October 31, 2008
We finally have a full casting confirmation for the new Broadway production of West Side Story! The role of 'Maria' will be played by Argentinian actress Josefina Scaglione. The musical will also feature Matt Cavenaugh from A Catered Affair as ''Tony,' Karen Olivo from In The Heights as 'Anita,' Cody Green from Movin' Out as 'Riff,' and George Akram from the Farrelly Brothers comedy Stuck On You as 'Bernardo.'
Besides the already-known direction of author and Tony Award-winner Arthur Laurents, the musical will also feature Steve Bassett as "Lt. Schrank," Kyle Brenn as "Boy Soprano," Joshua
Buscher as "Diesel," Mike Cannon as "Snowboy," Kyle Coffman as "A-Rab," Joey
Haro as "Chino," Eric Hatch as "Big Deal," Curtis Holbrook as "Action," Michael
Mastro as "Glad Hand" Danielle Polanco as "Consuela," Jennifer Sanchez as
"Rosalia," Lee Sellars as "Krupke," Tro Shaw as "Anybodys," Ryan Steele as "Baby
John," Greg Vinkler as "Doc" along with Madeline Cintron, Lindsay Dunn, Matthew
Hydzik, Marina Lazzaretto, Chase Madigan, Kaitlin Mesh, Pamela Otterson, Sam
Rogers and Amy Ryerson as "The Jets" and Isaac Calpito, Haley Carlucci, Peter
John Chursin, Yurel Echezaretta, Manuel Herrera, Yanira Marin, Mileyka Mateo,
Kat Nejat, Christian Elan Ortez, Michael Rosen, Manuel Santos, Michaeljon
Slinger and Tanairi Sade Vazquez as "The Sharks." Previews begin February 23rd. Get your tickets right here right now.
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Broadway, cody green, george akram, josefina scaglione, karen olivo, matt cavenaugh, musical, revival, west side story
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Posted on 10/31/2008
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October 24, 2008
Despite 8 Tony Awards, a Grammy Award-winning cast recording (with music by one-hit wonder Duncan Sheik), and a new star straight from acclaimed Showtime drama Weeds, Spring Awakening announced yesterday that the production will come to an end. It will be able to hold the hand of comedy favorite and fellow Tony Award-winning musical Spamalot on the way to Broadway's graveyard, sometimes known as the "To Be Revived" pile; both shows will close on January 18th.
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broadway, closing, duncan sheik, grammy award, hunter parrish, musical, spamalot, spring awakening, tony award
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Posted on 10/24/2008
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October 22, 2008
Starting December 3rd, the inimitable Liza Minnelli will begin a limited engagement at the Palace Theater. The show—aptly titled Liza's At The Palace!--will feature Liza and a twelve-piece orchestra, as well as all her hit Broadway songs. The Tony Award-winning star will not only sing; she will also tell stories and anecdotes from her long and illustrious career in show business, spanning over almost sixty years! Liza's At The Palace! will be scripted by Liza herself, along with fellow Tony Award-winning lyricist David Zippel, and will include a salute to her godmother, Kay Thompson, who was a vocal arranger for MGM in the 1940s (where she worked with Minnelli's mother--Judy Garland--and Gene Kelly) before striking out on her own with a nightclub act. With a career that has streched from Broadway to film to television roles like the vertigo-stricken Lucille on Arrest Development and even a guest spot on My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade, Liza has always known how to put on a good show. You can read our in-depth editorial while you wait for tickets to go on sale to the public Sunday at noon, or you can buy them right now exclusively at NYC.com.
Tags:
broadway, kay thompson, liza minnelli, lizas at the palace, musical, palace theatre, tony award winner
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Posted on 10/22/2008
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October 17, 2008
It's a long way off, but producers John H. Hart, Jeff Sine, and Fred Zollo have announced that they have acquired the rights to turn scrappy independent film Once into a Broadway musical. Once, of course, was released in 2006 and won the Academy Award for Best Song for "Falling Slowly," penned by the film's two stars, The Frames frontman Glen Hansard and Czech musician Markéta Irglová, in 2007. The multiple Tony Award-winning producers are planning to debut the musical during the 2010/2011 Broadway season.
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adaptation, broadway, debut, fred zollo, glen hansard, jeff sine, john h hart, marketa irglova, musical, once, the frames
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Posted on 10/17/2008
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October 16, 2008
Starting December 2nd, Slava's Snowshow will come to Broadway for a 5-week holiday engagement at the Helen Hayes Theatre. The production has been called the Cirque du Soleil of clowning and has been created and staged by Slava Polunin, widely considered to be the greatest clown in the world, and his snowshow--which played off-Broadway for three years--has traveled the world, picking up awards (Olivier, Drama Desk, and Stanislavksi Awards, among others) wherever it's gone.
For one night only, the New Amsterdam Theater will host Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, a benefit concert surrounding the 35th anniversary of the Elton John album of the same name. The concert will benefit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, Elton John's AIDS Foundation, and Friends In Deed. Tickets are currently on sale.
Sex In The City's Sarah Jessica Parker and her Tony Award-winning husband Matthew Broderick will host Broadway Voices For Change at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre on October 19th. The concert will benefit America Votes, the largest grassroots voter mobilization effort in the country. The production will feature Tony Award-winners Barbara Cook and Audra McDonald, as well, under the musical direction of Ted Sperling and lee Musiker. Tickets range from $50-$99.
The national tour of Dreamgirls will be holding open auditions at the legendary Apollo Theater in Harlen on November 1. These are no meager roles up for grabs: the starring roles of Deena, Lorrell, and Effie. Sign-ups for the audition will run from 9:30am to 11am and the place is likely to fill up fast, so get there early.
