The show features music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Martin Charnin, a book by Peter Stone. The musical is based on the play The Flowering Peach by Clifford Odets. The Broadway production ran for 351 performances.
Read on for some recent theatre headlines you may have missed in today’s news.
Priscilla Lopez and Daniel Sunjata Cast in Disney Channel’s Christmas Again
Tony winner Priscilla Lopez (A Chorus Line, Grand Horizons) and Tony nominee Daniel Sunjata (Take Me Out) are among the cast of the original Disney Channel movie Christmas Again, according to Deadline. Andy Fickman directs a cast that also includes Scarlett Estevez, Alexis Carra, Ashlyn Jade Lopez, Beth Lacke, and Gary Anthony Williams. Doan La’s screenplay concerns an 11-year-old girl who makes a wish to a shopping mall Santa and finds herself reliving the same day while learning the true meaning of Christmas. Filming is already underway.
Will Roland, Ashley Loren, Emily Bautista Star in Interactive Film Like After Death
A new short, interactive film starring a number of Broadway alums is set to debut on the All Together Now platform. Filmed completely in quarantine and written by Craig Cox and Alex Trow, Like After Death is a dark comedy that leads the audience on a kaleidoscopic journey through the life and death of a social media influencer. Joining Will Roland (Be More Chill), Ashley Loren (Moulin Rouge!), and Emily Bautista (Miss Saigon) are Lacy Allen, Rubén J Carbajal, Annie Cavalero, Tony Cavalero, Harrison Chad, Rebecca E Covington, Ashley De La Rosa, Katie Flahive, Vincent Jamal Hooper, Colby Lewis, Keetin Marchi, and Morgan Anita Wood. Performances are scheduled for December 4, 9, 15, and 17. Developed by Stephanie Cowan, Like After Death is produced by Danielle Gimbal with the Heredia Vision Team. Click here for tickets.
Lilli Cooper, Denée Benton, More Will Star in Reading of New Musical Haley at Therapy
Tony nominees Lilli Cooper (Tootsie) and Denée Benton (The Great Comet), Hunter Ryan Herdlicka, Jay Armstrong Johnson, Grace McLean, James Scully, Rebecca Faulkenberry, Liz Vice, Lauren Zakrin, Lulu Fall, Ashely Perez Flanagan, Audrey Cardwell, and Melissa Weyn will star in a concert reading of Josh Canfield’s new musical Haley at Therapy November 11 at 8 PM ET. The reading, benefiting Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, features musical arrangements by Taylor Peckham. To watch the comedic look into Haley’s first therapy session, click here.
Netflix Renews The Umbrella Academy, Starring Hamilton‘s Emmy Raver-Lampman
Netflix has renewed the American superhero series The Umbrella Academy for a third season. Set to reprise their roles are Emmy Raver-Lampman (Hamilton), Ellen Page, Tom Hopper, David Castañeda, Robert Sheehan, Aidan Gallagher, Justin H. Min, Ritu Arya, and Colm Feore. Steve Blackman will return as showrunner and executive producer. Production is scheduled to begin in February in Toronto, Canada, for the ten-episode season. The second season dropped July 31.
Adam Hyndman and Octopus Theatricals Launch Online Resource for Producers
Producer Hub, a new online resource dedicated to showcasing and supporting the work of independent producers, has launched with the support of Octopus Theatricals, Adam Hyndman, Sophie Blumberg, and Ronee Penoi. Expanding beyond connecting producers with other producers, it is a space to facilitate future collaboration and engagement. Equal parts educational and practical, the Producer Hub welcomes producers of all levels to sharpen and equip their working toolbox through exchange with a community of practitioners from across the field. Click here for more information.
Chicago Theatres Celebrated at Jeff Awards
Winners of the 2020 Jeff Equity Awards, celebrating the best of Chicago regional theatre, were announced November 9. Winners included Drury Lane Productions’ staging of An American in Paris and Court Theatre’s King Hedley II, which took home Outstanding Production of a Musical or Revue and Outstanding Production of a Play, respectively, for large venue categories; Tony and Emmy nominee Carrie Coon for Steppenwolf’s Bug; and playwrights Lee Edward Colston II (for The First Deep Breath), Levi Holloway (for Grey House), and Loy A. Webb (for His Shadow). For the full list, click here.
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Who is Sarah Jones? Depending on where you’ve encountered her, the answer will differ. She’s the British professor teaching a class on gender and sexuality. She’s an older Jewish woman from Queens. She’s a Dominican-American college student and mother. She’s a cop. She’s a 20-something Black man. She’s a TED Talker. She’s a Tony Award winner. She’s an actor and a writer driven by the concept of self-invention and connection.
