Disney turned its luck on Broadway around with Newsies, its most recent Times Square opening, collecting the reviews needed to give long-running The Lion King a fellow hit to keep it company.
That blast of trumpets you heard at the Winter Garden Theatre March 13 was the opening of Rocky, the new musical based on the Academy Award-winning 1976 Sylvester Stallone film of the same name about a palooka fighter from Philly with little to cheer about in his life who suddenly gets a shot at the heavyweight title.
Bryan Cranston followed up his small-screen triumph as the everyday, all-American drug lord Walter White in "Breaking Bad" with a starring turn in playwright Robert Schenkkan's political drama All The Way, playing President Lyndon B. Johnson. The show officially opened on Broadway March 6 at the Neil Simon Theatre.
Following a quiet couple of months, Broadway enjoyed a good, old-fashioned, big musical opening Feb. 20, when Kelli O'Hara and Steven Pasquale opened in The Bridges of Madison County.
Neil Patrick Harris did a knockout job hosting the Tony Awards ceremony the last three years. But for the 2014 show, Broadway favorite Hugh Jackman will return to host the annual broadcast live from Radio City Music Hall June 8.
The theatre and film worlds received a unexpected shock this week when actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, a titanic creative force on stage and screen for more than a decade, was found dead in his Greenwich Village apartment, the supposed victim of a drug overdose. He was only 46.
Playwright John Patrick Shanley has had some critical successes and some outright misses in the ten years since Doubt made him a bankable writer. But he hasn't achieved a popular success to match that Pulitzer Prize-winning play.
Though it is set to close Jan. 4, the Broadway production of Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark continues to generously provide the press with stories. Over this quiet New Year's Eve week alone, the troubled musical churned out two news items.
On Christmas week, when all but the actors settle down for a short winter's nap, a story like who might go into a Broadway show can constitute a major news story.
While Broadway bigwigs took off to holiday on sunny beaches and in snowy chalets, leaving Times Square to the tourists, London provided a bit of excitement for the theatre world. The Aldwych Theatre played host to the opening of the latest musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Stephen Ward, which was officially unveiled Dec. 19.
Three-time Tony Award nominee Marin Mazzie landed her biggest stage assignment in some time this week. She won the much-coveted part of temperamental stage diva Helen Sinclair in the new Broadway musical adaptation of Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway, producers announced Dec. 5. The role was famously played by Dianne Wiest in the movie.
Film actor James Franco seems to have done a little bit of everything with his still young career — acting, screenwriting, directing, teaching and being a famously truant NYU graduate student. Now, the Academy Award nominee and Golden Globe winner will give Broadway a try.
It took three years, but those predictions that Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark detractors made that the ever-beleaguered musical would shutter at a great loss have finally come true.
After Midnight, the jazz revue which celebrates Duke Ellington's years at the famed Harlem nightclub the Cotton Club — using his original arrangements and performed by a world-class big band of 17 musicians hand-picked by vaunted jazzman Wynton Marsalis, and set against a narrative of Langston Hughes poetry — opened this week at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. The production was "conceived" by Jack Viertel and played two previous engagements at New York City Center.
The Broadway revival of Harold Pinter's time-bending drama Betrayal, starring Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz and Rafe Spall, officially opened Oct. 27 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.
It was a week of surprises. But none was perhaps more surprising — or more talked about — than the news that the Roundabout Theatre Company was considering producing a new revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical Company.
This season's Tennessee Williams entry came early. On Sept. 26, Cherry Jones, Celia Keenan-Bolger and Zachary Quinto opened as Broadway's latest Wingfield family in a new production of the 1945 drama The Glass Menagerie at the Booth Theatre. John Tiffany directed and Bob Crowley — the only set designer out there whose name is trumpeted in press releases alongside the director's — fashioned the scenic elements.
The Prince of Broadway — the Harold Prince version of Jerome Robbins' Broadway, which takes audiences through the numerous award-winning productions created by famous director-producer, will hit finally be hitting the boards. If you want to buy a ticket, however, you'll also have to buy a plane ticket. It will premeire at Japan's Umeda Arts Theater in Osaka in 2015, according to the New York Post.
Should all the stars align, one of the hottest tickets on Broadway this spring will be a historical drama — a genre that rarely makes hay in New York — that had its premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival — an admired company, but one that has never sent a production to Gotham — written by a playwright whose work hasn't graced Broadway in more than two decades, Robert Schenkkan.
It's been a summer of oddball attractions on Broadway. Last week saw the opening of First Date, a new musical created by nobody the New York theatre world has ever heard of. And this week we have Soul Doctor, a new musical created by nobody the New York theatre world has ever heard of.
Denzel Washington, who won the 2010 Tony Award for his performance in Fences, finally got around to confirming that he was indeed returning to Broadway this coming season in a revival of A Raisin in the Sun. He revealed the news at the premiere his new, very un-Lorraine-Hansberry-like movie, "2 Guns."