Finally, the cast of A Tale Of Two Cities will join the United Nations in a stand against global poverty tomorrow. The event will feature performances by the cast to help raise awareness of poverty and benefit the UN Millennium Campaign's STAND UP Initiative and will be part of an expected 67 million people around the world engaging in events and demonstrations to voice their commitment to a more urgent response to inequality and global poverty. For more information, visit Stand Against Poverty.
Tags:
al hirschfeld theatre, apollo theater, barbara cook, broadway, casting, dreamgirls, elton john, matthew broderick, open audition, sarah jessica parker, tale of two cities, united nations
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Posted on 10/16/2008
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October 09, 2008
Previews begin February 3, 2009 for the new production of the classic Guys & Dolls at the Nederlander Theatre. Directed by two-time Tony Award-winning director Des MacAnuff (Jersey Boys) and starring Tony nominee Oliver Platt, this production will be the first Broadway revival of the well-loved musical in nearly two decades. Des MacAnuff will bring along fellow Jersey Boys alum Sergio Trujillo, who will provide his Tony and Drama Desk Award-winning choreography to the production. No further cast announcements were made at the time of the press release, and a sales date for the musical--which opens properly on March 1st--is also to be announced.
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broadway, guys and dolls, macanuff, musical, platt, revival, trujillo
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Posted on 10/9/2008
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October 02, 2008
It's daunting enough reading the works of Charles Dickens—at least for most readers—let alone taking one of his classic stories and retrofitting it for another medium. It's well known that Dickens was paid by the word and that he preferred, by and large, to get as big a paycheck for his work as he could manage. To distill such a book as A Tale Of Two Cities into a 155-minute musical without disintegrating the meat of the story is tantamount to suicide. This is the first place that an adaptation can go inexorably and horribly wrong under the best of circumstances, and yet it's where Jill Santoriello—the librettist, composer, and writer behind A Tale Of Two Cities: The Musical—went unquestionably right.
A Tale Of Two Cities, like most Dickens novels, trades on the writer's knack for characterization, with what seems like two entire cities' worth of characters who engender either the deepest affection or the iciest of hatred in the reader. There was, for me at least, a point in the novel when every character falls to the side, and it seems Santoriello felt the same way. While the story is, after all, about the French Revolution and the unceasing oppression of the poor by the aristocracies in both France and Dickens' native England, it is principally about a prisoner of the Bastille who, after being released following a nearly two-decades-long imprisonment, is reunited with a daughter who thought him as dead as she knew her mother to be. Dr. Manette—played by the forceful Gregg Edelman—and his daughter Lucie—played by the luminous Brandi Burkhardt—become inextricably intertwined with a French ex-patriot named Charles Darney—played brilliantly by Les Mis alum Aaron Lazar—and as the ties between England and France, father and daughter, husband and wife, change forever, the French Revolution uproots everything.
The musical finds a real villain in Natalie Toro's Madame DeFarge, whose voice carries all the anguish her character has lived through and all of the violence she visits upon her enemies. While Ernest DeFarge is more vengeful in the book, his restraint is amplified in the musical, and the choice gives the character of his wife the necessary room to blossom into something truly evil. Nick Wyman's portrayal of English spy and friend to the new citizens of liberté pays rightful tribute to Dickens' black humor and turns an otherwise devious and unappealing character into the audience's guilty ally, a trick pulled off with equal skill in Craig Bennett's portrayal of "resurrectiontist"—that is to say, graverobber—Jerry Cruncher.
But as Santoriello and those who've read the book through to the end know, there is only one main character in A Tale Of Two Cities, and the rest of the cast of Dickens' classic novel are simply Sydney Carton's background. Santoriello's brilliant spotlight of the conflicted and begrudged lawyer's assistant is masterful and insightful and infused with the kind of wit that Charles Dickens would have laughed the hardest at himself. James Barbour—of Stephen Sondheim's Assassins—plays Charles Darnay's physical and emotional evil twin beautifully, with a manner that makes the loathsome lovable and the unendurable Sydney Carton endearing. Barbour commands the show without stealing it and his performance , rather than absorbing it completely, instead reflects the spotlight onto his fellow performers. It is impossible not to laugh with Carton and pointless to hope for anything but his ultimate success.
The musical aspect follows suit with Jill Santoriello's brilliant sleight-of-hand adaption of the story, with numbers that never stall the narrative but instead imbue the story with the same effervescent detail that make the book so ingenious. If music is an sort of emotional shorthand, then songs like "Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind," "If Dreams Came True," and "I Can't Recall" act as undeniable fists that are as illuminating as they are sonorous. The power of the musical performances by James Barbour and Natalie Toro cannot be overstated, nor can the effect of Edelman and Burkhardt's "Who Are You/You'll Never Be Alone" be diminished. The cast is so perfectly populated with capable voices that it's quite impossible to invent a sufficiently varied palette of adjectives to keep from tripping over the same ones. The symphony of set design, too, is elegantly orchestrated and becoming of the turmoil they are meant to represent. Never jarring, always evocative, and truly clever, the sets do everything they are meant to do with no adverse side effects.
Good fiction, like magic, makes it difficult for the audience to see the mechanics of the trick. Charles Dickens was a master magician whose greatest feat was the grand illusion created in the pages of A Tale Of Two Cities, and Jill Santoriello's musical has not only recreated that sleight-of-hand, it is guilty of a far less obvious magic: to take a classic novel, long buried under scholarship and praise, and recall it to life.
Tags:
al hirschfield theatre, brandi burkhardt, broadway, charles dicks, gregg edelman, james barbour, jill santoriello, musical, natalie toro, review, tale of two cities
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Posted on 10/2/2008
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