Broadway might be dark, but that doesn’t mean that theatre isn’t happening everywhere Below, check out where you can get your daily fix of Broadway this weekend, February 13-14, 2020.
1904 Set and costume designer Oliver Messel is born in London.
1911 Ethel Barrymore gives The Twelve Pound Look at the Empire Theatre. The James M. Barrie one-act is preceded by a revival of his Alice Sit-by-the-Fire also starring Barrymore. Later she tours the vaudeville circuit with the first mentioned show.
1957 Tom Ewell, Nancy Olson, and Darren McGavin navigate The Tunnel of Love at the the Royale Theatre. Joseph Fields directs and helps adapt Peter DeVries‘ novel. The comedy sails for 417 performances.
1963 City Center Light Opera revives Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Joseph Fields, and Jerome Chodorov‘s Wonderful Town for 16 performances. Featured performers include Kaye Ballard and Gabriel Dell.
1973 El Grande de Coca Cola stars Ron House as a nightclub owner whose family poses as famous stars to entertain the customers. It runs for 1,114 performances at the Mercer Arts Theatre in New York.
1983 Hoping to follow up his success in The Magic Show, magician Doug Henning plays the title role in the musical Merlin at the Mark Hellinger Theatre. The show runs six months, and is regularly stolen by Chita Rivera, who plays the villainous Queen, and by a young actor named Nathan Lane, who has just his second Broadway role as her son, Prince Fergus.
1996 Jonathan Larson‘s alt-rock musical Rent opens Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop. It quickly transfers to Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre where it garners Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Book, and Best Score. It is also awarded the year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
1997 A Broadway revival of Anton Chekhov‘s Three Sisters opens at the Criterion Theatre. The cast features Amy Irving, Lili Taylor, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Calista Flockhart, Billy Crudup, David Strathairn, Jerry Stiller, and Eric Stoltz.
2003 The New York City Council overrides a mayoral veto and bans cell phones in Broadway and Off-Broadway theatres, and other public cultural events. Offenders can face a fine of $50 and eviction from the venue in question. Mayor Michael Bloomberg objects that the law will be impossible to enforce.
2012 An Off-Broadway revival of Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive, her dark Pulitzer Prize-winning coming-of-age play, opens at Second Stage Theatre. Directed by Kate Whoriskey, the cast features Elizabeth Reaser, Norbert Leo Butz, Kevin Cahoon, Jennifer Regan, and Marnie Schulenburg.
2013 Betty Buckley returns to the London stage in The Charing Cross Theatre production of Jerry Herman‘s musical Dear World. The production is directed and choreographed by Gillian Lynne, the choreographer who helped guide Buckley to a Tony Award for her portrayal of the faded glamour cat Grizabella in Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s Cats.
More of Today’s Birthdays: George Segal (b. 1934). Stockard Channing (b. 1944).
Casting is complete for Mark Ravenhill’s new autobiographical play Angela, the first in the Sound Stage audio series from The Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh and Pitlochry Festival Theatre, in association with Naked Productions and BBC Radio 3.
Airing March 26–28, the presentation will be led by Pam Ferris (Matilda) and Matti Houghton (Call the Midwife) as Angela, BAFTA winner Toby Jones (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) as Ted, and Jackson Laing (The Boy in the Dress) and Joseph Millson (Angel Has Fallen) as Mark with Nadia Albina (Emilia), Dermot Daly (Accidental Therapists), Raj Ghatak (Christopher Robin), Olivier Huband (Barefoot in the Park), Alexandra Mathie (Cockpit), and Kirsty Stuart. Naked Productions’ Polly Thomas directs.
Angela centers on the playwright’s mother, at the age of 84 and suffering with dementia, as she looks back across her life. Cutting between Angela in her old age and in her youth, the play depicts her struggle with depression and the challenges of her own aspirations, set against Mark’s experience of beginning to learn ballet in his fifties.
Playwright Ravenhill says, “With the death of my mum in 2019, I was drawn for the first time to write an autobiographical play. I was particularly interested to explore the way culture high and low had impacted on Mum’s life and our lives as a family. The play is constructed around a series of encounters with children’s literature, classical ballet, amateur theatre, and popular song— encounters that shaped my mum’s sense of self and her relationship with me. Both my parents are from working class backgrounds which gives a specific turn to their relationship to culture and to me. As I thought about a form that could move swiftly in time and location and between inner thought and outer action, I realized that this was best written as a radio play. I feel it’s the most ‘radio’ of the radio plays that I’ve written…”
The Sound Stage series, which continues through October 31, will also include Tennis Elbow by John Byrne, Hindu Times by Jamini Jethwa, The Mother Land by Lynda Radley, Black Diamonds and the Blue Brazil by Gary McNair, Sophia by Francis Poet, and new works by Timberlake Wertenbaker and Roy Williams.
Tickets go on sale February 14. Visit Lyceum.org.uk and PitlochryFestivalTheatre.com.
Actors Equity Association hasannounced its commitment to pursue a new diversity, equity and inclusion policy agenda for the industry in partnership with arts, entertainment and media unions.
Some Like It Hot has found a new member of its creative team The Shubert Organization and Neil Meron have just announced Emmy nominated writer and performer Amber Ruffin joins Tony nominee Matthew Lopez to adapt the musical comedy from the beloved MGM film.
The Broadway-aimed Some Like It Hot is still chugging along during the pandemic, adding another writer to its creative team. Writer and comedian Amber Ruffin will now pen the book to the new musical adaptation, joining the previously reported Matthew López (currently Tony-nominated for The Inheritance).
The creative team also includes songwriting duo Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (who previously musicalized the creation of the 1959 MGM film in “Let’s Be Bad” from the fictional Smash musical Bombshell) and director-choreographer Casey Nicholaw.
The musical now aims to premiere on Broadway in 2022. In the early months of the coronavirus shutdown, producers Neil Meron (also a Smash veteran) and Bob Wankel (of the Shubert Organization) announced that the show would scrap its previously announced out-of-town tryout in Chicago (originally slated to begin this March) and open directly in New York in the fall.
Ruffin’s involvement signals a departure from the Billy Wilder source material, resulting in a new take that the writer calls “honestly groundbreaking.” The character of Sugar—portrayed in the film by Marilyn Monroe—will be reworked as Black, with her racial identity providing more than an opportunity for color-blind casting.
“It is an exciting proposition to create a show with characters whose race is instrumental and not incidental to the story,” López says. “It became apparent to me that if we were to honor our commitment to tell that story with honesty and integrity, it required a Black creative voice on the team. It didn’t take long for all of us to agree that Amber was the person to approach.”
Inspired by the French film Fanfare of Love, Some Like It Hot follows two Prohibition-era jazz musicians in Chicago (played on screen by Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon), who witness a mob hit and go into hiding by disguising themselves as members of an all-female band. Through their escape plot, the two become enamored with the band’s singer and ukulele player, Sugar (Marilyn Monroe). Incidentally, that character became the namesake for a previous Broadway adaptation of the comedy: the 1972 musical Sugar.
Ruffin is currently host, writer, and executive producer of The Amber Ruffin Show on the NBC streaming platform Peacock. She concurrently remains on the writing team on Late Night With Seth Meyers (becoming the first Black woman to write for a late-night network talk show), for which she earned an Emmy nomination. Her additional credits include Detroiters, Drunk History, and A Black Lady Sketch Show. She recently published her book You’ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey: Crazy Stories of Racism, co-written with her sister Lacey Lamar.
Also boarding the project as a producer is Tony-winning director Kenny Leon. Rounding out the team are Roy Furman, Robert Greenblatt, and the Nederlander Organization.
