/* Mobile Menu Retract ---------------------------------*/

Playbill Vault’s Today in Theatre History: September 25

by | Sep 24, 2021 | New Musical News Feed

1928 Chee-Chee, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart‘s musical about castration in ancient China, opens to searing reviews and goes on to close after just 31 performances, the team’s shortest run.

1935 Winterset, Maxwell Anderson‘s verse drama about a man determined to find justice after his father was wrongfully executed, opens on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theatre. Starring Richard Bennett, Eduardo Ciannelli, and Burgess Meredith, it runs 179 performances before heading on a national tour, and returns to Broadway for an additional 16 performances after winning the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play. In response to the Pulitzer Prize being awarded to Idiot’s Delight over Winterset, New York Times drama critic Brooks Atkinson writes “If Winterset does not mean more to the arts and the thought of the theatre today and tomorrow than Idiot’s Delight—in short, if it is not a better play now and always—then, as John Anderson said in his celebrated renunciation of the Critics Circle award, ‘I am Admiral Dewey.'”

1945 Despite reports of bad acting and poor production quality, the new Tennessee Williams and Donald Windham play, You Touched Me, opens at the Booth Theatre, beginning a tepidly-reviewed run of 109 performances. Williams and Windham wrote the play based on a D. H. Lawrence story for stars Montgomery Clift, Edmund Gwenn, and Marianne Stewart.

1961 Frank Fay, the vaudevillian and star of Harvey, dies at age 69. The actor, who at one time was married to Barbara Stanwyck, was confined to a hospital the previous week in Santa Monica, California and deemed legally incompetent.

1963 John Osborne‘s Luther, the story of the priest who launched the Protestant Reformation, opens on Broadway, en route to a 211-performance run and the 1964 Tony Award as Best Play.

1963 Sammy Davis, Jr. is reported in Variety as having turned down Laurence Olivier‘s offer to be Iago to his Othello. Davis feels he is just not ready for the dramatic demands of the role.

1979 Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice are the princes of Broadway as their new musical, Evita, opens at the Broadway Theatre. The very successful musical continues to run for 1,567 performances. Patti LuPone stars as Eva Peron, with Mandy Patinkin as Che Guevara, the quasi-narrator of the musical. Clive Barnes of the New York Post reports that “Evita is a stunning, exhilarating theatrical experience, especially if you don’t think about it too much.”

1997 Riverdance, the showcase of Irish dance and music that played sold-out engagements in Dublin and London in 1995, comes to New York for a third run at Radio City Music Hall. The show, which had two runs in 1996, returns to the Manhattan venue once more in 1998 before finally restaging itself for an official Broadway run March 16, 2000 to August 26, 2001.

2003 By a macabre coincidence, Edward Said, the Palestinian-born Columbia University professor who was the likely model for a character in the play Omnium Gatherum, dies, the same day the Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros drama opens Off-Broadway. Said was 67, and suffered from leukemia.

2008 Harry Potter film star Daniel Radcliffe makes his Broadway debut opposite Tony and Olivier Award winner Richard Griffiths in a revival of Equus. Peter Shaffer‘s Tony-winning drama tells the story of a psychiatrist (Griffiths) who becomes absorbed in the strange case of a young man (Radcliffe) who blinds a stable of horses.

2011 Perfect Crime, Warren Manzi’s long-running thriller that opened in 1987, celebrates its 10,000th performance Off-Broadway. The cast includes original cast member Catherine Russell, who has been with the show for 24 years, securing herself a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records.

2018 The world premiere of Theresa Rebeck’s Bernhardt/Hamlet opens on Broadway at the American Airlines Theatre. Janet McTeer stars as trailblazing 19th-century French actor Sarah Bernhardt, who famously took on the title role in Hamlet in 1899.

2018 Merle Debuskey, one of the most prominent press agents ever to ply his trade on Broadway, and Joe Papp‘s right-hand man during the New York Shakespeare Festival‘s first decades, dies at age 95. He represented more than 500 Broadway and Off-Broadway shows over the course of his career, and was president of the press agents’ union ATPAM for 25 years.

