St. Ann’s Warehouse in Dumbo, Brooklyn, has been recast as a crowded and vibrant refugee camp called the Calais Jungle on the coast of France. The theater’s ticket booth is in a ramshackle hut, its bar relocated to a dome of canvas and metal. The audience doesn’t so much sit as huddle, as if around a campfire.Continue Reading
Early in The Cher Show, Sonny Bono reprimands Cher when she complains about the rigors of stardom. “You bought the ticket; take the ride.”
The target audience at the Neil Simon Theatre is onboard.
Book writer Rick Elice (Jersey Boys), director Jason Moore (Avenue Q) and choreographer Christopher Gattelli have created a celebratory jukebox musical that has energy and style. Continue Reading
Broadway sold $43 million of tickets in the week ending on Sunday, up 10 percent from a year ago for its best Thanksgiving ever.
In an ugly week for stocks but fine one for tourism and premium pricing, most shows bounced, especially musicals that performed in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.Continue Reading
Mike Birbiglia likes lists. Early in his irresistible one-man comedy The New One, he cites seven reasons why he never wanted a child.
“Number 1: I’ve never felt like there should be more of me in the world.” That leads to a roundup of his horrific medical history, which includes a life-threatening sleep disorder, which he depicted in an earlier show, book and indie movie called Sleepwalk with Me.Continue Reading
With a top-ticket (so far) of $119, Lin-Manuel Miranda and three co-producers are mounting an engagement early next year of Freestyle Love Supreme, the improv hip-hop group that the Hamilton creator has performed in since 2004.
“There is nothing like a live hip-hop show that is improvised from the first moment til the final curtain,” Miranda said in a statement. Previews begin on Jan. 30 at the tiny Greenwich House Theater. That’s three days after a run of Hamilton is scheduled to end in San Juan, Puerto Rico, which stars Miranda in the title role. Continue Reading
The set designer and Yale professor Ming Cho Lee is officially synonymous with excellence in theatrical design.
Last week at the Palm West Side restaurant, Lee was recognized for lifetime achievement as part of the annual Henry Hewes Design Awards. Jeffrey Eric Jenkins, a professor of theatre at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and the Hewes Design chairman, announced that future lifetime achievers will be given an award named after Lee.Continue Reading
Ninety minutes, no intermission has its appeal. But Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman, with two dozen actors, a rabbit, goose, and a real-life baby dramatizing plot lines that explosively coalesce, makes the case for epic drama.
As directed by Sam Mendes, it has more humor and vitality than one might expect from a play set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.Continue Reading
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.
In Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at the Hunter Theater Project, Jay O. Sanders plays the title character as the kind of wisely figure you’d like to have as your own uncle. That is, until a brother-in-law announces he wants to sell the family estate that Vanya has managed for 35 years.
“Thanks to you,” Vanya bellows, “I destroyed, I annihilated the best years of my life!” He’s initially terrifying, then almost befuddled at the intensity of his own outburst. “What am I saying? I’m losing my mind.”
Some theatrical ideas are so ambitious it almost doesn’t matter whether they succeed or fail – the fun is in seeing them play out. In his audacious, stripped-down staging of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, which opened Sunday at St Ann’s Warehouse, director Daniel Fish exposes the repression, lust, and violence that always lay beneath the surface of this seminal musical.
