The Peter Pan-inspired Fly takes flight at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego February 18.
Starring in the musical are Lincoln Clauss (Bat Out of Hell) as Peter Pan, Storm Lever (Summer: The Donna Summer Musical) as Wendy, and The Prom alum Isabelle McCalla as Tink.
Directed by Jeffrey Seller, Fly is based on the J.M. Barrie novel Peter and Wendy with a book by Pulitzer Prize finalist Rajiv Joseph (Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo), music by Bill Sherman (In the Heights) and lyrics by Kirsten Childs and Joseph.
Also in the cast are Broadway alums Eric Anderson (Waitress) as Hook, Nehal Joshi (All My Sons) as Smee, Jeremy Davis (Cats) as Noodler, Nick Eibler (The Prom) as Nibs, Collin Jeffery (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) as Curly, Daniel Quadrino (Wicked) as Toodles, and Daniel Stewart Sherman (Kinky Boots) as Max. Additional principals include Victor E. Chan as Boris, Audrey Cymone as Slightly/Jane, Liisi LaFontaine as Crocodile, Sean Pope as Twins, and David Price as Skylights.
Rounding out the ensemble are Hettie Barnhill, Dayna Jarae Dantzler, Victoria Fiore, Shonica Gooden, Amara Granderson, Masumi Iwai, Emily Grace Kersey, Kamille Upshaw, and Naomi C. Walley, with Lillith Freund, Jimmy Larkin, Jake Millgard, and Alexia Sky as swings.
The creative team includes scenic designer Anna Louizos, costume designer Paul Tazewell, lighting designer Howell Binkley, sound designer Nevin Steinberg, music supervisor Will Van Dyke, aerial designer Pichón Baldinu, wig designer Charles LaPointe, makeup designer Joe Dulude II, fight director Steve Rankin, dramaturg Gabriel Greene, and production stage manager Anjee Nero. Casting is by Patrick Goodwin of Telsey + Company.
Fly is scheduled to play through March 29 in the Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Theatre.
Broadway’s Come From Away, now in its third smash hit year, hit the stage for CUT FROM AWAY THE UNTOLD STORIES SONGS, a one night only concert event at Feinstein’s54 Below
Producer Scott Rudin, director Ivo van Hove, and more will appear on CBS’ 60 Minutes February 16 to reveal their fresh take on the classic West Side Story for the Broadway 2020 revival.
The show officially opens February 20, having delayed its previously scheduled February 10, due to a performer injury. In their piece, host Bill Whitaker and 60 Minutes reveals footage from the first day of rehearsal as well as interviews with cast members and the creative team. The inside look focuses heavily on the re-imagining of the classic musical by Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, and Jerome Robbins—particularly this production’s use of video images.
Adaptations of novels can be a tricky business. Novels are inherently quiet, with time for exposition, internal monologue, and the meandering passage of time; theatre demands urgency and action. In adapting Khaled Hosseini’s second novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, director Carey Perloff and playwright Ursula Rani Sarma tackled the challenge of boiling the author’s sweeping prose down to a “streamlined piece of dramatic fiction.”
With that goal in mind, both women separately chose a place in the book where they wanted to start the play. “We both marked the same page,” says Perloff with a laugh: the middle of the book, when a bomb strikes Kabul and orphans teenager Laila.
“I was really conscious of starting our story with a bang—literally,” seconds Sarma. After the blast, Laila’s neighbor Rasheed rescues her from the rubble and takes her as a second wife, causing palpable tension with his wife Mariam.
The book came after Hosseini’s runaway hit The Kite Runner and focuses on two Afghan women, both oppressed by husband and country, pitted against each other who learn how to coexist to survive.
“They couldn’t be more opposite in how they see life, yet it’s their coming together,” according to Sarma, that compels the narrative. That relationship became the spine of the play, which first premiered in 2017 at ACT in San Francisco, and now plays Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage through March 1. “There are almost no plays about female friendship, and yet, all of us who are women know that the lodestar of your life are your female friends,” says Perloff.
On the, literal, same page, Perloff and Sarma carved a piece that honored the poetry of the novel but expressed it theatrically. From the get-go, Perloff could visualize the production. Vibrant with color, the set echoes the desert of Afghanistan as it devolves during war. “[Scenic designer Ken MacDonald] took chicken wire, as if from rubble, and made it into these mountains up against a drop that is cut like a mountain range. The drop can open and reveal a beautiful sky of any color or shut and be an interior,” says Perloff. “It’s a swirling world of these doors [that make rooms and hallways] against a mountain landscape, on a floor that’s painted with this Afghan pattern. It’s very abstract and supple.”
