edjames

2018 Drama Desk Awards winners: Full list led by ‘SpongeBob Square Pants,’ ‘Angels in America,’ ‘Carousel” Winners of the 63rd annual Drama Desk Awards were revealed on June 3 during a ceremony at the Town Hall in midtown Manhattan that was hosted once again by Michael Urie. As with the Outer Critics Circle Awards, these kudos also consider both Broadway and off-Broadway fare. To that end, the Broadway production of “The Band’s Visit” was ineligible, save for its sound design which was deemed to be new and won with these voters. X = Winner PLAYS Best Play X – Admissions, by Joshua Harmon Mary Jane, by Amy Herzog Miles for Mary, by The Mad Ones People, Places & Things, by Duncan Macmillan School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play, by Jocelyn Bioh Best Revival of a Play X – Angels in America Hindle Wakes In the Blood Three Tall Women Travesties Best Director of a Play Marianne Elliott, Angels in America Jeremy Herrin, People, Places & Things Joe Mantello, Three Tall Women Lila Neugebauer, Miles for Mary Simon Stone, Yerma X – John Tiffany, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Best Actor in a Play Johnny Flynn, Hangmen X – Andrew Garfield, Angels in America Tom Hollander, Travesties James McArdle, Angels in America Paul Sparks, At Home at the Zoo Best Actress in a Play Carrie Coon, Mary Jane Denise Gough, People, Places & Things X – Glenda Jackson, Three Tall Women Laurie Metcalf, Three Tall Women Billie Piper, Yerma Best Featured Actor in a Play Anthony Boyle, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Ben Edelman, Admissions Brian Tyree Henry, Lobby Hero X – Nathan Lane, Angels in America David Morse, The Iceman Cometh Gregg Mozgala, Cost of Living Best Featured Actress in a Play Jocelyn Bioh, In the Blood X – Jamie Brewer, Amy and the Orphans Barbara Marten, People, Places & Things Deirdre O’Connell, Fulfillment Center Constance Shulman, Bobbie Clearly Best Music in a Play X – Imogen Heap, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Justin Hicks, Mlima’s Tale, Public Theatre Amatus Karim-Ali, The Homecoming Queen Justin Levine, A Midsummer Night’s Dream Adrian Sutton, Angels in America Best Costume Design for a Play Dede M. Ayite, School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play X – Jonathan Fensom, Farinelli and the King Katrina Lindsay, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Ann Roth, Three Tall Women Emilio Sosa, Venus, Signature Theatre Best Lighting Design for a Play X – Neil Austin, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Natasha Chivers, 1984 Alan C. Edwards, Kill Move Paradise Paul Gallo, Three Tall Women Paul Russell, Farinelli and the King Best Set Design for a Play X – Miriam Buether, Three Tall Women Bunny Christie, People, Places & Things Lizzie Clachan, Yerma Maruti Evans, Kill Move Paradise Louisa Thompson, In the Blood Best Sound Design in a Play Brendan Aanes, Balls X – Gareth Fry, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Tom Gibbons, 1984 Tom Gibbons, People, Places & Things Stefan Gregory, Yerma Palmer Hefferan, Today is My Birthday MUSICALS Best Musical Desperate Measures KPOP Mean Girls Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story X – SpongeBob SquarePants Best Revival of a Musical Amerike-The Golden Land Carousel X – My Fair Lady Once on This Island Pacific Overtures Best Director of a Musical Christian Barry, Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story Teddy Bergman, KPOP Jack O’Brien, Carousel X – Tina Landau, SpongeBob SquarePants Bartlett Sher, My Fair Lady Best Actor in a Musical Jelani Alladin, Frozen Harry Hadden-Paton, My Fair Lady Joshua Henry, Carousel Evan Ruggiero, Bastard Jones X – Ethan Slater, SpongeBob SquarePants Best Actress in a Musical Gizel Jiménez, Miss You Like Hell LaChanze, Summer X – Jessie Mueller, Carousel Ashley Park, KPOP Daphne Rubin-Vega, Miss You Like Hell Best Featured Actor in a Musical Damon Daunno, The Lucky Ones Alexander Gemignani, Carousel Grey Henson, Mean Girls X – Gavin Lee, SpongeBob SquarePants Tony Yazbeck, Prince of Broadway Best Featured Actress in a Musical X – Lindsay Mendez, Carousel Kenita R. Miller, Once on This Island Ashley Park, Mean Girls Diana Rigg, My Fair Lady Kate Rockwell, Mean Girls Best Music The Bengsons, The Lucky Ones Ben Caplan, Christian Barry, Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story X – David Friedman, Desperate Measures Erin McKeown, Miss You Like Hell Helen Park, Max Vernon, KPOP Best Lyrics Nell Benjamin, Mean Girls Quiara Alegría Hudes/Erin McKeown, Miss You Like Hell X – Peter Kellogg, Desperate Measures Helen Park, Max Vernon, KPOP Best Book of a Musical X – Tina Fey, Mean Girls Kyle Jarrow, SpongeBob Squarepants Peter Kellogg, Desperate Measures Hannah Moscovitch, Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story Best Choreography Camille A. Brown, Once on This Island Christopher Gattelli, SpongeBob SquarePants Casey Nicholaw, Mean Girls X – Justin Peck, Carousel Nejla Yatkin, The Boy Who Danced on Air Best Orchestrations Tom Kitt, SpongeBob SquarePants Annmarie Milazzo and Michael Starobin (John Bertles and Bash the Trash, found instrument design) Once on This Island Charlie Rosen, Erin McKeown, Miss You Like Hell Jonathan Tunick, Pacific Overtures X – Jonathan Tunick, Carousel Best Costume Design for a Musical Gregg Barnes, Mean Girls Clint Ramos, Once on This Island David Zinn, SpongeBob SquarePants X – Catherine Zuber, My Fair Lady Dede M. Ayite, Bella: An American Tall Tale Best Lighting Design for a Musical Louisa Adamson, Christian Barry, Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story Amith Chandrashaker, The Lucky Ones X – Jules Fisher, Peggy Eisenhauer, Once on This Island Brian MacDevitt, Carousel Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, KPOP Best Set Design for a Musical Louisa Adamson, Christian Barry, Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story Beowulf Boritt, Prince of Broadway, Manhattan Theatre Club Dane Laffrey, Once on This Island Santo Loquasto, Carousel X – David Zinn, SpongeBob SquarePants Best Sound Design in a Musical X – Kai Harada, The Band’s Visit Scott Lehrer, Carousel Will Pickens, KPOP Dan Moses Schreier, Pacific Overtures

