Early in his funny and poignant off-Broadway show, The New One, the comedian Mike Birbiglia expresses a low tolerance for children. “We gotta get babies off planes,” he says. “We got rid of smoking in the eighties, so we could get rid of babies now. Or bring back smoking and get those babies some cigarettes, because they’re too stressed out and they’re too powerful.”
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.
REVIEW : The question at the heart of Head Over Heels is whether Elizabethan comedy and the music of the Go-Go’s go together. Sadly, the answer is no.
(See below for other opinions about the first musical of the season, which was capitalized for at least $11.6 million, according to investment papers.)
The jukebox musical that opened Thursday at the Hudson Theatre is (bizarrely) ostensibly based on Sir Philip Sidney’s 16th century Greek-mythological prose poem, The Arcadia. Thus the not-quite-iambic pentameter of the shepherd Musidorus (Andrew Durand), when he finds the skeletons of actors in the woods accompanied by a note: “These sad remains are of our theatre troupe, / Starved for lack of Serious Message.” This could charitably be called meta-commentary.
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.
EXCLUSIVE: Conventional wisdom dictates that most new plays need an off-Broadway or out-of-town tryout before they’re Broadway-ready.
Norman Twain didn’t do conventional.
The New York movie and theater producer spent years nurturing The Lifespan of a Fact, a comic-drama about the interplay of facts and truth in the magazine world, based on the 2012 book by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal. Twain sought to open it cold on Broadway, in a starry one act, while putting a cleaver to runaway production costs.
EXCLUSIVE: Jed Bernstein, a Broadway producer and former leader of the industry’s trade association, earned $3.3 million in pay and benefits during the 27 months he ran Lincoln Center.
He took over the performing arts complex, one of the largest in the world, on January 27, 2014 and relinquished the presidency on April 14, 2016. His 2016 compensation was $1.1 million, including $252,000 in salary for three and a half months, $100,000 in bonus/incentive pay and $720,000 in severance, according to Lincoln Center’s 2016-17 tax return. The return was recently posted on its web site.
The Broadway season that ended on Sunday was strong but not stellar.
Overall attendance: up 4 percent to 13.8 million, according to the Broadway League. Grosses rose 17 percent, to $1.7 billion. The average price of a ticket for a musical gained 11 percent to $125.70 — thanks to strong demand for Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, The Lion King, Hello, Dolly! with Bette Midler and, increasingly, Mean Girls, which looks like a hit.
The New York Drama Critics’ Circle voted not to give a prize for best musical this season, implicitly endorsing The Band’s Visit‘s Tony Award ambitions and rejecting Broadway’s other new musicals.
“It does bode well for The Band’s Visit,” Critics’ Circle President Adam Feldman said in an interview.
BEST MUSICAL SUSPENSE: There were just seven new musicals on Broadway this season, the fewest in at least a decade. Only one received “Critic’s Pick” from the New York Times and generally great reviews: The Band’s Visit, about an Egyptian ensemble stranded in a sleepy Israeli town. It has a now-Tony-Award-nominated score by David Yazbeck that’s packed with prospective cabaret standards. As expected, it did well, collecting 11 nominations this morning. But a source of its integrity, the understated drama — its “zero razzle-dazzle,” as New York Magazine‘s Sara Holdren put it — could be a liability with road presenters, who represent a chunk of the roughly 840 Tony voters.Continue Reading