Arena Stage
The play moves through space (and time—through flashbacks) with a lyrical fluidity to capture the atmosphere of the city of Kabul, the realities of living in a war zone, and the authenticity of Afghani culture. An anthropologist as well as a director, Perloff is consistently drawn to stories about other cultures. “I deeply believe in cultural authenticity and in people telling their own stories, but I also deeply believe, maybe because I trained as an anthropologist, that our job in the world is to try to do a deep dive into other cultures and build a bridge,” she says.
In building the play for the 2017 staging, Perloff and Sarma collaborated with a cultural consultant as well as numerous members of the Afghan community, which numbers at 250,000 in the Bay Area.
“They taught us everything from how to sweep using an Afghan broom, to how you make sabzi, to what happened during the Soviet era when women could be educated, to how to wear a burka,” says Perloff. But more than these tangible skills, hearing the true stories of Afghani women—some of whom experienced domestic violence, like Laila and Mariam—informed the soul of Sarma’s writing.
With Suns she hopes to illuminate the endurance and resilience of Laila and Mariam and women like them, while also realizing that the situations in the homes halfway across the globe may not be so far from home. “You wanted people to be able to emote, to empathize, for some of these women’s trials and tribulations to feel like they could be yours,” she says. “What the play has to say about love and endurance and survival, it’s very much worth listening to, especially for a contemporary audience.”
With Suns, Perloff and Sarma manage not only to start with a bang, but make an impact.
On February 14, The New York Pops was joined by guest artists Mandy Gonzalez, Carrie Manolakos, and Alex Newell for I’m Every Woman Divas On Stage. The concert saluted the power of the female voice, and paid tribute to Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Barbra Streisand, Adele, and fellow icons who have transformed the world through song.
Performances begin February 14 at Playwrights Horizons for the New York City premiere of Michael Friedman and Daniel Goldstein’s Unknown Soldier. Directed by Trip Cullman and choreographed by Patrick McCollum, the musical is the final work by the late Friedman to premiere in New York.
In Unknown SoldierMargo Seibert stars as Ellen, a woman who’s inherited her grandmother’s home—and with it, a clue that her understanding of her family and of herself are incomplete.
Rounding out the cast are Kerstin Anderson (My Fair Lady,The Sound of Music) as Lucy Lemay, Zoe Glick (Frozen,Les Misérables) as Young Ellen, Erik Lochtefeld (The Light Years,King Kong) as Andrew, Oscar winner Estelle Parsons (Miss Margarida’s Way, August: Osage County) as Lucy Anderson, Thom Sesma (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Sweeney Todd) as Doctor, and Perry Sherman (Fun Home,Burn All Night, Amélie) as Francis.
Margo Seibert Marc J. Franklin
Unknown Soldier follows Ellen Rabinowitz, who, in 2003, finds herself back in her inherited childhood home in Troy, New York, where she was raised by her resentful grandmother Lucy, recently passed. Cleaning it out, she discovers a mysterious photograph of an anonymous soldier, returned from battle in WWI, tucked away in a box of keepsakes. The musical unravels a delicate tangle of family lore, as Ellen chases the extraordinary story that unlocks her history—and charts her future.
With a book and lyrics by Goldstein, and music by Friedman, Unknown Soldier is scheduled through March 29.
The ensemble is made up of James Crichton (Jasper in Deadland, Peter and the Starcatcher), Emilie Kouatchou (Oklahoma!,Sweeney Todd), Jay McKenzie (Beautiful), and Jessica Naimy (Ink,Honeymoon in Vegas).
The creative team includes scenic designer Mark Wendland, co-costume designers Clint Ramos and Jacob A. Climer, lighting designer Ben Stanton, sound designer Leon Rothenberg, projection designer Lucy Mackinnon, hair and wig designer J. Jared Janas, co-orchestrator Marco Paguia, music director Julie McBride, music coordinator Tomoko Akaboshi, and stage manager Lisa Ann Chernoff.
Unknown Soldier received its world premiere at the Williamstown Theater Festival.
Sony Masterworks Broadway has announced the release of Sing Street ORIGINAL BROADWAY CAST RECORDING, an album of music from the musical adaptation of John Carney’s indie hit film. Available for preorder now, the album will be released digitally Thursday, March 26, coinciding with the show’s Broadway debut at the Lyceum Theatre that same evening, with the physical CD release to follow on Friday, April 17.