Review: Jim Parsons and Zachary Quinto Enter Sniping in ‘The Boys in the Band’ By Ben Brantley. May 31, 2018 Holy social anthropology! What is this strange and barbaric tribal ceremony that our unsuspecting traveler has stumbled upon? Men are actually dancing with — gasp — other men, in a wrist-flicking, hip-wriggling, keister-twitching chorus line. Perhaps they’re enacting some unspeakable mating ritual, the kind an adventurous American couple of the mid-1960s might have seen (and recoiled from) while watching But this is definitely not the sort of activity Joe Average expects to encounter in the apartment of his best friend from college. That, more or less, is the point of view of a lone, presumably heterosexual man when he arrives as an uninvited guest at the all-gay party of hedonism and hatred that is Mart Crowley’s epochal 1968 drama “The Boys in the Band,” which opened on Thursday night in a starry but disconnected revival at the Booth Theater. And theatergoers, too, may feel an awakening shock at this moment. Because, really, all the insinuating antics onstage — laced with frisky innuendos and stinging zingers — feel pretty humdrum to latter-day viewers, not so different from an episode of “Will & Grace.” What’s so shocking is how shocked the recent arrival appears, and what a pall of cold shame his disapproving presence casts over what has been a moment of joy, perhaps the only one the play allows. This sudden plummeting of emotional temperature jolted me into a painful, present-tense awareness of how truly ghettoized — and terrifying — life was for most American gay men when “Boys” opened Off Broadway. I was a 13-year-old North Carolina middle-school student then, and secretly followed the coverage of what became a Cultural Event with an uneasy fascination. Though I hadn’t read the play, all accounts of it suggested that no one in his right mind would want to grow up to be like the miserable and vicious misfits it depicted. In his original New York Times review, Clive Barnes spoke of “the special self-dramatization and the frightening self-pity — true I suppose of all minorities, but especially true of homosexuals.” And I thought that was just how teenagers were! I got myself a (temporary) girlfriend, pronto. So it is definitely a cause for celebration that the self-loathing title characters of “Boys” are now being portrayed — in the play’s Broadway debut — by successful, and in some cases wildly popular, mainstream actors who are (to use a quaint phrase) openly gay. They include Jim Parsons (“The Big Bang Theory”), Zachary Quinto (the J. J. Abrams “Star Trek” films) and Matt Bomer (“White Collar”). I wish I could report that this charismatic and capable team, directed by the busy Joe Mantello, transported me vividly and uncompromisingly into the dark ages of homosexual life in these United States, and that I shuddered and sobbed in sympathy. But even trimmed from two acts to an intermission-free 110 minutes, the show left me largely impatient and unmoved. Part of this is a matter of the miscasting of the production’s biggest marquee names, the seriously talented Mr. Parsons and Mr. Quinto. More important, though, is that this real-time drama only rarely seems to be happening in real time, with real feelings. The bitchy quips are all delivered and landed with deft comic timing, and the show is an entertaining primer in the now widely accepted art of throwing shade. But I had to strain to imagine the boys of “Boys” were a blood-bound clan, better known to one another than their natural-born families were. And without that illusion of chosen consanguinity, the expositional creakiness of Mr. Crowley’s script is laid unflatteringly bare. The structure of “Boys” is not unlike that of an earlier scandalous sensation of a play, Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”(There’s an allusion to Albee — whom one character confuses with Tennessee Williams — in the original text for “Boys.”) As in “Woolf,” a party is being thrown, like a sharp-edged stone from a slingshot, and wicked games will be played. The host in this case is Michael (Mr. Parsons), a writer and semi-lapsed Catholic living — on maxed-out credit cards — in a sumptuous red velvet duplex in Manhattan’s East 50s. (David Zinn did the set, along with the refreshingly unexaggerated period costumes.) Michael is a withering wit and a hostile drunk; he has been off the sauce for five weeks when the play begins, and intends to stay that way. Fat chance, with the birthday party that’s happening tonight. It’s for Michael’s best frenemy, the misanthropic Harold (Mr. Quinto), for whom a social event means getting stoned and camouflaged in makeup (he has a pockmarked face) well in advance. As for the rest of the guests, I can’t improve on Pauline Kael’s description of them, in her review of , as “a 40s-movie bomber-crew cast: a Catholic, a Jew, a Negro, a hustler. …” Ticking off these boxes are a solid Mr. Bomer as Donald, Michael’s former lover and a fellow analysand (the parent-blaming specter of Freud hovers); Andrew Rannells (of “The Book of Mormon” and “Falsettos”) as Larry, a commercial artist; and Tuc Watkins as Hank, who has left his wife for Larry. Michael Benjamin Washington is Bernard, whose status as an African-American is the butt of the show’s nastiest humor. Bernard swaps stereotyping digs with Robin de Jesús’s (excellent) Emory, the most flamboyantly effeminate of the lot. Then there are the outsiders: the Cowboy (Charlie Carver) of the midnight variety, who has been purchased by Emory as a birthday present for Harold, and the unlucky Alan (Brian Hutchison), that old roommate of Michael, whose arrival lights the fuse on the time bomb. Michael falls off the wagon — a moment signaled by an action-freezing, sepulchral spotlight, courtesy of the lighting designer Hugh Vanstone — and initiates an especially cruel, soul-baring party game. Make way for regrets, recriminations and the basis for a lifelong hangover. Of course what happens after Alan (who swears he didn’t know Michael was gay) shows up isn’t all that different from before. Most of the characters are, like the play itself, diagnosticians of their sexual identities, and there’s a lot of “this is how we are, and how we got that way” soliloquizing. Some of the fattier sections of such discourse have been trimmed away. But so, more damagingly, have many of the old movie references that establish Michael as a loving practitioner of camp, as both a source of genuine pleasure and a defense system. These deletions make Michael seem like more of a bitter scold than he is already. On its own terms, Mr. Parsons’s self-contained, slow-burn performance is impressive. But in mannerisms and voice, this guy is too tight, too cautious to be the extravagant, escapist playboy he is said to be. As his arch-nemesis, Harold, a heavily made-up Mr. Quinto, registers as an inhuman visitor from another planet, an effect that sometimes happens when handsome actors play ugly. His line readings sound as if they come straight from the crypt, making Harold’s pronouncements disproportionately oracular and ominous. (Harold to Michael: “We tread very softly with each other because we both play each other’s game too well.”) The rest of the cast is just fine, and they’re never better than when the boys are happily at play, dancing and camping and exchanging choice put-downs. But because they’re so endlessly, openly analytical, there’s no subtext for the actors to play, which means the big “reveals” aren’t all that revealing. There is one superlative performance, however, that provides the show with its most genuinely moving moments. That comes from Mr. de Jesús, whose unapologetically nelly Emory slowly displays an innate dignity beneath the flippancy and frivolity. In the 2010 revival of “La Cage aux Folles,” Mr. de Jesús portrayed a similar archetype, which he took so far over the top you expected him to float away. In this role, he grounds the classically effeminate gay man in a bedrock of genuine pain, yes, but also resilience. Some pundits who see “Boys” as a sort of positive prophecy have said that they could imagine Emory later joining the barricades during the Stonewall uprising of 1969. Mr. de Jesús justifies that prediction, and makes — who’d have thought it? — silly old Emory the best reason to hope for the futures of the time-warped boys of this disharmonious band.

Today's excuse is that he cannot ford moving boxes. This is such a sad situation. Part of me says he's deeply depressed, another part of me says he's lazy and spoiled. I don't totally blame the parents but this guy does need the help of a good therapist. NEWS Deadbeat son evicted from parents’ home says he’s too broke to move By Yaron Steinbuch May 25, 2018 | 9:42am Michael Rotondo, 30, walking out of his parents' home.Mike Roy The unemployed millennial who has been ordered to pack up his belongings and vamoose from his parents’ home after they sued him says there’s one problem — he can’t afford moving boxes. Freeloader Michael Rotondo, 30, was ordered by an Onondaga County judge to get out of the house in upstate Camillus by noon Friday. His parents, Mark and Christina Rotondo, lowered the boom on their deadbeat son, who has been living with them rent-free for the past eight years, by suing him. Michael, who has a young son, told The Post this week that he wanted three months to move out — or he’d appeal the judge’s ruling. But he cited a practical matter that he said prevents him from moving out. “Mostly, I need to start packing my boxes so I can move,” he told Syracuse.com on Thursday. “But I have to pay for the boxes, which might be a problem.” Rotondo admitted Wednesday during an interview with CNN that he was jobless, but there’s at least one restaurant chain trying to change that. In a statement on Facebook, Villa Italian Kitchen offered the man a “store-level job” and training at any one of its 250 locations across the country. “At Villa, we feel for millennials, across the board. It’s tough out there,” the restaurant wrote. “With that said . . . we’re offering you a store-level gig, complete with extensive training to get you up to speed, at any one of our 250 locations worldwide.” The chain added, “We heard your parents offered you $1,100 to get out. We’ll do you one better. Literally, one. Offer from us is on the table for $1,101 to come join our team. Consider it a signing bonus. We gotchu, bud.” Rotondo has been told that if he fails to move out and get a job by June 1, Onondaga County sheriff’s deputies could forcibly remove him. “I’m aware that that’s how the ax falls,” he said Thursday. “I’m going to try to resolve this as civilly as possible.” Speaking to CNN on Wednesday, Rotondo tried to downplay the notion that many people believe he’s the walking definition of an entitled millennial. “I would say that I’m really not a member of that demographic that they’re speaking to,” Rotondo said, despite falling into the widely recognized age gap for millennials. America’s failure to raise boys By Karol Markowicz May 26, 2018 | 10:42am | Amid the progress in society of women, Michael Rotondo reminds us of the risks of undermotivating young men. Mike Roy Last week, a judge in New York ruled that a 30-year-old man must move out of his childhood home on June 1 after his parents served him with several notices asking him to go. The ruling inadvertently exposed a hidden truth: The boys are not all right. A generation of damaged boys are turning into impaired men and, as seen by the mocking coverage of this case, we’re treating this development like a joke, encouraged to ridicule and condemn them for it. For months, Mark and Christina Rotondo asked son Michael to vacate their home. He had lived with them for eight years and, as he approached his 31st birthday, his parents set deadlines encouraging him to leave. They provided him with guidance and gave him money to move on, which he proceeded to spend on other things. Michael, meanwhile, claimed he didn’t want to remain in their home, especially after they took him off the family phone plan, but he couldn’t seem to motivate out the actual door. The story is a terrifying real-life version of the 2006 romantic comedy “Failure to Launch” starring Matthew McConaughey and Sarah Jessica Parker. In it, McConaughey’s parents, desperate to get their grown son out of the house, hire Parker to help them do that. But what was a hilarious premise in 2006 is all too real in 2018. The Rotondo family story is a warning to modern families with no Hollywood love story at the end. While the media lambast Michael as an “entitled millennial,” that only tells part of the story. What’s happening is an all-out failure in how we are raising boys. A Pew Research poll from 2016 showed that men age 18-36, exactly Michael Rotondo’s demographic, were more likely to be living at home with their parents than alone, with a roommate or with a partner. That’s a startling statistic, especially as the same isn’t true for women. We can’t blame this stagnation on the entitlement of the millennial generation when half of that generation is living their lives as intended. Part of the problem is we’ve been encouraging girls at the expense of boys. The language of empowerment we use around girls is absent from how we talk to boys. The expectation that males will succeed just because they are male has been smashed, just like feminists wanted, but now what? To shrug our shoulders and not care what happens to a generation of young men is to produce a generation of Michael Rotondos, adrift and living at home as they enter their 30s. It doesn’t help that this demographic is also finding it so hard to get, and stay, employed. An Economic Policy Institute report from February found that men are absent from the workforce in large numbers. This is a big change from the past. The report noted that “in 1979, only 6.3 percent of prime-age men did not work at all over the course of a year, but that number nearly doubled to 11.9 percent in 2016.” The telling thing is that there isn’t widespread concern about this; instead there is a celebration that women are outpacing men at school and at work. We tell girls they are amazing and unstoppable by virtue of their gender A 2010 study by psychologist Judith Kleinfeld in the journal Gender Issues found that boys’ issues were going unaddressed. Boys, the study found, had “higher rates of suicide, conduct disorders, emotional disturbance, premature death and juvenile delinquency than their female peers, as well as lower grades, test scores and college attendance rates.” It’s no wonder a generation of boys are growing into fearful adults who would rather live in their childhood room, and sleep on their old Superman sheets washed by Mom, than take a chance in a world for which they are unprepared. The rising prominence of Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson is a development of this. He has been described as a “father figure” to this group of lost boys. His controversial speeches, which are attended overwhelmingly by men and offer direction on getting their lives in order — to literally “clean up their room” — is taking the place of parents who have failed to instruct their children to do the same. The fact that Peterson’s YouTube videos go viral to a majority male audience, and his book “Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos” is a bestseller, is significant. Despite some of his questionable ideas (such as if white privilege even exists), Peterson is speaking directly to men about something that has become a rarity in our “Future is Female” world. We tell girls they are amazing and unstoppable by virtue of their gender while telling boys they have to somehow overcome their gender to be great. The result is a slumping male, unsure how to live his life, forced to watch YouTube videos to figure it out. The Rotondos are right to force Michael to live his own life; they don’t owe him support this far into adulthood. But the message of this case should be taken to heart by us all. Michael isn’t alone in his failure to launch; there are many others like him. We mock him at our own peril. We need to start teaching boys how to “clean up their rooms” or not be so surprised that grown-up men still live in them.

