The free online event will take place tonight,Monday, March 8 8pm EST, as part of the ‘Studio Tenn Talks Conversations with Patrick Cassidy’ series. Check back right here at BroadwayWorld to watch live
Read on for some more theatre headlines that you may have missed in today’s news, including a few items about former Hamilton stars.
Renée Elise Goldsberry and Javier Muñoz Cast in Disney Junior Animated Series Eureka!
Hamilton original cast members Renée Elise Goldsberry and Javier Muñoz have joined the cast of Eureka!, an upcoming Disney Junior animated series. The show will follow a young inventor living in prehistoric times and is set to debut later this year. Ruth Righi will voice Eureka with Goldsberry and Lil Rel Howery as her parents, Roxy and Rollo, and Muñoz as her teacher, Ohm. Broadway alum Devin Trey Campbell (Kinky Boots) will also voice a character named Barry. The series is produced by animation studio Brown Bag Films in association with Disney Junior.
Broadway at the Critics Choice Awards
After a posthumous Golden Globe Awards win last month, the late Chadwick Boseman won a Critics Choice Award March 7 for his performance in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. The Netflix adaptation of the August Wilson play also received Best Costume Design for Tony winner Ann Roth and Best Hair and Makeup design. Meanwhile, the Disney+ release of Hamilton won Best Movie Made for Television, while one of its stars, Leslie Odom Jr., won as a co-writer on the song “Speak Now” from One Night in Miami… (also based on a play). Additional winners (from across the pond) included Tony nominee Carey Mulligan for Promising Young Woman, said film’s director-screenwriter Emerald Fennell (also the book writer of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella), and Olivier nominee Hannah Waddingham for Ted Lasso.
Broadway & Beyond Will Offer Résumé & Interview Workshop
Broadway & Beyond: Access for Stage Managers of Color, created to provide opportunity and education for stage managers of color, will host its second event, Résumé & Interview Workshop: Always Be Prepared!, March 16 from 6–7:30 PM ET. The evening, facilitated by Patch Schwadron (career counselor supervisor of The Career Center at The Actors Fund) and stage manager Sherry Cohen, will offer tips for creating an effective résumé and cover letter, how to nail a job interview, and presentation skills. The event will also serve as a networking opportunity for stage managers of color from around the country. Attendance is free, and interested candidates must register online at BroadwayBeyondAccess.com by 5 PM ET on March 14. (Those seeking individualized feedback on their résumés at the workshop should include it with the advance registration.)
Patti Smith to Honor Robert Mapplethorpe at Brooklyn Museum
Patti Smith will perform an afternoon of poetry and music March 9 at 12:30 PM ET at The Brooklyn Museum as part of the ongoing statewide NY PopsUp festival. Singer-songwriter, author, and poet Smith will honor the memory of artist Robert Mapplethorpe on the anniversary of his death, March 9, 1989. The performance, a personal thank you to the museum’s workers, can be seen on the festival’s Instagram page at @NYPopsUp.
Dance Lab New York Announces New Documentary First Try
A new film will follow DLNY artists Tilly Evans-Krueger, Ja’ Malik, and Ariel Rivka as they develop a number of dance pieces. First Try premieres on YouTube March 29 at 8 PM ET. “As an organization dedicated to supporting choreographers, it’s a privilege for DLNY to create a film that showcases the passion and fortitude of these artists, and introduce audiences to three special dance makers who have come through our doors this past year,” says Founding Artistic Director Josh Prince. First Try will also feature appearances from Andy Blankenbuehler, Robbie Fairchild, Lorin Latarro, and more. To register for the free premiere event, click here.
Watchas Richard chats with Broadway favorite Eva Noblezada, who will soon join Seth Rudetsky for two very special concerts on Sunday, March 73pm and 8pm.
March 12, 2021 marks a year since the COVID-19 pandemic gripped New York, forcing theatres shutdown. While theatres remain dark, the driving force of Broadway is not its stages but rather the people who make it come to life performance after performance. In honor of the many artists who have navigated the pandemic off the stage, the Ensemblist reunited over 90 performers to the theatre district for a portrait with theatre photographer Michaelah Reynolds.
“To mark the anniversary of Broadway’s shutdown, we wanted to create a contemporary take on Langdon Clay’s iconic image of 42nd Street from 1979,” the Ensemblist co-creator Mo Brady explained. “Working with photographer Michaelah Reynolds, more than 90 New York stage actors came together to be photographed along the same block adhering to COVID precautions. Although the images were taken more than 40 years apart, they each show one of the world’s most famous roads in a time of crisis. Our goal was to create a striking visual that simultaneously showed isolation and community.”
Featuring performers from Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations, Aladdin, Beetlejuice, Caroline, or Change, Chicago, Come From Away, Company, Frozen, Hadestown, Hamilton, Jagged Little Pill, Mean Girls, Moulin Rouge!, Mrs. Doubtfire, Once Upon a One More Time, The Book of Mormon, The Inheritance, The Lion King, The Phantom of the Opera, Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, West Side Story, and Wicked.
Today we celebrate the birthday of gravity-defying composer, Stephen Schwartz
1933 Maxwell Anderson indicts Both Your Houses, a political story at the Royale Theatre. Morris Carnovsky is in the cast of the Theatre Guild production. The play wins the 1933 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
1940 Ernest Hemingway details the Spanish Civil War in The Fifth Column. The Theatre Guild production re-worked by Benjamin Glazer stars Franchot Tone and Katherine Locke.
1948 Composer Stephen Schwartz is born in New York. He writes music and lyrics for Broadway musicals including Godspell, Pippin, and Wicked. He also writes the songs for the animated film The Prince of Egypt, and lyrics to Alan Menken‘s music for The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Pocahontas.