Now that Tracy Letts is a multiple Tony Award winner — for both playwriting and acting — perhaps we've entered a time where his early works are being dusted off and brought back in high fashion.
If/Then, the new musical starring Rent and Wicked star Idina Menzel, will begin previews at Broadway's Richard Rodgers Theatre March 4, 2014, prior to an official opening March 27, it was announced this week.
Did no one tell Kenneth Branagh that we had a Macbeth on Broadway this season (Alan Cumming's still-running version) and that we're expected another production of the Shakespeare tragedy next season (with Ethan Hawke), so we don't really need another rendition?
The biggest opening of the week was in Chicago, where the world premiere of The Jungle Book was officially unveiled at the Goodman Theatre July 1 following previews that began June 21. Originally scheduled to play through Aug. 4, performances were recently extended to Aug. 11. The production will then transfer to Boston's Huntington Theatre Company, running Sept. 7-Oct. 6, before presumably moving to New York.
That Neil Patrick Harris loves Broadway and the theatre is made readily apparently by the effusive sincerity of his praised turns hosting the annual Tony Awards ceremony. That passion, however, has not translated into an actual stage performance in nearly a decade. His last appearance on Broadway was in the 2004 revival of Stephen Sondheim's Assassins.
Today's young generation is too fresh to this planet to know a time when you couldn't escape the title "The Bridges of Madison County." Published in 1992 by an unknown author named Robert James Waller, the story about a brief, four-day love affair between a National Geographic photographer and an Italian-American housewife in 1965 Iowa became an unexpected runaway smash.
Broadway's seen a lot of shows, but perhaps nothing like Soul Doctor, the musical about the real-life unconventional Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, which will begin previews at Broadway's Circle in the Square Theatre July 17.
It was a fairly quiet week around Times Square, news-wise, with everyone's mind on June 9, the date two weeks from now when the Tony Awards will be handed out.
When Christopher Durang's comedy Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike opened at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre last fall, it got respectful reviews—good, but not great—and enjoyed a healthy run. Durang could easily file the title as one of his successes, though not necessarily as a critical and popular smash.
The big news in the theatre this week—in case you spent Tuesday under a rock—was the announcement of the 2013 Tony Awards nominations. The honors were done by Tony winner Sutton Foster and Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who seems to have come up in the world. (My stage brain remembers when he was fourth or fifth banana in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. But I guess he has a TV show or something now...?)
The Broadway season is not quite over—still five shows left—but you wouldn't blame critics if they checked into a rest home after this week. They crammed in six opening in five days (and that doesn't even include the opening of the limited engagement of The Rascals: Once Upon a Dream). The consolation: there was a good amount of decent stuff.
Tom Hanks and Cyndi Lauper had their Broadway debuts this week — working in very different capacities, of course — and faced sentencing by the local judiciary, i.e., the critics.
Gigi, the Oscar-winning film musical that was later adapted for the Broadway stage, will be adapted anew for a Broadway run, possibly as soon as 2013-14, producer Jenna Segal announced this week. Eric D. Schaeffer will direct the classic, inspired by characters of French writer Colette, with a score by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe.
You hear that? That rumbling in the distance? Feel that vibration under your feet? That's the Tony train coming! There's no stopping it, so don't try. Just brace yourself for its arrival. The cut-off date for Tony consideration is April 25, and until then, producers will be attaching as many cars to that locomotive as the traffic will allow. Two Broadway openings a week? Three? Four? You'll see it. Get ready.
Christopher Durang enjoyed his first Broadway production in 17 years this week. (In the spirit of charity, we won't count the text he contributed to the 2010 Dame Edna outing All About Me.) It was Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, which had a critically embraced Off-Broadway run earlier this season. His previous Broadway bout was the famous flop Sex and Longing in 1996. The two shows have a thing or two in common. They were both produced by Lincoln Center Theater and both starred Durang's old college pal Sigourney Weaver.
Cinderella didn't quite get the fairy-tale ending she might have hoped for when the Rodgers & Hammerstein show named after her opened on Broadway on March 3.
Not since Jeremy Piven bolted the 2008 revival of Speed-the-Plow, citing mercury poisoning from excessive sushi binging, have we had a Broadway star exit as odd and awkward as what went down this week, when "Transformers" star Shia LaBeouf left the Broadway debut of Lyle Kessler's Orphans dramatically parted ways.
Daniel Craig — a rainmaker in A Steady Rain a couple seasons back — will head back to Broadway, accompanied by Rachel Weisz, in a new Broadway revival of Harold Pinter's time-bending drama Betrayal, according to a report out of London. Mike Nichols, who just can't quit Broadway, will direct.
I'm not a betting man. And I'm not a rich man. But I would have bet you $100 a month ago that there was no way the Rebecca melodrama could get any weirder.