In today's NYTimes, this announcement.... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/theater/merrily-we-roll-along-to-be-revived-off-broadway.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftheater&action=click&contentCollection=theater&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=8&pgtype=sectionfront ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ to Be Revived Off Broadway e A scene from Fiasco Theater’s “Into the Woods”; the company is tackling “Merrily We Roll Along,” another another Stephen Sondheim musical, next. “Merrily We Roll Along,” a Stephen Sondheim musical that abruptly flopped on Broadway in 1981 but has become a much-loved show in the decades since, will be revived Off Broadway next winter by the Roundabout Theater Company. The musical, a rueful deconstruction of the unraveling of a three-way friendship, will be a production of Fiasco Theater, which is Roundabout’s company in residence. Fiasco, known for its stripped-down productions, often with simple props, did a well-received production of “Into the Woods,” another show with a score by Mr. Sondheim. “Merrily,” which is based on a play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, features a book by George Furth. Its original production, which closed just two weeks after opening, was the subject of a 2016 documentary, “Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened.” Noah Brody, Fiasco’s co-artistic director, will direct a cast that includes members of the company. The show will open Feb. 19 at the Laura Pels Theater. “Merrily” is the seventh production announced by Roundabout for its upcoming season. On Broadway, where the theater operates three spaces, Roundabout will present “Bernhardt/Hamlet,” a new comedic play by Theresa Rebeck about Sarah Bernhardt’s famous 1899 performance as the Prince of Denmark, starring Janet McTeer and directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel. Revivals of “True West” and “Kiss Me, Kate” are part of the season as well, with a fourth Broadway production still to be announced. Off Broadway, in addition to “Merrily,” Roundabout will present “Toni Stone,” a new play by Lydia R. Diamond, starring Uzo Aduba (“Orange is the New Black”) and directed by Pam MacKinnon, about the first womanto play as a regular on a big-league professional baseball team; and “Apologia” by Alexi Kaye Campbell, starring Stockard Channing and directed by Daniel Aukin. “Usual Girls,” by Ming Peiffer and directed by Tyne Rafaeli, will be presented at the Roundabout Underground theater for emerging artists.

He's OK Saw him outside his condo building. I'm sure they'll make some adjustments for his injury. (He lives up the block, next door to Jimmy Fallon)

Saturday night's performance was cancelled after Jim Parson's tripped on stage and injured his ankle! A theater insider told me his "understudy' was no where near ready to take over the role. Jim Parsons Injury Forces Cancellation Of ‘The Boys In the Band’ Performance During a Saturday matinee performance of the Broadway revival of the 1968 off-Broadway hit The Boys in the Band, cast member Jim Parsons tripped causing a cancellation of the evening show. According to the Associated Press and tweets from those attending the show, Parsons tripped during the encore. While his castmates took their bows, he limped off the stage. The official Boys in the Band Twitter account made the announcement of the cancellation after the performance. “Due to a minor injury of a cast member, the Sat evening performance has been canceled,” they announced. “Performances will resume Monday night.” The Boys In The Band takes place at an alcohol-fueled birthday party for a gay man and his friends that turns inexorably – and with acid humor – from celebratory to toxic as relationships unravel, feelings are shredded and alliances are food-processed. In addition to the Emmy Award-winning Parsons, the 50th anniversary of the groundbreaking production also stars Zachary Quinto, Matt Bomer, Andrew Rannells, Robin De Jesús, Brian Hutchison, Michael Benjamin Washington, and Tuc Watkins. Due to a minor injury of a cast member, the Sat evening performance has been canceled. Performances will resume Monday night. Please contact your point-of-purchase for refund and exchange information. https://t.co/UL3P4GWBJH — The Boys in the Band on Broadway (@BoysBandBway) May 13, 2018

I liked it, but I wasn't overwhelmed. Tony Shaloub has moved on to film his TV show, his role is now filled by actor, Dariush Kashani. Katrina Lenk's performance is mesmerizing. She has an earthy sexual aura and you cannot help but focus on every moment of her performance. The music is good. Best musical? I don't know. Still, an enjoyable piece of theater.

A little background from the film's director... William Friedkin dishes on the original ‘Boys in the Band’ By Michael Riedel May 3, 2018 | 8:22p A scene from William Friedkin's 1970 film version of "The Boys in the Band."Everett Collection An all-star cast began previews this week in “The Boys in the Band,” Mart Crowley’s 1968 play about a group of gay men who throw a party — and plenty of bitchy zingers. So it seemed fitting to catch up with William Friedkin, the Oscar-winning director who made the 1970 movie. The actors in the Broadway revival — Jim Parsons, Matt Bomer, Andrew Rannells and Zachary Quinto, among them — are openly gay. Fifty years ago, that would have been unthinkable. “When we made ‘Boys in the Band,’ you couldn’t say you were gay and get a job,” says Friedkin, who also directed “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist.” But Friedkin, who’s straight (wife No. 1 was Jeanne Moreau, wife No. 4 is Sherry Lansing), didn’t think twice about making the movie. “I didn’t give a flying f–k into a rolling doughnut about any of that,” he says over lunch at the Carlyle Hotel. “And you know why? Because the play is brilliant. The characters are finely drawn and there is wonderful wit. It’s a bit reminiscent of Oscar Wilde. It can be mentioned in the same sentence.” Crowley wrote “The Boys in the Band” at a low point in his life. He was “down on my ass and dead broke,” he once told me, and was house-sitting for actress Diana Lynn in Beverly Hills. He’d gone through a heavy period of drinking and, trying to keep his head clear, rattled off the play in four days by the pool. “A great combination of anger and despair,” he said, fueled the writing. The play opened off-Broadway and was an immediate hit, propelled in part by an exceptional cast, including Laurence Luckinbill, Leonard Frey, Cliff Gorman, Peter White and Keith Prentice. When Friedkin saw the play, he made a key decision. “I loved those guys,” he says. “And I told Mart, ‘We’re not going to cast anybody but them.’” Theater buffs cherish the movie because it’s a record of the original production, though Friedkin says he didn’t shoot “The Boys in the Band” like a stage play. “I moved it around like it was a Luis Buñuel film,” he says with a laugh. He shot the opening in Greenwich Village, and it’s fun to see what the neighborhood looked like in 1969, decades before Marc Jacobs stores lined the streets and luxury apartment buildings shot up along the Hudson. While the play is set in the Village, the apartment in the movie is on East 68th Street. At the time, it belonged to the actress Tammy Grimes. “Mart knew her, and he brought me up to look at her place,” says Friedkin. “She was very open to it. The scenes where they’re hanging crepe paper and getting ready for the party were shot in the daylight on her deck. We moved into a studio to shoot the night scenes.” Frey has an unforgettable turn as the lethally bitchy Harold, who was based on Howard Jeffrey, a Broadway choreographer who died of AIDS in 1988. Frey also died of AIDS, as did some other members of the original cast. The straight members of the cast — Gorman, Luckinbill and White – took a risk to be in the movie. Their agents warned them that they would lose jobs if they did. Luckinbill, in fact, was dropped from a tobacco commercial. “They did the movie because the roles are just so damned good,” says Friedkin, who also directed “Cruising,” the 1980 Al Pacino thriller whose gay-themed violence touched off a controversy. Written a year before the Stonewall riots, “The Boys in the Band” is a time capsule, to be sure, but Friedkin says it meant a great deal to a generation of gay men. “I hear from guys all the time that this was the film that helped them come out of the closet,” says Friedkin, now 82. “It gave them the courage not to be ashamed.”