More of Today’s Birthdays: Charles B. Cochran (1872-1951). Harriet Hoctor (1905-1977). Robert Wright (1914-2005). Mark Hamill (b. 1951). Christopher Reeve (1952-2004). Jayne Houdyshell (b. 1954). Michael McGrath (b. 1957). Tate Donovan (b. 1963). Catherine Zeta-Jones (b. 1969).

Look Back at Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin in Evita on Broadway

Cast Complete for Return of Summer: The Donna Summer Musical North American Tour

by | Sep 23, 2021 | New Musical News Feed

Casting is complete for the return of the North American tour of Summer: The Donna Summer Musical, which will have technical rehearsals at the Pullo Center in York, Pennsylvania, followed by an official opening November 16–21 at Pittsburgh’s Benedum Center. The tour will subsequently visit more than 40 cities during the 2021–2022 touring season.

Sharing the role of the late, multiple Grammy winner Donna Summer will be Brittny Smith as Diva Donna, Charis Gullage as Disco Donna, and Amahri Edwards-Jones as Duckling Donna. The non-Equity tour will also feature Porter Lee Anderson III as Andrew Gaines, John Guaragna as Bruce Sudano, and Christopher Lewis as Neil Bogart.

The ensemble includes Robert Peter Ayala, Layla Brent-Tompkins, Mia Davidson, Kayleigh Hegarty, Ciara Jones, Lily Kren, Marisel Lopez, Diane Meck, Francisco Risso, Lathan A. Roberts, Nissi Shalome, David Tanciar, Meridien Terrell, Emilee Theno, Stephen Vaught, Lamont Whitaker, and Aubrey Young.

Summer has a book by Tony nominee Colman Domingo, Robert Cary, and Tony winner Des McAnuff, with songs by Summer, Giorgio Moroder, Paul Jabara, and others.

This new touring production is directed by Lauren L. Sobon and choreographed by Natalie Caruncho, based on the original direction by Tony winner McAnuff and original choreography by Tony winner Sergio Trujillo.

The tour also has associate choreography by Angelica Beliard, musical supervision by JP Meyer, music direction by Erika R. Gamez, scenic design by Robert Andrew Kovach, costumes by Tony winner Paul Tazewell, lighting by Russell A. Thompson, sound by David Temby, and projections by Chris McCleary.

Summer: The Donna Summer Musical, which opened April 23, 2018, at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, ended its Broadway run December 30, 2018, after 27 previews and 288 performances. The Broadway company starred Tony Award winner LaChanze (The Color Purple), Ariana DeBose (Hamilton), and newcomer Storm Lever. LaChanze and DeBose were Tony-nominated for their performances.

Summer includes more than 20 of Summer’s well-known hits, including “Love to Love You, Baby,” “Hot Stuff,” and “MacArthur Park.” The production arrived on Broadway after a developmental world premiere at La Jolla Playhouse in late 2017.

The tour is produced by APEX Touring.

For additional information visit TheDonnaSummerMusical.com.

Turning on the incubator

by | Sep 21, 2021 | Fly Plan | 0 comments

The first time I heard the word “incubator” I was five years old (it was 1947 a few months before my sixth birthday).  My younger brother, Bill, was born in March.  But he was a little guy and couldn’t come home right away.  He had to be kept in the hospital in an ‘incubator.”  Kudos to my parents for being able to explain to me what that meant!

Today I am talking about a different kind of incubator.  It’s not a machine in which to hatch chicks or speed underweight newborns home to their families.  It’s an idea, and I think it’s long overdue.  The idea, sponsored by the Shanghai Grand Theatre and Beijing Damai Culture of Alibaba, Inc, is to nurture writers and their writing in an ambitious plan to create stageable new works of musical theatre in China.

The idea goes way beyond anything I personally can do to help.  In includes using a network of high schools, universities, and other theatres to provide the testing of new musicals as they mature and ripen with audience exposure and feedback.  We have a few organizations in the United States who are attempting to do something similar, but nothing as permanent and on the scale of the Fly Plan Incubator program.  This is my shout out to TheatreWorks in Mountain View, California, The Village Theatre in Issaquah, Washington, the O’Neill Center in New London, Connecticut, the National Alliance for Musical Theatre fall festival of new works in New York, and (sadly) the now deceased Theatre Building Chicago Musical Program.  All of these programs have had varying degrees of nurturing support and audience exposure for new works, a respectable number of which ended up with long runs on Broadway.  (Apologies to any deserving programs I have left out.)

