Derren Brown‘s challenge: make a vacant Broadway theater appear out of thin air.
In a conversation with Adam Green at the New Yorker Festival on Oct. 7, the British illusionist said he’s “hopefully doing Broadway next spring, fingers crossed.” Greg Day, his United Kingdom-based spokesman, told Broadway Journal that Brown seeks to bring in Secret later this season. Ben Brantley called the show “enthrallingly baffling” when it played off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theater in 2017.
EXCLUSIVE: Can’t afford to spend $1,551, including Ticketmaster fees, for two center orchestra seats to Hamilton at the Richard Rodgers Theatre?
How about 12 monthly payments of $138 instead?
That’s a new option at Ticketmaster, the primary online dealer for Hamilton and a dozen other Broadway shows.Continue Reading
CHICAGO — “Being a woman is no job for a man,” Michael Dorsey (Santino Fontana) concludes in the winning but inconsistent Broadway-bound musical comedy Tootsie, which opened last night at the Cadillac Palace Theatre here. So how come his Dorothy Michaels holds the stage as well as his Michael Dorsey?
In an auburn wig, beige high heels and glasses, Fontana is sublime as Michael/Dorothy, the temperamental, opinionated, unemployed New York actor who finds stardom and self-awareness after putting on a dress and posing as an actress. Fontana borrows a gesture or two from Dustin Hoffman’s performance in the brilliant 1982 Columbia Pictures comedy. But Fontana makes the role his own with fine timing, crisp dancing and a gender-bending vocal range interpreting David Yazbek’s varied and mostly wonderful score. (Plus, of course, nonstop changes of William Ivey Long’s wry costumes.)Continue Reading
Shane O’Regan is going places — for starters, Philadelphia, Chicago and Austin, Texas. He and the 24 characters he plays in the World War I drama Private Peaceful tour the U.S. after an off-Broadway run ends on Oct. 7.
Casting agents are checking out the 25-year-old. He slips “from one character to the next with preternatural ease,” critic Alexis Soloski wrote in the New York Times, citing his “actorly excellence (and he really is excellent).” Back home he was nominated for an Irish Times Irish Theatre Award for the role in Dublin.Continue Reading
Sales of Frozen and Mean Girls took a hit last week as schools reopened and Broadway contended with oppressive heat and competition from the latter rounds of the U.S. Open tennis championships in Queens.
Disney’s Frozen fell 16 percent to $1.6 million, the lowest since the adaptation of the 2013 animated movie opened in March. Mean Girls, produced by Lorne Michaels and the late Stuart Thompson and based on the Tina Fey movie, dropped 21 percent to $1.2 million, its weakest seven days since opening in April.Continue Reading
EXCLUSIVE: Investors in Scott Rudin’s celebrated revival of Hello, Dolly! have earned a profit of 5 percent, according to two people familiar with the production.
In a flop-filled business, recouping is considered the benchmark for success, and investors months ago earned back their money. The musical was the talk of the 2016-17 season, won four Tony Awards, and last week was the third-bestselling musical, behind Hamilton and The Lion King. For angels seeking prestige, glamour and the satisfaction of helping to create a revival worthy of the iconic, 1964 original, Dolly delivered and made them money.
Others, however, expected more from a production that’s grossed $126 million.Continue Reading
Pulitzer Prize-winning collaborators Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey have a new musical that airs tonight on the Disney Channel.
They say their adaptation of Mary Rodgers’ 1972 novel Freaky Friday, the mother-daughter body swapping comedy, isn’t so different from Next to Normal, their acclaimed rock musical that explores mental illness. Both pieces seek to convey emotional truths.Continue Reading
INTERVIEW: The last five weeks have been busy for Jason Robert Brown, the 48-year-old composer, lyricist, arranger, orchestrator and performer. There was an acclaimed Encores! run of his 1995 song cycle, Songs for a New World, at City Center; a workshop of an original musical, The Connector, written with Jonathan Marc Sherman, at Vassar College via the nonprofit New York Stage & Film; and a new album, Brown’s first since 2005, How We React and How We Recover. He spoke by phone from his home on the Upper West Side. (The conversation has been condensed.)
Q: How has the political climate affected what you do?
JRB: I don’t want to watch anything that feels frivolous or create anything that feels frivolous.
There’s cause for celebration in Bet Hatikva and Petah Tikva.
The Band’s Visit, a drama about acceptance, missed connections and the romance and ennui of everyday life, won 10 Tony Awards, including best musical. The triumph raises the profile of the quiet show about an Egyptian police band marooned in a sleepy Israeli town, who’d intended to go to a cosmopolitan city with a similar-sounding name.
Some takeaways from the CBS telecast:Continue Reading
EXCLUSIVE: On Broadway, selling out isn’t a prerequisite for cleaning up.
The Band’s Visit, which is considered a lock for best new musical at the Tony Awards tomorrow, has repaid well over half of its $8.75 million capitalization, according to two people familiar with the production. They report that it’s on track to make its investors whole by Labor Day.
Matt Polk, a production spokesman, declined to comment.