SpongeBob Square Pants is a wonderfully fun and entertaining musical for everyone, not just kids! Ethan Slater should win a Tony for his role.

I concur with the advice previously given by others urging you to exercise more and increase the circulation to the your legs. Simple, easy movement and stretching will help. All those supplements are wasting your money. A good trainer, and/or a physical therapist, who specialize in senior "disabilities" would be a good start. I might also offer the suggestion to try "Easy Yoga", a good and proven way to move and stretch your body without a lot of stress. The advice to start slowly is also key. Don't overdo it. Good luck and feel better.

On the other side of the critics notebook s this excellent review from NYTimes: Review: In an Energized ‘Iceman,’ the Drinks are on Denzel By BEN BRANTLEYAPRIL 26, 2018 If you have a good time at a production of “The Iceman Cometh,” does that mean the show hasn’t done its job? I was beaming like a tickled 2-year-old during much of George C. Wolfe’s revival of Eugene O’Neill’s behemoth barroom tragedy, which opened on Thursday night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, with Denzel Washington more than earning his salary as its commanding star. A sustained grin may not seem an apt response to a play in which desperate, drunken denial is the given existential condition, and suicide and murder are presented as perfectly reasonable life choices for anyone who sees the world clearly. Besides, to smile through nearly four hours of doomed, rotgut-soaked souls mouthing the same hopeless blather over and over again would appear to be courting lockjaw, if not temporary insanity. Surely, the more appropriate and customary behavior for an “Iceman” audience member would echo that of the play’s cynic-in-chief, a disenchanted socialist (played here with ashen anger by David Morse), who says, “I took a seat in the grandstand of philosophical detachment to fall asleep observing the cannibals do their death dance.” But who’s going to feel like nodding off, or slump into terminal angst, when Mr. Wolfe has filled the stage with such delectably seasoned hams, who lap up limelight the way their characters throw back booze? In addition to Mr. Washington and Mr. Morse, this “Iceman” boasts a fine rogue’s gallery of performers who gladden the heart whenever they show up on a New York stage, including Colm Meaney, Bill Irwin, Danny McCarthy, Tammy Blanchard, Neal Huff, Reg Rogers, Michael Potts and Frank Wood. The denizens of Harry Hope’s last-chance bar in the downtown Manhattan of 1912 (that’s the wonderful Mr. Meaney as the crankily sentimental Harry) are such a scrappy, funny, madly posturing crew that you may not even share their impatience for the Big Guy to show up. That’s Theodore Hickman, known to his pals as Hickey, who is portrayed by Mr. Washington, this production’s Oscar- and Tony-winning star, and its commercial raison d’être. Hickey, a traveling salesman and perennial life of the party, doesn’t make his entrance until nearly an hour into show. The other characters, who had so eagerly awaited his arrival, wind up hostile to and disappointed with their usually inebriated pal, who has dared to go on the wagon and be really, really serious. Rest assured that you will not feel similarly let down by Mr. Washington’s center-of-gravity performance, or at least not by the play’s conclusion. Mr. Wolfe’s energetic interpretation of this 1946 drama (which a friend of mind suggested should be retitled “The Iceman Rompeth”) is likely to be divisive. Most productions — including Robert Falls’s acclaimed, Chicago-born version starring Nathan Lane, seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2015 — tend to elicit adjectives like “searing” and “devastating” (on the positive side) and “narcotic” and “way too long” (on the negative). After all, this is a work in which life is revealed, none too subtly, to be so crushing that the only way to get through it is to live in a cloud of illusions, or pipe dreams, to use one of O’Neill’s favorite terms. The characters employed to illustrate this point — a group of outcasts and also-rans who hide their heads in whiskey bottles and carefully tended rationalizations — are, as drunks often tend to be, an unbearably garrulous lot. That means that in addition to being one of the longest of great American plays, “Iceman” is also one of the most repetitive. You pretty much get everything it has to say during the first 20 minutes or so. O’Neill wasn’t wrong, though, in the self-admiring assessment he made in a 1940 letter to the critic George Jean Nathan, to whom he had sent an early draft. “I feel there are moments in it,” he wrote, “that hit as deeply into the farce and humor and pity and ironic tragedy of life as anything in modern drama.” Watching this latest incarnation, I laughed more often than I teared up. But this “Iceman” — which has been beautifully designed by Santo Loquasto (the increasingly abstract set), Ann Roth (costumes), Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer (the wondrous, color-coded lighting) and sound (Dan Moses Schreier) — acquires its own poignant lyricism, while vividly reminding us that in life, comedy and tragedy are seldom mutually exclusive. With its heightened performances and tone-poem visuals, this production also clearly elicits the musical nature of “Iceman,” which is in some ways closer to opera or oratorio than it is to conventional drama. On the page, its words can seem as blunt and cipher-like as notes on a musical staff. It is when you hear them spoken that they spring into interconnected life. All those repeated phrases take on the haunting insistence of melodic motifs. We’re reminded that all of us, no matter how we like to think otherwise, tend to be stuck in a single song of identity, on which we render only slight variations. The cast members here capture that monotony, to which their characters cling like a security blanket. And they exaggerate it to highly entertaining effect, in their arias and overlapping duets of lamentation and accusation. In fabricating their hopeful visions of their hopeless lives, O’Neill’s barflies are always performing, for themselves as well as the others. How right it feels that each of the men who have made Harry’s dive and boardinghouse their home — first seen as in a “Last Supper”-like tableau of sleeping figures — should stir to life when a subtle spotlight picks him out. They’re each as enticingly grotesque as a caricature by Goya or Daumier, thanks in part to their distinctively disheveled coifs. (Mia M. Neal did the great and essential hair and wigs.) I don’t have space to do a full roll call, as Larry Slade (Mr. Morse) does for the benefit of the newest and youngest resident, Don Parritt (the open-faced Austin Butler, in a sensationally assured Broadway debut). But for inhabitants of a place regularly characterized as a morgue, they are an exceptionally vibrant group. They love telling their lies, and these actors (whose profession, after all, is lying) love giving flamboyant life to such falsehoods. And then good old Hickey shows up, with his toothy smile and goofy jokes. At first, he seems to fit right in, as expected. But since he is portrayed by Mr. Washington, a specialist in layers of feeling, we notice an unsettling, even menacing blankness whenever his face is in repose. You know exactly what Mr. Butler’s character means when he says of Hickey, “There’s something that isn’t human behind his damned grinning and kidding.” That’s not just because Hickey is on a mission to save his former drinking buddies from their delusions, to make them face reality, as he swears he has done. More than any Hickey I’ve seen (including Kevin Spacey and, and ), Mr. Washington makes us sense that Hickey hasn’t entirely bought his own bill of truth-peddling goods. Hickey’s long, revelatory monologue at the end of Act IV — when he explains the events that turned him from carefree party boy into a cold-sober judge of others — is often delivered as a flashy nervous breakdown to the rest of the cast. In this version, Hickey moves a chair to the edge of the stage and delivers his soliloquy naturalistically, right to us. As he keeps trying — and failing — to justify himself, a chill creeps over the audience. That’s when I stopped smiling. The party is finally, truly over, and so are the lies within lies. And suddenly Mr. Wolfe and Mr. Washington have slapped us with that mother of all hangovers, which for O’Neill is life itself.

I had a great two evenings of theater. It was a memorable experience. Everything about it rates 5 stars, and excellent production. It will run forever. I was reminded of that fact when I saw an ad for Phantom on the side of a bus yesterday celebrating it's 30th year! Pricey, but highly recommended for all Potter fans. It does help if you are familiar with the previous story lines and characters.

And the good news...the show has be renewed for another season on CBS! CBS’s Madam Secretary Renewed for Season 5 Current Show Status Madam Secretary Season 5 — OFFICIALLY RENEWED Latest EpisodeAired Sun 4/22/2018The Friendship GameSeason 4: Episode 18 Next EpisodeAirs Sun 4/29/2018Thin IceSeason 4: Episode 19

