Broadway performers and writers, who lampooned Donald Trump and his wife during the presidential campaign and raised millions for Hillary Clinton, expressed despair and defiance as the developer and reality TV performer pulled off what Politico called the biggest upset in United States history. Continue Reading
PATTI LUPONE, JESSE TYLER FERGUSON DERIDE TRUMP AS ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE BLASTS COMMERCIAL
UPDATE WITH ADL statement: Patti LuPone and Jesse Tyler Ferguson have taken themselves out of the running for a Presidential Medal of Freedom in a Donald Trump administration.
RUDIN SEEKS TO SILENCE ANGELS
EXCLUSIVE: While expanding Broadway’s boundaries, Scott Rudin is reining in his investors.
The daring and powerful producer is requiring backers to sign away their right to criticize him and the plays and musicals that they’re capitalizing. The unusual provision appears in recent prospectuses obtained by Broadway Journal. It prohibits investors from making “negative remarks orally or in writing in any medium,” including social media, about him, his show or his business practices.
RUDIN PAPERS DEFINE NON-DISPARAGEMENT, NEGATIVE ACT
EXCLUSIVE: The first investor non-disparagement clause we found was for the Scott Rudin-produced revival of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. (Click on the text for easier reading.)
CRITICS SHOW LIEV LITTLE LOVE & SPLIT ON ‘LIAISONS’
The Associated Press raved, the Hollywood Reporter was mixed and Ben Brantley at the Times panned while questioning whether Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses holds up in a new Broadway revival, particularly with a scene that blends rape and seduction.
‘HAMILTON’ SETS ANOTHER RECORD WITH $998 TICKETS
EXCLUSIVE: The producers of Hamilton are selling a new block of $998 tickets for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays that handily sets a Broadway price record.
The $998 seats are up 18 percent over the $849 tickets Hamilton introduced in early June — the previous record holder. When including Ticketmaster’s $18 service fee, the new ticket, at $1,016, is the first on Broadway to run four figures.
PRESERVING CAST RECORDINGS IN THE AGE OF FREE MUSIC
As ticket prices for Broadway musicals consistently rise, independent record labels like Sh-K-Boom, which preserves musical theater scores, must grapple with the proliferation of free music: specifically, web services such as YouTube and Spotify that cannibalize CD sales and iTunes downloads.
“There have to be the purchases,” Sh-K-Boom President Kurt Deutsch said Aug. 3 at the Upper East Side Barnes & Noble, before a concert promoting his new Broadway cast recording of She Loves Me. His company has put out about 100 cast recordings since 2002, beginning with Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years.
‘HAMILTON,’ ‘EVAN HANSEN’ PERFORMERS EXPLORE PRISON & POLICE ABUSE AT CIVIL LIBERTIES BENEFIT
Summer is the off-season for Manhattan fundraising. But with headlines consumed by hate crime, police conduct and race relations, the New York Civil Liberties Union says its July 18 Broadway-themed benefit is timely in the extreme.
“This is a very charged and heightened time in politics and civil liberties,” said Susan Blackwell, a performer and writer who will host the event, Broadway Stands Up for Freedom, at NYU’s Skirball Center. “It’s easy to get bogged down and overwhelmed.”
ANOTHER CRITIC SILENCED (FOR NOW) AS JEREMY GERARD EXITS DEADLINE.COM
Jeremy Gerard, a prolific and widely read arts reporter and critic, was laid off by Deadline.com two years and two months after the news outlet hired him to oversee its expansion of New York media and theater coverage .
Gerard, who was executive editor and chief theater columnist, said in an email that he was told that Deadline.com, otherwise known as Deadline Hollywood, is focusing resources on film and television coverage. Mike Fleming Jr., co-editor in chief, didn’t return an email. Gerard said: “I have loved working at Deadline and will miss my great colleagues there.”
‘HAMILTON’ WINS 11 TONYS AS ‘HUMANS,’ ‘COLOR PURPLE’ TRIUMPH
Hamilton won the Tony Award for best musical and dominated the evening as Scott Rudin joined Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeffrey Seller in the winner’s circle.
It was indeed a coronation for Miranda’s hip-hop-infused musical, which won for his score and book (and inspired an acceptance sonnet and rap), as well as for orchestrations, choreography, costume and lighting design, direction, featured actress and actor and lead actor Leslie Odom Jr. The bounty should help sell many $849 tickets that producers introduced last week. So should the telecast’s four Hamilton numbers, including a parody of the musical’s title song that introduced host James Corden. Corden, a CBS late night host and Tony winner himself, opened the show by expressing solidarity with the victims of the Orlando mass shooting. “Hate will never win,” he said. “Together, we have to make sure of that.”