There are major regional theatres in the United States with a track record of successfully launching new works, namely the Old Globe in San Diego, the 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle, the La Jolla Playhouse, the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta for instance.  But each of these institutions works with a Broadway producer’s enhancement dollars, sometimes as much as a couple of million dollars per production, which means these pathways are not available to many talented writers.

I am now in week ten of a ten-week workshop during which five teams of dedicated wordsmiths and composers have performed a series of challenging exercises designed to flex their musical theatre muscles to conquer the basic ABCs of the craft.  Now, we are about to enter the second phase of the project, a term of six months.  Each writing team will have one-on-one coaching from my team which includes myself, Sheila Wurmser and Ross Kalling, as well as a producer assigned by the Fly Plan project.  I am not privy to the developmental plan beyond the end of the second phase, but I do know the general idea is to further test and tighten the material based on experience with actors, directors, and audiences.  Sounds like heaven to me.

And what will we be working on?  It’s much too soon to say a lot about the shows since they are all works in progress.  However, here’s a thumbnail for each of the five teams:

  1. Becoming a Mother, written by CHEN Tianran and Ke Li. Essentially a revue about the joys and miseries of motherhood.
  2. Everything is Fine, written by ZHAO Yu’an and WANG Haibei. A young man is stricken with a potentially terminal disease and must cope with depression, family, and friends as he matures and finds true purpose in his life.
  3. The Assassin and the 10th Princess, written by BI Dan and WU Yicheng. An eighteenth century Chinese princess begins a correspondence with a French revolutionary, also a woman, as they both deal with political and social upheaval.
  4. Painted Skin, Dusting Heart, written by ZHANG Qian, ZANG Sijia and LIU Chang. A traditional Chinese myth comes to life when a fox in human form comes to test love and fidelity in marriage and personal relationships.
  5. Room of Hers, written by CAO Yining and WANG Ziwei. Three famous deceased Chinese women known for their poetry argue about their place in the pantheon as well as the lot of women in the world in general.

Okay.  I realized as I was writing the above descriptions that I am not doing justice to the work of the eleven writers involved.  These very brief notes are no better than a TV Guide log line, if that good!  However, I wanted you all to have at least a hint of the breadth of work these writers are doing, and the wide range of topics and resonance the works are likely to have.

This is such an exciting time to be writing for the musical theatre!  The world is in constant upheaval, and the form of the contemporary musical is in flux.  On the one hand, a seemingly “traditional” romantic story such as The Band’s Visit, features authentic-sounding Egyptian music and there isn’t a moment in the show that smacks of Tin Pan Alley or Vaudeville, even though the composer, David Yazbek, is comfortable with all those sounds.  On the other hand, a seemingly “contemporary” musical with a huge audience such as Hamilton, gives us a theatricalized version of the kind of Hip-Hop music of our day while the staging and storytelling owe much more to Oklahoma than to the Gangsta Rap of today.  And on an even third hand, comes a little show from London via the Edinburgh Fringe in which six young women aggressively compete for our attention as the wives of Henry VII in the show Six, which has roared into life on Broadway finally having been stillborn by the pandemic – a revue with a vengeance!  And don’t get me started on Hadestown.

My point is that this is not the way Broadway looked in 1955 when there were shows like Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, The Bells Are Ringing and a host of others.  Perhaps charming enough, but…  These shows had a sort of formula.  Maybe 10 – 14 scenes in the first act, maybe 7 – 10 scenes in the second act.  About 12 – 15 new songs, several reprises and a “god-help-them-if-they-didn’t” Eleven O’clock number.  (For you kids out there, shows used to start at 8:30 p.m.  The first act of a musical was usually around 90 or 100 minutes, taking you to 10 or 10:15 for intermission.  The second act was 35 – 45 minutes, so by 11 O’clock it was very near the end – time for the star to have a show-stopping number.  Shows ended at 11:15 or 11:30, and then the patrons ran to a bistro like Upstairs at the Downstairs to see a revue with 4 – 6 talented young performers singing songs by tomorrow’s Broadway composers.  Nowadays they start as early as 7:30 and are dark by 10 and night life in New York is no longer connected to the theatre.)

I’ll keep you posted on the work in China.  Watch this space.

John