Sorry, the Drama Desk nomination lat exceeded the thread limitation, so here is Part 2 for those who might be interested; Outstanding Orchestrations Tom Kitt, SpongeBob SquarePants Annmarie Milazzo and Michael Starobin (John Bertles and Bash the Trash, found instrument design) Once on This Island Charlie Rosen, Erin McKeown, Miss You Like Hell, Public Theater Jonathan Tunick, Pacific Overtures, Classic Stage Company Jonathan Tunick, Carousel Outstanding Music in a Play Imogen Heap, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Justin Hicks, Mlima’s Tale, Public Theatre Amatus Karim-Ali, The Homecoming Queen, Atlantic Theater Company Justin Levine, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Public Theater Adrian Sutton, Angels in America The Hudson Scenic Studio Award for Outstanding Set Design of a Play Miriam Buether, Three Tall Women Bunny Christie, People, Places & Things, St. Ann’s Warehouse/National Theatre/Bryan Singer Productions/Headlong Lizzie Clachan, Yerma, Young Vic/Park Avenue Armory Maruti Evans, Kill Move Paradise, National Black Theatre Louisa Thompson, In the Blood, Signature Theatre Outstanding Set Design for a Musical Louisa Adamson, Christian Barry, Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story, 2b Theatre Company/59E59 Beowulf Boritt, Prince of Broadway, Manhattan Theatre Club Dane Laffrey, Once on This Island Santo Loquasto, Carousel David Zinn, SpongeBob SquarePants Outstanding Costume Design for a Play Dede M. Ayite, School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play, MCC Theater Jonathan Fensom, Farinelli and the King Katrina Lindsay, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Ann Roth, Three Tall Women Emilio Sosa, Venus, Signature Theatre Outstanding Costume Design for a Musical Gregg Barnes, Mean Girls Clint Ramos, Once on This Island David Zinn, SpongeBob SquarePants Catherine Zuber, My Fair Lady, Lincoln Center Theater Dede M. Ayite, Bella: An American Tall Tale, Playwrights Horizons Outstanding Lighting Design for a Play Neil Austin, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Natasha Chivers, 1984 Alan C. Edwards, Kill Move Paradise, National Black Theatre Paul Gallo, Three Tall Women Paul Russell, Farinelli and the King Outstanding Lighting Design for a Musical Louisa Adamson, Christian Barry, Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story, 2B Theatre Company/59E59 Amith Chandrashaker, The Lucky Ones Jules Fisher, Peggy Eisenhauer, Once on This Island Brian MacDevitt, Carousel Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, KPOP, Ars Nova, Ma-Yi Theater Company, Woodshed Collective Outstanding Projection Design David Bengali, Van Gogh’s Ear, Ensemble for the Romantic Century Andrezj Goulding, People, Places & Things, National Theatre/St. Ann’s Warehouse/Bryan Singer Productions/Headlong Peter Nigrini, SpongeBob SquarePants Finn Ross and Adam Young, Mean Girls Finn Ross and Ash J. Woodward, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Outstanding Sound Design in a Play Brendan Aanes, Balls, One Year Lease Theater Company/Stages Repertory Theatre/59E59 Gareth Fry, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Tom Gibbons, 1984 Tom Gibbons, People, Places & Things, National Theatre/St. Ann’s Warehouse/Bryan Singer Productions/Headlong Stefan Gregory, Yerma, Young Vic/Park Avenue Armory Palmer Hefferan, Today is My Birthday, Page 73 Productions Outstanding Sound Design in a Musical Kai Harada, The Band’s Visit Scott Lehrer, Carousel Will Pickens, KPOP, Ars Nova, Ma-Yi Theatre Company, Woodshed Collective Dan Moses Schreier, Pacific Overtures, Classic Stage Company Outstanding Wig and Hair Carole Hancock, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Campbell Young Associates, Farinelli and the King Cookie Jordan, School Girls;, or The African Mean Girls Play, MCC Theater Charles G. LaPointe, SpongeBob SquarePants Josh Marquette, Mean Girls Outstanding Solo Performance Billy Crudup, Harry Clarke, Vineyard Theatre David Greenspan, Strange Interlude, Transport Group Jon Levin, A Hunger Artist, The Tank/Flint & Tinder Lesli Margherita, Who’s Holiday! Sophie Melville, Iphigenia in Splott, Sherman Theatre, Cardiff/59E59 The Chase Award for Unique Theatrical Experience Derren Brown: Secret, Atlantic Theater Company Master, Foundry Theatre Say Something Bunny! Outstanding Fight Choreography J. David Brimmer, Is God Is, Soho Rep Steve Rankin, Carousel Unkle Dave’s Fight House, Oedipus El Rey, The Public Theater/The Sol Project Outstanding Puppet Design Finn Caldwell, Nick Barnes, Angels in America Michael Curry, Frozen Charlie Kanev, Sarah Nolan, and Jonathan Levin, A Hunger Artist, The Tank/Flint & Tinder Vandy Wood, The Artificial Jungle, Theatre Breaking Through Barriers SPECIAL AWARDS To Sean Carvajal and Edi Gathegi of Jesus Hopped the A Train whose last-minute entrances into the Signature production of this powerful play ensured it had a happy real-life ending Ensemble Award: To Nabiyah Be, MaameYaa Boafo, Paige Gilbert, Zainab Jah, Nike Kadri, Abena Mensah-Bonsu, Mirirai Sithole, and Myra Lucretia Taylor of School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play, whose characters learn the facts of life but whose portrayers taught us all a thing or two about the way things are. Sam Norkin Award: To Juan Castano, whose varied performances this season in Oedipus El Rey, A Parallelogram, and Transfers not only make a complex statement about American life but also indicate great things to come for this talented performer.

it's awards season on Broadway and off-broadway! ‘Carousel,’ ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ Lead 2018 Drama Desk Nominations (Full List) By Gordon Cox The Broadway revival of “Carousel” and the new musical “SpongeBob SquarePants” led the list of nominations for the 2018 Drama Desk Awards, with “Carousel” snagging a dozen nods (including outstanding musical revival) and “SpongeBob” landing 11 (among them outstanding musical). “Mean Girls” — the only other Broadway show competing with “SpongeBob” for new musical in this year’s Drama Desks — scored ten nods total. Among plays, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” already an awards-favorite in London, took eight, while the high-profile revival of “Angels in America,” starring Andrew Garfield and Nathan Lane, walked away with seven. The Drama Desks are one of a number of theater awards that cluster around the Broadway-centric Tony Awards in the late spring. The Drama Desks, however, serve as an imperfect indicator of Tony love, since the they consider Off Broadway shows eligible to compete against Broadway productions. This year, too, one of the Broadway’s season’s biggest contenders, “The Band’s Visit,” didn’t make the Drama Desk list because it would have been eligible last year for its Off Broadway staging. Earlier this week, the Outer Critics Circle also announced their nominations. “SpongeBob” led that pack with 11 noms, while “Harry Potter” scored ten. The 2018 Drama Desks Awards will be held June 3 at midtown Manhattan venue Town Hall. The full list of nominations follows. 2018 DRAMA DESKS AWARDS NOMINATIONS Outstanding Play Admissions, by Joshua Harmon, Lincoln Center Theater Mary Jane, by Amy Herzog, New York Theatre Workshop Miles for Mary, by The Mad Ones, Playwrights Horizons People, Places & Things, by Duncan Macmillan, National Theatre/St. Ann’s Warehouse/Bryan Singer Productions/Headlong School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play, by Jocelyn Bioh, MCC Theater Outstanding Musical Desperate Measures, The York Theatre Company KPOP, Ars Nova/Ma-Yi Theatre Company/Woodshed Collective Mean Girls Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story, 2b Theatre Company/59E59 SpongeBob SquarePants Outstanding Revival of a Play Angels in America Hindle Wakes, Mint Theater Company In the Blood, Signature Theatre Company Three Tall Women Travesties, Menier Chocolate Factory/Roundabout Theatre Company Outstanding Revival of a Musical Amerike-The Golden Land, National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene Carousel My Fair Lady, Lincoln Center Theater Once on This Island Pacific Overtures, Classic Stage Company Outstanding Actor in a Play Johnny Flynn, Hangmen, Royal Court Theatre/Atlantic Theater Company Andrew Garfield, Angels in America Tom Hollander, Travesties, Menier Chocolate Factory/Roundabout Theatre Company James McArdle, Angels in America Paul Sparks, At Home at the Zoo, Signature Theatre Company Outstanding Actress in a Play Carrie Coon, Mary Jane, New York Theatre Workshop Denise Gough, People, Places & Things, National Theatre/St. Ann’s Warehouse/Bryan Singer Productions/Headlong Glenda Jackson, Three Tall Women Laurie Metcalf, Three Tall Women Billie Piper, Yerma, Young Vic/Park Avenue Armory Outstanding Actor in a Musical Jelani Alladin, Frozen Harry Hadden-Paton, My Fair Lady Joshua Henry, Carousel Evan Ruggiero, Bastard Jones, the cell Ethan Slater, SpongeBob SquarePants Outstanding Actress in a Musical Gizel Jiménez, Miss You Like Hell, The Public Theater LaChanze, Summer Jessie Mueller, Carousel Ashley Park, KPOP, Ars Nova/Ma-Yi Theater Company/Woodshed Collective Daphne Rubin-Vega, Miss You Like Hell, The Public Theater Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play Anthony Boyle, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Ben Edelman, Admissions, Lincoln Center Theater Brian Tyree Henry, Lobby Hero, Second Stage Nathan Lane, Angels in America David Morse, The Iceman Cometh Gregg Mozgala, Cost of Living, Manhattan Theatre Club Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play Jocelyn Bioh, In the Blood, Signature Theatre Jamie Brewer, Amy and the Orphans, Roundabout Underground Barbara Marten, People, Places & Things, National Theatre/St. Ann’s Warehouse/Bryan Singer Productions/Headlong Deirdre O’Connell, Fulfillment Center, Manhattan Theatre Club Constance Shulman, Bobbie Clearly, Roundabout Underground Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical Damon Daunno, The Lucky Ones, Ars Nova Alexander Gemignani, Carousel Grey Henson, Mean Girls Gavin Lee, SpongeBob SquarePants Tony Yazbeck, Prince of Broadway, Manhattan Theatre Club Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical Lindsay Mendez, Carousel Kenita R. Miller, Once on This Island Ashley Park, Mean Girls Diana Rigg, My Fair Lady Kate Rockwell, Mean Girls Outstanding Director of a Play Marianne Elliott, Angels in America Jeremy Herrin, People, Places & Things, National Theatre/St. Ann’s Warehouse/Bryan Singer Productions/Headlong Joe Mantello, Three Tall Women Lila Neugebauer, Miles for Mary, Playwrights Horizons Simon Stone, Yerma, Young Vic/Park Avenue Armory John Tiffany, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Outstanding Director of a Musical Christian Barry, Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story, 2b Theatre Company/59E59 Teddy Bergman, KPOP, Ars Nova/Ma-Yi Theater Company/Woodshed Collective Jack O’Brien, Carousel Tina Landau, SpongeBob SquarePants Bartlett Sher, My Fair Lady The LaDuca Award for Outstanding Choreography Camille A. Brown, Once on This Island Christopher Gattelli, SpongeBob SquarePants Casey Nicholaw, Mean Girls Justin Peck, Carousel Nejla Yatkin, The Boy Who Danced on Air, Abingdon Theatre Company Outstanding Music The Bengsons, The Lucky Ones, Ars Nova/Piece by Piece Productions/Z Space Ben Caplan, Christian Barry, Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story, 2b Theatre Company/59E59 David Friedman, Desperate Measures, The York Theatre Company Erin McKeown, Miss You Like Hell, The Public Theater Helen Park, Max Vernon, KPOP, Ars Nova/Ma-Yi Theater Company/Woodshed Collective Outstanding Lyrics Nell Benjamin, Mean Girls Quiara Alegría Hudes/Erin McKeown, Miss You Like Hell, Public Theatre Peter Kellogg, Desperate Measures, The York Theatre Company Helen Park, Max Vernon, KPOP, Ars Nova/Ma-Yi Theater Company/Woodshed Collective Outstanding Book of a Musical Tina Fey, Mean Girls Kyle Jarrow, SpongeBob Squarepants Peter Kellogg, Desperate Measures, York Theatre Company Hannah Moscovitch, Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story, 2B Theatre/59E59