1962 There was vaudeville, but This Was Burlesque. Ann Corio stars in the revue, which runs Off-Broadway for over 1,500 performances.
1969 The morality of the creation of the hydrogen bomb is explored in Heinar Kipphardt‘s In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, opening at the Vivian Beaumont Theater for a run of 162 performances. The cast includes Joseph Wiseman, Philip Bosco, Herbert Berghof, and Paul Rudd.
1974 The two surviving members of the Andrews Sisters, Patty Andrews and Maxene Andrews, are featured in Over Here!, a musical set in the world of USO shows during World War II. The supporting cast includes future stars John Travolta, Janie Sell, Ann Reinking, Treat Williams, and Samuel E. Wright.
1978 Brian Clark ponders Whose Life Is It, Anyway? His drama stars Tom Conti as a paralyzed man eager to end his life. After a run at London’s Mermaid Theatre, it transfers to the Savoy for a run of 672 performances. The following year, Conti wins a Tony for the role on Broadway. A return engagement in 1980 changes the lead character’s gender for Mary Tyler Moore.
1978 Micheal MacLiammoir dies. Co-founder of Dublin’s Gate Theatre, he is remembered as an actor, director, designer, and playwright. He employed a young Orson Welles who had traveled to Ireland. He later appeared as Iago in Welles’ film version of Othello.
1983 The “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” ballet comes to life once more as the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart musical On Your Toes is revived on Broadway at the Virginia Theatre. The revival outruns its predecessor to play 505 performances.
1989 “Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to find he’s been turned into a giant cockroach.” It was a punchline in The Producers, but Franz Kafka‘s story Metamorphosis becomes an actual Broadway drama, starring Mikhail Baryshnikov as Gregor. It runs 96 performances at the Barrymore Theatre.
1993 Jeffrey, Paul Rudnick‘s “AIDS comedy,” as one reviewer calls it, opens Off-Broadway at the Minetta Lane Theatre. It stars John Michael Higgins, and runs through January 16, 1994.
2002 One Mo’ Time, one of the longest-running Off-Broadway revues of the 1980s, opens on Broadway, but does not enjoy a repeat of its success. It closes after a month’s run.
2003 From Britain’s National Theatre comes Vincent in Brixton, a portrait of artist Vincent Van Gogh as a young man (Jochum ten Haaf), struggling to support himself as an art dealer, falling in love with an older woman (Clare Higgins), and absorbing images that he will someday turn into masterpieces.
2008 Debbie Allen‘s all-black revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, starring Anika Noni Rose as Maggie and James Earl Jones as Big Daddy, opens at the Broadhurst Theatre. The production also features Phylicia Rashad as Big Mama and Terrence Howard as Brick.
2011 A Broadway revival of Jason Miller‘s Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning 1972 drama That Championship Season opens on Broadway at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre. Brian Cox, Jim Gaffigan, Chris Noth, Jason Patric (whose late father wrote the play), and Kiefer Sutherland star in the Scranton, Pennsylvania-set drama about a team of high school basketball players who reunite to hash out the past on the anniversary of their winning game.
2014 Robert Schenkkan‘s political drama All the Way, starring Bryan Cranston as U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, opens on Broadway at the Neil Simon Theatre. It wins Tony Awards for Best Play, and for Cranston’s performance.
2016 Lupita Nyong’o makes her Broadway debut in Danai Gurira‘s Eclipsed, about a group of women being held captive in the African nation of Liberia. The production was first seen Off-Broadway at The Public Theater in 2015.
Today’s Birthdays: Oscar Strauss (1870-1954). Ring Lardner (1885-1933). Lou Costello (1906-1959). Ella Logan (1910-1969). Shuler Hensley (b. 1967).
Samuel L. Jackson, Danielle Brooks, and John David Washington are set to star in a Broadway revival of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Piano Lesson in 2022. The production will be directed by LaTanya Richard Jackson.
Arts outreach organization Off The Lane has established The Ann Reinking Scholarship, taking a cue from the late Broadway performer and choreographer’s own life story and offering a $5,000 grant to a young dancer moving to New York City. The funds will help them in their artistic endeavors, much as Reinking herself traveled cross-country from Seattle to start her own career.
Reinking would go on to become a confidant and romantic partner of director-choreographer Bob Fosse, making star turns on stage in Chicago and Sweet Charity among others, choreographing the former’s long-running Broadway revival herself in Fosse’s style and winning a Tony Award. Reinking passed away in December 2020.
The scholarship will be open to dancers of all disciplines, including Broadway, modern, jazz, and ballet, with the first award scheduled to be given in November. Submissions will be accepted beginning in May.
“I believe Annie would have loved having her name on the Ann Reinking Scholarship Program,” says Reinking’s husband and scholarship advisory board member Peter Talbert. “Like so many young dancers coming to New York, she struggled to find a foothold in a strange city. Short of money and friends, Annie persevered and found her way forward, thanks to some helping hands. This program will offer others following in her footsteps that helping hand, to ensure that they can succeed in their desire to make their dream come true. That’s a legacy worthy of her name and reputation.”
Joining Talbert on the scholarship’s advisory board will be Hinton Battle, Gregory Butler, Gary Chryst, Mindy Cooper, Dylis Croman, Charlotte d’Amboise, Erzebet-Liz Foldi, Joel Grey, Marilu Henner, Bebe Neuwirth, Chita Rivera, Tommy Tune, William Whitener, and Chris Reinking Stuart.
For more information on The Ann Reinking Scholarship and Off The Lane’s other programs, visit OffTheLane.org.