandy Patinkin kicks off his Kidults concert tour at the Neil Simon Theatre on Broadway.
2002 The first national tour of The Producers launches in Pittsburgh, starring Lewis J. Stadlen and Don Stephenson as Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom.
2012 Christopher Curtis and Thomas Meehan‘s musical Chaplin, depicting the life of screen legend Charlie Chaplin and chronicling the rise and fall of the infamous Little Tramp, opens on Broadway at the Barrymore Theatre for a 135 performance run. Rob McClure stars in the title role, opposite Erin Mackey as wife Oona O’Neil, Christiane Noll as mother Hannah Chaplin, and Jenn Colella as villainous gossip columnist Hedda Hopper.
2016 Fun Home, Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron‘s Tony Award-winning musical based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, closes on Broadway after 582 performances.
Today’s Birthdays: Thomas Jefferson 1856. Adele Astaire 1896. Brian Murray 1937. Harry Groener 1951. Amy Irving 1953. Kate Burton 1957. Jeff Marx 1970. Misty Copeland 1982.
Watch highlights from the 2012 Broadway production of Chaplin:
BROADWAY BRIDGES Participating Shows Announced For Fall 2019
The Broadway League, with the support of the New York City Department of Education DOE and the United Federation of Teachers UFT, has announced 15 participating shows for the fall 2019 season of Broadway Bridges.
BWW Exclusive: See Megan Hilty Sing ‘Walkin’ After Midnight’ from PATSY & LORETTA
BroadwayWorld has an an exclusive video of Megan Hiltywho plays Patsy in the upcoming Lifetime movie aoePatsy Lorettaa,singing aoeWalkin’ After Midnight.a The video is timed to country icon Patsy Cline’s birthday today in celebration of the film, which also stars Jessie Mueller,premiering on October19.
Playbill Vault’s Today in Theatre History: September 8
1914 A farce about selling soap called It Pays to Advertise, by Roi Cooper Megrue and Walter Hackett, opens at the Cohan Theatre. It stars Grant Mitchell and Ruth Shepley.
1925 Comedian Joe E. Brown toplines Captain Jinks, a musical version of Clyde Fitch‘s hit comedy Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines. The show runs 167 performances.
1932 Jean Bart‘s melodrama The Man Who Reclaimed His Head opens on Broadway at the Broadhurst Theatre for a 28 performance run. Claude Rains, Stuart Casey, and Jean Arthur star in the play about a brilliant but hideously deformed man who is driven to madness when he finds out his employer is having an affair with his wife.
1943 The wartime revue Laugh Time opens a 126-performance run with an enviable cast featuring Ethel Waters, Bert Wheeler, Fay Wray, and the dance team of Buck and Bubbles.
1953 Legendary flop musical Carnival in Flanders opens at the New Century Theatre. Despite a score by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke, a book by Preston Sturges, and a famous leading man in the person of John Raitt, the show ekes out a 6-performance run. Notably, leading lady Dolores Gray wins the 1954 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, the briefest run to be so honored.
1975 Jazz titans Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Count Basie make their Broadway debuts in The Concert at the Uris Theatre. The sold-out two week engagement features Sinatra and Fitzgerald singing against the backdrop of Basie’s 18-man band (with 20 additional strings added for Sinatra’s set).
1977 Zero Mostel, star of stage and screen, dies at age 62. His most notable work included leading the original Broadway casts of Fiddler On The Roof and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way To The Forum and starring in the Mel Brooks film, The Producers.
1999 Off-Broadway’s Century Theatre becomes The Exact Center of the Universe as Joan Vail Thorne’s comedy moves to a commercial run. The Southern-fried family comedy features Frances Sternhagen as a matron unsettled by her son’s romance. John Tillinger directs the star and a cast that also features Reed Birney, Marge Redmond, Tracy Thorne, and Sloane Shelton. It runs 142 performances.
2004 British actor Fritha Goodey, 32, who had been scheduled to star with David Suchet in an upcoming Cambridge production of Terrence Rattigan‘s Man and Boy, is found dead of stab wounds to the chest at her home in London.
2009 Jordan Roth, who joined Jujamcyn Theaters in 2005 as resident producer and became vice president the following year, succeeds Rocco Landesman as president of the company, which owns and operates five major Broadway houses.
2009 Army Archerd, who chronicled the projects and practitioners of show business for a half a century through his column in Variety, dies at age 87. Archerd—whose unusual first name was an abbreviation of Armand—wrote a 900-word column, titled “Just for Variety,” from 1953 to 2005, and continued contributing to Daily Variety and writing a blog for Variety.com through July 2009.
2016 Spamilton, a satirical musical by Forbidden Broadway creator Gerard Alessandrini, opens at Off-Broadway’s Triad cabaret. Inspired by the Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning Hamilton, the show both celebrates and parodies the landmark musical, along with much of the rest of Broadway. Originally announced as an 18-performance limited engagement, the show extends at the Triad before transferring to an open-ended engagement at the 47th Street Theatre/The Puerto Rican Traveling Theater in June 2017.
Today’s Birthdays: Howard Dietz 1896. Jean-Louis Barrault 1910. Sir Harry Secombe 1921. Sid Caesar 1922. Teal Wicks 1982. Justin Peck 1987.
Watch clips of Justin Peck’s Tony Award-winning choreography for the 2018 Broadway revival of Carousel:
BWW Interview: Vanessa Williams Shares Why Symphony Shows Make her Heart Sing
Next week, Atlanta audiences get to witness a superstar take the stage with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
Mac Wellman’s The Invention of Tragedy Begins at The Flea
Performances begin September 7 at The Flea Theater for the world premiere of Mac Wellman’s The Invention of Tragedy. The new play, directed by Meghan Finn, is part of The Flea’s festival of Wellman works celebrating the three-time Obie Award-winning playwright and poet, as well as one of The Flea’s co-founders.
The festival, Mac Wellman: Perfect Catastrophes, A Festival of Plays, kicked off August 24 and continues through November 1.
In The Invention of Tragedy, a chorus of students are trying like the devil to tell a simple story—perhaps the story about the tragedy of the Sandwich Man—with sandwich boards upon which nothing is written, and hence, say nothing. The play is an examination of the post-9/11 world and America’s general and genial acceptance of the Iraq war.
The cast is made up of Sophia Aranda, Mirra Kardonne, Alice Marcondes, Sarah Alice Shull, Renee Harrison, Macy Lacenta, Madelyn Rose Robinson, Zoe Zimin, Drita Kabashi, Susan Ly, and Ana Semedo.
The creative team features scenic designers Christopher and Justin Swader, costume designer Alice Tavener, lighting designer Brian Alduous, sound designer Espii Procter, choreographer Chanon Judson, composer Michael Cassedy, production stage manager Haley Gordon, and assistant lighting designer Michael Hernandez. Jake Beckhard and Ran Xia are the assistant directors on the show.
Mac Wellman: Perfect Catastrophes, A Festival of Plays features five works by Wellman. As a part of the festival, The Flea will also hold a symposium examining Wellman’s impact on the American theatre October 4–6.