Harry Potter’ is the one to beat at this year’s Tonys By Michael Riedel April 26, 2018 | 8:52pm | Updated A scene from the stage production of "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child"Manuel Harlan MORE FROM: MICHAEL RIEDEL Can hosts Groban and Bareilles stop a Tony ratings nosedive? Why 'Carousel' was a problem before #MeToo How two seedy old bars inspired a Broadway classic Remembering the impresario behind Andrew Lloyd Webber's success 'Three Billboards' playwright won't get his Broadway show The Tony Award nominators are like Regina in “Mean Girls.” And while they don’t all wear pink, their power is absolute — which is why they’ve got the theater world on edge until Tuesday morning’s announcement of their chosen nominees. The anointed one will be “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” which should snap up several nominations, including for Best Play, Best Director, Best Costumes, Wands, Owls, Toads, Newts and for cast members Jamie Parker, Noma Dumezweni and Anthony Boyle. “Potter,” budgeted at $68 million, is eclipsing everything on Broadway right now, even musicals with big budgets (“Frozen”) and critical acclaim (“The Band’s Visit”). “It’s going to be the top story on Tuesday,” says a source involved in “The Band’s Visit.” “The rest of us are fighting for oxygen.” “The Band’s Visit” should also have much to celebrate. It will pick up nominations for Best Musical as well as nods for its score, book, direction and stars Katrina Lenk and Tony Shalhoub and supporting players John Cariani and Ari’el Stachel. It’s also going to win a lot of Tonys, including Best Musical. But this lovely, intelligent show is struggling to find its footing in a theater season dominated by the brand names “Potter,” “Frozen” and “Mean Girls.” “Frozen” and “Mean Girls” will make the Best Musical cut, as will “SpongeBob SquarePants.” Left out like a cake in the rain will be “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical,” “Escape to Margaritaville” and “Prince of Broadway.” But look for Jimmy Buffett to appear on the Tony telecast leading his cast in “Margaritaville,” and LaChanze, one of the stars of “Summer,” singing “Last Dance.” CBS isn’t going to pass up a chance to broadcast two of the biggest songs in the karaoke catalog. “Harry Potter” is set to win the Tony for Best Play, but honorable mention — in the form of nominations — will go to “Farinelli and the King,” “Junk” and “The Children.” Shoo-ins for Best Revival of a Play are “Three Tall Women,” “Travesties” and “Angels in America.” The fourth slot will go either to “The Iceman Cometh” or “Lobby Hero.” My Fair Lady” and “Once on This Island” are the only three musical revivals this year, so they’ll fill out that slate. There’s great affection for “Once on This Island,” a charming show given a terrific revival, but “Carousel” and “My Fair Lady” are classics, so they dominate the field. But look for Michael Arden, who directed “Island,” to get a nomination — and many more jobs on Broadway. Tina Fey will be nominated for her “Mean Girls” script and her husband, Jeff Richmond, will get a nod for his score. “Mean Girls” isn’t going to beat “The Band’s Visit” on many fronts, but Fey is sure to turn on the charm during the Tony campaign and, given her star power, she’ll make an aggressive play for Best Book of a Musical. Tony officials meet Friday to make one last decision: Should Bruce Springsteen get a Special Tony Award for his Broadway show? You don’t have to be the Amazing Kreskin to figure that one out. But here’s something else they should do: reinstate a special Tony for Best Cast Replacement. Bernadette Peters deserves it for “Hello, Dolly!”

BRAVA CHITA!!!! Tonys Honor a New York Times Theater Photographer “At first people wouldn’t let me in — why would they let someone in who wasn’t going to let them see the photo ahead of time?” Sara Krulwich said in an interview. “It made no sense to people.”CreditTodd Heisler/The New York Times Sara Krulwich, a longtime theater photographer who has documented decades of Broadway history for The New York Times, is being honored for “extraordinary achievement” by the Tony Awards. The awards administrators said Wednesday that Ms. Krulwich, who has been a staff photographer at The Times since 1979, would be among three recipients of this year’s Tony Honors for Excellence in the Theater, which are given to individuals, organizations and institutions that have contributed to the theater industry but are not eligible in any established Tony Awards categories. The Tony Awards will also give honors for excellence to Bessie Nelson, a longtime costume beader, and to Ernest Winzer Cleaners, a 110-year-old business with a specialty in costume work. Earlier this week, Tony administrators announced that this year’s lifetime achievement awards would go to the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and the performer Chita Rivera, and that an annual award for volunteerism would go to Nick Scandalios, executive vice president of the Nederlander Organization, for his work as an advocate for gay parents and their children. Ms. Krulwich, 67, became the first culture photographer for The Times in 1994, and gradually made theater into a beat as she successfully fought to win access from producers accustomed to relying on photographers they hired. “At first people wouldn’t let me in — why would they let someone in who wasn’t going to let them see the photo ahead of time?” Ms. Krulwich said in an interview. “It made no sense to people.” Access continues to be a challenge. “One hundred percent of the time there is a question — whether I’ll get in, how much I can shoot, where I can shoot,” she said. “But it’s the rare play that doesn’t let me shoot something.” Among the early milestones of Ms. Krulwich’s career: She photographed developmental work on the Broadway production of Tony Kushner’s masterwork, “Angels in America,” and she photographed Jonathan Larson, the writer and composer of “Rent,” hours before his unexpected death the night before the show’s first Off Broadway preview at New York Theater Workshop. A more recent memory: She shot the final dress rehearsal of “Hamilton,” just before the first preview for that show’s Off Broadway production at the Public Theater. She said she looks for “emotion and energy” when composing a photograph. “I think this is the best job in the world,” Ms. Krulwich said. “I’m surrounded by these amazing people, everybody I watch is at the top of their careers, and I’m inside while they’re thinking about how to make theater. I love it.”