Jones has brought a global cornucopia of personalities to the stage for the past 20 years, and the truth is she doesn’t just play all of these characters; she is all of these people. Her roles, inspired by her family and friends, swirl with her DNA and point-of-view, emerging out of her. The height of turmoil of this past summer (the brew of COVID-19 and the second Civil Rights movement) brought her and her personas to a different platform: IGTV. Jones decided to “greenlight myself,” and her eight-episode series Sarah Jones & Friends digs into her carpetbag of characters to help us understand one another even when it seems like we have nothing in common.
Just as she did with her Tony-winning Bridge & Tunnel and Off-Broadway’s Sell/Buy/Date, Jones converts what could just be another solo show—playing dozens of characters, taking on accents and physicalities—into a nuanced lesson about the current yet reparable dysfunction of our human family. “This has been a new abnormal, and we get to learn what our resilience looks like in the face of it,” says Jones.
Jones impresses with her transformative skills, but she is a marvel because of how she does it and why.
“As a Black person of mixed-race experience in America, the pandemic was one kind of layer of unraveling for me,” she says. And even as a woman, even as a Black mixed-race person, Jones examines her privilege on camera and interacts with her viewers as she opens to real-time epiphanies. “White supremacist, cis, hetero, patriarchal culture is such a factor in all of our lives to one extent or another. Stepping into [these characters’] shoes, in a way, prevents me from ignoring other people’s reality.”
By proxy, it helps audiences do the same.
Thanks to IGTV, that audience grew exponentially, which, in turn, deepened Jones’ experience and impacted her work—each episode in the series building and evolving on the feedback from the one before.
“I have learned that people just getting access for free—as long as they’re subscribed to Instagram—has given me exchanges with audiences,” she says. “Audiences saying, ‘I can’t believe what you can do. I can’t believe you are reminding me of my Jewish grandma.’ It’s wonderful for people to discover our connection as human beings while, hopefully, being entertained.”
Self-producing also led Jones to a deeper level of authenticity. “We have always had this sense of, ‘We need producers.’ We need access to the kind of privilege that a lot of us inherently don’t have,” she explains. “To not have to wait for someone else to vet my work, judge, and criticize it, end up in development hell for a year—which is something I went through—and then have it come out as unrecognizable…. This is the opposite. This is an experience of really getting to have a trust exercise with me and the audience and no one interfering, and it’s been so gratifying.”
Gratifying and financially fruitful in a time when most artists are unemployed. Jones offered her Venmo handle thinking people might want to donate a couple bucks, pay-what-you-can style. “I’ve done two six-week runs of work at MTC. In all of that time, I made less money than I do on Venmo doing these shows,” Jones shares. “I’m grateful for institutions, making it possible for audiences to find our work a lot of the time, but Instagram eliminates that.”
Which begs the question (particularly in an age where our stages are closed): How should we make theatre? Would IGTV work for other projects?
IGTV is ideal for Jones because of her mission: to reach a wide audience in an intimate and casual setting for hard conversations. Jones says, “For me, watching my heroes be multiple characters, not just opine as they think those characters would, but being those people [creates the question], ‘What does it mean to be someone else?’ That hopefully starts to shrink the gap a little bit between us.”
She’s already encountered evidence that it’s working. “I’ve gotten to watch people who’ve started with none of this in their vocabulary be able to talk about, ‘What does it mean to be an ally?’” she says. “To watch them go from, ‘I know something awful happened and I don’t have language around it’ to ‘I do understand that when I hear defund the police, all people are saying is, can we divert some of the funding?’”
In this era of fixing the American family dysfunction, of a reckoning with systemic racism, of battling a health crisis, Jones ascribes four phases to our process to progress: awareness, awkwardness, acceptance, and actions.
For phase one, Sarah Jones & Friends is the safe place. “You can get a European-American rights advocate, a sex-positive feminist college student in the same body,” Jones laughs. “There’s no reason that you can’t have a 20-minute experience at your desk, a lunch break with a Wednesday matinee on Instagram that really does try to link all of us as human beings alongside the incredible divide that we’re experiencing.”
Watch all eight episodes on Jones’ IGTV. Follow her @yesimsarahjones.
1913 Birthday of June Hovik, better known as June Havoc, even better known as namesake of Baby June, the character based on her in the musical Gypsy. The show pretty accurately sums up her childhood with a hard-driving mom in the dying years of vaudeville, and a sister who later becomes Gypsy Rose Lee. Havoc has a busy Broadway career of her own, appearing in Pal Joey, Mexican Hayride, Affairs of State, and her own play, Marathon ’33. She’s present to advise the cast of the original 1959 Gypsy, as well as the 2003 revival.
1926 Opening night at the Imperial Theatre for the George and Ira Gershwin musical Oh, Kay!, about hijinks involving rumrunners at a Long Island estate. Gertrude Lawrence and Victor Moore are featured in the show, which runs 256 performances and introduces the standards “Someone To Watch Over Me,” “Do Do Do,” and “Clap Yo’ Hands.” In 2012, a reworked version of the musical opens on Broadway under the title Nice Work If You Can Get It.