''SpongeBob SquarePants'', ''My Fair Lady'', ''Harry Potter and the Cursed Child'', and more top the list of nominees. April 24, 2018 2018 Outer Critics Circle Award nominee Norbert Leo Butz and the cast of Broadway's My Fair Lady. The 2018 Outer Critics Circle Award nominations were announced this morning by The Band's Visit's Katrina Lenk and Come From Away's Jenn Colella in a ceremony at the Algonquin Hotel. Take a look at the nominees listed below and stay tuned for the winners, to be announced on Monday, May 7. The Band's Visit was nominated for and received multiple awards from the Outer Critics Circle last season and therefore was not considered this year. Outstanding New Broadway Play The Children Farinelli and the King Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Junk Outstanding New Broadway Musical Escape to Margaritaville Frozen Mean Girls Prince of Broadway SpongeBob SquarePants Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play Admissions Cost of Living Hangmen The Low Road Mlima's Tale John Gassner Award (Presented for an American play preferably by a new playwright) Amy and the Orphans Napoli, Brooklyn Pipeline [Porto] School Girls; or, The African Mean Girls Play Outstanding New Off-Broadway Musical Cruel Intentions Desperate Measures Jerry Springer — The Opera Miss You Like Hell Woody Sez Outstanding Book of a Musical (Broadway or Off-Broadway) Tina Fey, Mean Girls Kyle Jarrow, SpongeBob SquarePants Quiara Allegría Hudes, Miss You Like Hell Peter Kellogg, Desperate Measures Outstanding New Score (Broadway or Off-Broadway) Yolanda Adams, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith, Sara Bareilles, Jonathan Coulton, Alexander Ebert of Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, the Flaming Lips, Lady Antebellum, Cyndi Lauper, John Legend, Panic! At the Disco, Plain White T's, They Might Be Giants, T.I., David Bowie, Tom Kenny and Andy Paley, and Tom Kitt, SpongeBob SquarePants Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, Frozen Imogen Heap, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child David Friedman and Peter Kellogg, Desperate Measures Erin McKeown and Quiara Allegría Hudes, Miss You Like Hell Outstanding Revival of a Play (Broadway or Off-Broadway) Angels in America Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train Lobby Hero Three Tall Women Travesties Outstanding Revival of a Musical (Broadway or Off-Broadway) Carousel My Fair Lady Once on This Island Pacific Overtures Outstanding Actor in a Play Sean Carvajal, Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train Andrew Garfield, Angels in America Tom Hollander, Travesties Gregg Mozgala, Cost of Living Michael Urie, The Government Inspector Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play Anthony Boyle, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Johnny Flynn, Hangmen David Morse, The Iceman Cometh Nathan Lane, Angels in America Paul Sparks, Edward Albee's At Home at the Zoo Outstanding Actress in a Play MaameYaa Boafo, School Girls; or, The African Mean Girls Play Jessica Hecht, Admissions Glenda Jackson, Three Tall Women Lauren Ridloff, Children of a Lesser God Katy Sullivan, Cost of Living Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play Jamie Brewer, Amy and the Orphans Denise Gough, Angels in America Harriet Harris, The Low Road Laurie Metcalf, Three Tall Women Mary Testa, The Government Inspector Outstanding Actor in a Musical Harry Hadden-Paton, My Fair Lady Joshua Henry, Carousel David M. Lutken, Woody Sez Conor Ryan, Desperate Measures Ethan Slater, SpongeBob SquarePants Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical Norbert Leo Butz, My Fair Lady Alexander Gemignani, Carousel Gavin Lee, SpongeBob SquarePants Nick Wyman, Desperate Measures Tony Yazbeck, Prince of Broadway Outstanding Actress in a Musical Lauren Ambrose, My Fair Lady Erika Henningsen, Mean Girls Hailey Kilgore, Once on This Island Taylor Louderman, Mean Girls Patti Murin, Frozen Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical Kerry Butler, Mean Girls Lindsay Mendez, Carousel Lauren Molina, Desperate Measures Ashley Park, Mean Girls Emily Skinner, Prince of Broadway Outstanding Solo Performance Billy Crudup, Harry Clarke Eve Ensler, In the Body of the World Alison Fraser, Squeamish John Lithgow, John Lithgow: Stories by Heart Sharon Washington, Feeding the Dragon Outstanding Director of a Play Jo Bonney, Cost of Living Marianne Elliott, Angels in America Joe Mantello, Three Tall Women Patrick Marber, Travesties John Tiffany, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Outstanding Director of a Musical Michael Arden, Once on This Island Bill Castellino, Desperate Measures Tina Landau, SpongeBob SquarePants Casey Nicholaw, Mean Girls Bartlett Sher, My Fair Lady Outstanding Choreographer Camille A. Brown, Once on This Island Christopher Gattelli, My Fair Lady Christopher Gattelli, SpongeBob SquarePants Steven Hoggett, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Justin Peck, Carousel Full list of nominees: https://www.theatermania.com/broadway/news/outer-critics-circle-award-nominations-2018_84927.html

Once again, its all publicity. There are no biopics currently in the works, and certainly no actresses who have been cast as Dusty. Trust me on this one.

Thanks Sam, critics seem to agree the new musical is awful! Review: Hot Stuff Turns Cold in ‘Summer: The Donna Summer Musical’ SUMMER: THE DONNA SUMMER MUSICAL Broadway, Musical 1 hr. and 40 min. Open Run Lunt-Fontanne Theater, 205 W 46th St. By JESSE GREEN. APRIL 23, 2018 The biographical jukebox musical — of which “Jersey Boys” provides a shining example, thanks to all the Brylcreem — is the cockroach of Broadway. It has a small head, a primitive nervous system and will probably outlast the apocalypse. Even by that standard, “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical,” which opened on Monday at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, is a blight. Despite the exciting vocalism of a cast led by the formidable LaChanze, it reduces the late Queen of Disco and pioneer of electronica to a few factoids and song samples that make her seem profoundly inconsequential. You could learn more (and more authentically) by reading a thoughtful obituary while listening to her hits — “Hot Stuff,” “ ,” “She Works Hard for the Money,” among many others — online. But then you would not be contributing to the music publishing enterprise that keeps jukebox musicals coming no matter how hard they get stomped on by critics. Among the producers of “Summer” are Tommy Mottola, who helped reboot a version of the label that released Ms. Summer’s early hits, and Universal Music Group, which oversees her catalog. (Universal also has a hand in “Mamma Mia!” and “Escape to Margaritaville.”) I don’t doubt the sincerity of their interest in brands that can still make them millions. It’s the sincerity of their interest in musical theater I question. That’s because I found myself asking throughout the show’s intermission-less 100 minutes: Can’t they do any better than this?Certainly Ms. Summer’s life merits a more sophisticated treatment. Born LaDonna Adrian Gaines in Boston in 1948, she sang in church, dropped out of high school to try her luck in New York and by 1968 was While in Germany she not only married (briefly) the man who would provide her last name and first child but also met Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, who would produce 11 of her 20 albums. In 1975 they recorded the song “ ,” which in became her first hit and made her world famous. Ariana DeBose, center, and the ensemble performing “Bad Girls.” CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times The story of Ms. Summer asking the two men to dim the lights and close their eyes while she writhes on the studio floor singing the hypersexed number is too good not to stage, and yet apparently not too good to stage poorly. The director Des McAnuff, who with Colman Domingo and Robert Cary also wrote the musical’s book, skitters away from it after about 10 seconds, just as the show over all skitters away from almost everything even slightly awkward or troubling — and thus interesting — about Ms. Summer’s life and career. It totally botches, for instance, her relationship with the gay community, which instantly embraced her on the radio and the dance floor for reasons the show doesn’t explore. Comments that Ms. Summer later made about God not creating “Adam and Steve” (let alone others she denied making about AIDS as a punishment for sin) left many gay men feeling betrayed — a betrayal they attributed to her resurgent Christianity. Rather than dramatizing this fascinating conflict head on, the musical brushes it aside as an ancient misunderstanding and uses Ms. Summer’s gay publicist as an alibi. (Singing “Friends Unknown,” she mourns his death to show she couldn’t have been homophobic.) It does not even mention her 1979 announcement that she was born again; she sings “ ” instead. Similarly, “Summer” sketches years of sexual abuse by her pastor with little more than a leer, a shoehorned number (“ ”) and a few vague remarks. It’s dramaturgy by song hook. At the core of all of these missed opportunities is the split between Ms. Summer’s manufactured image as a sex goddess and her self-image as a good girl. The musical makes its only stab at conceptual expressiveness by dividing Ms. Summer into three avatars to theatricalize that split: the mature Diva Donna (LaChanze), the young adult Disco Donna (Ariana DeBose) and, a bit desperately, the preteen Duckling Donna (Storm Lever). This is hardly new. “Lennon” gave us five John Lennons; “The Cher Show,” scheduled to open on Broadway in December, has three title characters. But as used in “Summer,” the triple casting comes off as a gimmick, possibly necessary to spare any one performer a grueling sing but always dissipating whatever narrative energy the authors manage to gin up. Still, I welcomed the division, because the script is otherwise appallingly banal, taking as its format the line of least resistance: a “concert of a lifetime” in which Ms. Summer recalls her highs and lows. None of them, including a 1976 suicide attempt and a homicidal ex-boyfriend, are dwelled upon long enough to register.

Madonna involvement in the Dusty biopic was as a producer, not a performer.

A sure Tony nominee and winner...I'm seeing it Thursday/Friday evening. Can't Wait! Review: ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ Raises the Bar for Broadway Magic Time is a dangerous toy in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” the enthralling two-part play about the later life of its title wizard. Various characters in this deluxe London import, which opened on Sunday night at the Lyric Theater, find it in their power to journey into the past, which means altering the future, which means serious trouble for everyone. In that regard, these stumbling adventure-seekers must be regarded as lesser magicians than their creators, who include J.K. Rowling, the writer of the prodigiously popular Harry Potter fantasy novels, and the poetic director John Tiffany (“Black Watch,” “The Glass Menagerie”). This inspired team bends time to its will with an imagination and discipline that leave room for nary a glitch, making five hours of performance pass in a wizardly wink of an eye. Featuring a script by Jack Thorne — from an original story by Ms. Rowling, Mr. Thorne and Mr. Tiffany — “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” also gives vibrant, decades-traversing life to those wistful “what if” speculations about the past that occupy both grown-ups and children. It’s a process that involves folding stories into stories into stories, collapsing years into minutes and making dreams feel eternal, and more vivid than reality. If you give yourself over to this show’s hypnotic powers — and I’m talking to the parents who may be accompanying their Potter-mad offspring with reluctance — you’ll find everything that happens onstage seems as improbably fluid as, well, time itself. It helps that what happens includes some of the most eye-boggling illusions you’ll ever witness, without a visible wire or trap door in sight. In embodying the magical with such seeming spontaneity, “Cursed Child” becomes the new gold standard for fantasy franchise entertainment on Broadway. By contrast, most of the family-courting stage versions of animated films that have ruled the theater district for so long look as stiff and artificial as parades of windup toys. The budget for “Cursed Child,” which has been a sold-out hit in London since opening there in 2016, is a staggering $68 million, the most ever spent on a nonmusical Broadway production. Yet I mean it as the highest praise when I say that the show doesn’t look expensive. Or rather, it seems expensive only in the way of a custom-made little black dress, one with endless tricks up its deceptively simple sleeves. “Cursed Child,” which has a deeply symbiotic cast of 40, shimmers with beguiling richness, but you’re never conscious of its seams or the effort that’s gone into the making of it. This effect is evident as soon as you step into the lobby of the Lyric Theater, which has been transformed from a too big, ungainly show barn into a cozy yet sumptuously appointed environment that seems to have been exactly as it is for many, many years. On the stage, open for your inspection, looms the vaulted central hall of Harry Potter’s alma mater, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. This stately mansion is the work of the ace set designer Christine Jones and has been shrouded in beckoning, velvety and inventively concealing shadows by Neil Austin’s lighting. The scenery at this point consists mostly of suitcases and trunks. But watch out for the gliding staircases that will soon become a crucial part of the mise en scène. Luggage and staircases are appropriate motifs for a show that turns out to be all about traveling, in the broadest sense of the word, and unpacking the conflicted feelings that are part and parcel of the long-distance journey of growing up. Overseeing everything from above, like an inescapable eye, is a palely glowing clock. Beneath this formidable timepiece, a series of scenes melt into one another, approximating cinematic cross-cutting, while managing to feel both epic and intimate. The story begins where the final novel in the Potter series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” ended. Harry (an irresistibly anxious Jamie Parker) is an adult now (which doesn’t mean he has entirely grown up), employed by the Ministry of Magic, which is run by his old school chum (and partner in fighting the forces of darkness), Hermione Granger (the marvelous Noma Dumezweni). Harry and his wife, Ginny (Poppy Miller), are seeing their sons off to school from King’s Cross Station in London. Anthony Boyle, center left, as Scorpius Malfoy, and Brian Abraham as the Sorting Hat.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times It will be the first year at Hogwarts for their younger boy, Albus (Sam Clemmett), who is understandably ambivalent about going to the place where his student father became “the most famous wizard in the whole world.” Hermione and her prankster husband, Ron Weasley (Paul Thornley, delightful) are there, too, with their daughter, Rose (Susan Heyward). Also on the platform: the platinum-haired Draco Malfoy (Alex Price), once Harry’s sinister rival, and his nerdy son, Scorpius (Anthony Boyle, who leads with his adenoids in a show-stealing performance). Scorpius and Albus are destined to bond, both as outcasts in the young wizarding world and as allies in a quest that may lead them into the realms once occupied by the ultimate dark lord, Voldemort. Their insular friendship, which opens up enough to include a determined young woman named Delphi Diggory (Jessie Fisher), will be sorely tested, as will their contentious relationships with their dads. And yes, the script has more variations on father issues than the entire canon of Greek tragedy. Part of the generation-crossing appeal of Ms. Rowling’s novels lies in her ability to give operatic grandeur to the most universal and pedestrian hopes and fears — feelings harbored by anguished adolescents of all ages — by placing them in a wildly fantastical context. (In this sense, her fiction resembles that of Stephen King.) And this show more than honors that dichotomy. That everyone who sees “Cursed Child” is implored to “keep the secrets” relieves me of the onerous burden of parsing the byzantine but only occasionally tedious plot. Those who have read the Potter novels, or seen the blockbuster film adaptations, should not feel that the carefully appointed logic of Ms. Rowling’s fictional prototype has been violated. The uninitiated may be confused when the mere mention of certain names (Dolores Umbridge, Neville Longbottom) draws gasps from the audience. But I can’t imagine anyone ultimately not feeling strangely at home within the show’s magical flux. This state of enchantment is sustained through Steven Hoggett’s balletic movement direction of the large ensemble and Katrina Lindsay’s wittily transformative costumes. Working with Ms. Jones and Jamie Harrison (credited with illusions and magic), they summon an alternate universe of a world gone fascist, for the show’s darkest and most uneasily topical sequences. And do watch out for the phantasmal Dementors. The leading cast members, most of whom I first saw in London, have relaxed into looser but completely detailed performances. (Mr. Parker, Ms. Dumezweni and Mr. Thornley cut loose delightfully to portray their characters as inhabited by young’uns.) It is impossible not to identify with most of the people — and creatures — onstage, who memorably include a fabulous centaur (David St. Louis) and that great, giggling ghost of the first-floor girls’ bathroom, Moaning Myrtle (Lauren Nicole Cipoletti). For this slyly manipulative production knows exactly how, and how hard, to push the tenderest spots of most people’s emotional makeups. By that I mean the ever-fraught relationships between parents and children, connections that persist, often unresolved, beyond death. Time-bending, it turns out, has its own special tools of catharsis in this regard. In the multiple worlds summoned here, it is possible for kids to instantly become their grown-up mentors, and for a son to encounter his forbidding father when dad was still a vulnerable sapling. “I am paint and memory,” a talking portrait of the long-dead wizard Dumbledore (Edward James Hyland) says to his former star pupil, Harry. Well, that’s art, isn’t it? Substitute theatrical showmanship for paint, and you have this remarkable production’s elemental recipe for all-consuming enchantment.

Dusty Springfield. Ok, now I can claim total expertise on this subject. I was called, in print, the greatest Dusty expert I the USA. My pal, Paul can claim that title internationally. I was privileged to not only see Dusty perform live, but met her personally on a number of occasions. She was an incredible performer, but alas, she suffered from bipolar disorder aa well as alcohol and drug additions. She conquered drinking but drugs (prescription) were another problem. Yes, she was gay and had many female partners. Her Irish Catholic background and the fact that she grew up in the '50's perhaps had a to to do with her closeted mentality, although there were times that she pushed the envelope, with quotes to the Evening Standard in 1969 like “I know I’m as perfectly capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy. More and more people feel that way and I don’t see why I shouldn’t.” There have been a slew of movie scripts floating around for a biopic on her life. There have been at least 10 different stage productions, but in the end, the problem is that you can't replicate or come close to the voice. Right now, the rumor mill has it, Downton Abby actress Lily James may do a biopic. Madonna once had the rights. Adele is a great singer, but she is no Dusty, and Adele is the first to admit it. She was "attached" to one project, but that was in 2013. Even Kristin Chenowirth was once involved in a biopic. Right now a new stage production is being presented in the UK and is on its way to the West End. This once has a bit more power and credence behind it, as it is being produced by Dusty best friend, Vicki Wickham. The late singer's rise to fame will be documented in the production, which is being written by Sandi Toksvig after she was contracted by producers Vicki Wickham - who was the former manager of Dusty - and theatre mogul David Ian. Vicki has admitted she's seen ''numerous really bad'' shows and scripts written about Dusty - who died from breast cancer in 1999 aged 59 - that haven't captured the true colourful life that she led, and she's determined to show a side to the blonde beauty that no one knows about. She told the Daily Mail newspaper: ''I keep going to these and coming out going, 'Yes, the music's great - but it has nothing to do with Dusty! ''Dusty was extraordinary. Yes, she could drive you mad - all divas do. But there's such a lovely side to her that should, and will, be told.'' The musical - which is still yet to get a director and is currently without a title - will feature Dusty's most famous songs, such as 'Son of a Preacher Man', 'I Only Want to Be with You' and 'Yesterday When I Was Young'. Vicki has vowed the production will venture into the dark side of Dusty's personality but will end on a high note. She said: ''I promise you, you'll come out happy and singing.'' Oddly enough, Vicki, along with author, Penny Valentine, wrote the warts-and-all bio of Dusty called "Dancing With Demons" which chronicled the sad, alcohol, and drug fueled events in Dusty's life. Anyway, Dusty has been deceased for 19 years but she is not forgotten. She has her OBE and has been inducted into the USA and UK Rock and Roll Halls of Fame, her recordings of "The Look of Love" and her album Dusty In Memphis have been placed in the Grammy Hall of Fame.

"People that don't care much for theatre..." Last weeks box office grosses were $32 million, and the 2017 total was over a billion dollars. That's a lot of seats and a lot of fans. Yes, higher prices have inflated gross receipts, however, the majority of shows have been running for many years and are still sold out (Wicked, Hamilton, Lion King, Dear Evan Hansen, Aladdin, Chicago, Kinky Boots, Book of Mormon, and others are difficult to get tickets to). As a result of the popularity of Broadway, NYC's tourism dollars on hotels, restaurants, and other tourist related industries, the money pours in. It never seems to fail that when I go to the theater (and I see a lot of it) I'm sitting near a bunch of ladies who are all "Y'alling" it amongst each other, not to mention the foreign languages being spoken...) Awards shows are a snooze in general. Today, nobody cares for them except to watch who's walking down the red carpet, BUT "Best Tony" award, and others are a critical and effective advertising/marketing plan.