1932 Opening night for Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II‘s operetta Music in the Air at the Alvin Theatre, beginning a run of 342 performances. The score includes “I’ve Told Ev’ry Little Star” and “The Song Is You.” The cast includes Walter Slezak, Al Shean, Natalie Hall, and a pre-I Love Lucy Vivian Vance.
1939 Life With Father, a family comedy based on Clarence Day’s stories that was written by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse, opens at the Empire Theatre. The cast includes Lindsay himself taking over a role that was turned down by Alfred Lunt. He appears on stage with his offstage wife, Dorothy Stickney. Lindsay had hoped that the play would run for at least six months. He gets his wish; the play runs for over eight years, setting a new record for a non-musical play, racking up 3,224 performances.
1950 John Gielgud and a young Richard Burton appear together in Christopher Fry‘s The Lady’s Not for Burning at the Royale Theatre for 151 performances. Gielgud also directs the romantic comedy set in the 15th century.
1973 Boom Boom Room by David Rabe opens at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, marking the first time that Joseph Papp has a show at Lincoln Center. Madeline Kahn stars as a middle-aged woman realizing that her adult life is, in reality, not that much better than her abusive childhood. Charles Durning and Robert Loggia co-star in the show that wins mixed reviews and a short run of only 37 performances.
1979 Romantic Comedy opens at the Barrymore Theatre with stars Mia Farrow and Anthony Perkins. The Bernard Slade play gets mixed reviews and runs 396 performances.
1990 Six Degrees of Separation opens at Lincoln Center after a successful Off-Broadway run. Directed by Jerry Zaks and starring Stockard Channing, Courtney B. Vance, and John Cunningham, the show about a Black impostor posing as a college friend of a White family’s son runs for 485 performances at its new home.
2001 Roundabout Theatre Company‘s revival of Clare Booth Luce‘s not altogether affectionate comic treatise on her sex, The Women, features a constellation of contemporary stars, including Kristen Johnston, Rue McClanahan, Cynthia Nixon, Mary Louise Wilson, and Jennifer Tilly.
2006 After numerous stage adaptations of movies, Broadway gets a musical based on a TV special. Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas opens at the Hilton Theatre and proves to be so popular, it returns the following year. Patrick Page stars as the greedy green title character, with John Cullum as his faithful pooch.
2007 He grunts, he shuffles, he stomps—he sings! Mary Shelley’s 19th-century creature is reinvented for Broadway in Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan‘s musical based on Brooks’ 1974 film comedy, opening at the Hilton Theatre. The production stars Roger Bart as Dr. Frankenstein, Megan Mullally as the doctor’s love interest Elizabeth, Sutton Foster as comely assistant Inga, Shuler Hensley as The Monster, Andrea Martin as castle matron Frau Blucher, and Christopher Fitzgerald as hunchback Igor. Reviews are less enthusiastic than for Brooks’ previous Broadway effort, the smash hit The Producers, but the production still runs 485 performances.
2011 Venus in Fur, David Ives‘ two-character play about the relationship between a hungry actor and a controlling writer-director, opens on Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club‘s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Nina Arianda, who created the role of Vanda in the production’s 2010 Off-Broadway premiere, stars opposite Hugh Dancy. Arianda wins a 2012 Tony Award for her performance.
2012 Annie, the 1977 show that introduced generations of children to the tuneful optimism of traditional Broadway musicals, opens in a new production on Broadway at the Palace Theatre. The 35th anniversary revival of the tale of a red-headed orphan in the care of a billionaire Republican during the Great Depression stars Lilla Crawford in the title role, Katie Finneran as Miss Hannigan, and Anthony Warlow as Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks.
2015 Marc Acito, Jay Kuo, and Lorenzo Thione‘s musical Allegiance, inspired by the childhood of veteran actor George Takei, opens on Broadway at the Longacre Theatre. Takei stars alongside Lea Salonga and Telly Leung. The production runs 111 performances.
2018 King Kong, a Broadway musical based on Merian C. Cooper’s 1932 adventure novel that inspired the 1933 Hollywood classic—and a subsequent film franchise—opens at the Broadway Theatre. The centerpiece of the production is its titular star: a 20-foot-high, 2,000-pound puppeteer-operated gorilla whose lifelike face is capable of expressing a breathtaking range of emotion. The puppet’s creators, Sonny Tilders and Creature Technology Company, receive a Special Tony Award.
More of Today’s Birthdays: Bram Stoker (1847–1912). Peter Weiss (1916–1982). Gene Saks (1921–2015). Nicholas Kepros (b. 1932). Alfre Woodard (b. 1952). Chuck Cooper (b. 1954). Parker Posey (b. 1968). Gretchen Mol (b. 1972). David Turner (b. 1974).
Today we celebrate Allegiance, which opened on this day in 2015 at Broadway’s Longacre Theater.