edjames

It was never a secret in the entertainment world. (And for goodness sake, she went to Sarah Lawrence college! (LOL)) Taken too soon, by cancer, at age 68, she was a lovely lady. She was working on a Broadway musical of her life and music when she died.

A little background on the show... This show will run forever. It's a huge sold-out hit in London and US audiences will flock to see it. FYI The Lyric Theater is actually two theaters that were combined together during the 42nd St restoration. If I'm not mistaken, the new entrance to the theater is on 43rd Street. It was once the Apollo Theater and the Lyric theater. The theater has 1600+ seats, making it one of Broadway's biggest houses. The play won 9 Olivier Awards, including Best Play. It is also opening in Melbourne and no doubt a US based touring company is in the works. Another Harry Potter Landmark: At $68 Million, the Most Expensive Broadway Nonmusical Play Ever By MICHAEL PAULSON APRIL 14, 2018 The Lyric Theater underwent major renovations for “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” including exterior additions that are symbolic to the play: a wing on the facade and a rooftop nest with a child huddled inside. The Harry Potter economy is filled with jaw-dropping numbers, including 500 million books sold and $7.7 billion in worldwide film grosses. Here’s another one: “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” a two-part drama now in previews and opening April 22, cost about $68.5 million to bring to Broadway, including not only $35.5 million to capitalize the show — more than for any other nonmusical play in history — but also another $33 million to clear out and redo the theater. It’s a huge bet in a flop-prone industry, but also a seemingly safe one, predicated on the expectation that “Cursed Child” will become a big hit on Broadway, a long-running production that can spin off profits for years. “That’s a ton of money, no question about it, in terms of what things cost around here, but it’s Harry Potter, one of the most popular brands in the history of brands,” said Tom Viertel, the executive director of the Commercial Theater Institute. “It has a title the likes of which we would rarely, if ever, get to see on Broadway.” Even in previews, as the cast finds its footing and the creative team makes adjustments, the show is setting box-office records. Potter fans have been filling up the Lyric, one of Broadway’s largest theaters, and the $2.1 million the play took in during the first week of April was more than any play had previously grossed in a single week. The record-setting $35.5 million capitalization — the amount raised from producers and investors to pay an unusually large cast and crew, rehearse an unusually long show and build an unusually elaborate production — was disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. By comparison, most nonmusical plays on Broadway are between $3 million and $5 million, and even the splashiest musicals rarely top more than $25 million. But the capitalization is only a portion of what it took to pave the way for “Cursed Child” to get to Broadway. The Ambassador Theater Group, the British theater giant that operates the Lyric, spent about $23 million to persuade its previous occupant, Cirque du Soleil, to shutter its “Paramour” musical and make way for “Cursed Child,” according to two people with knowledge of the transaction. Interior touches include dragon lanterns, a monogrammed carpet with “H” for Hogwarts, and phoenix sconces. Ambassador, which competed with other Broadway landlords to woo “Cursed Child,” overhauled the Lyric at the behest of the play’s producers. A charmless barn of a theater (previously home to a series of flops, including the $75 million musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark”), it was reconfigured to feel more like an old-fashioned opera house, with a vaulted ceiling, a necklace of boxes, and 1,622 seats (down from 1,896). Even the entrance was relocated, from crowded 42nd Street to the less dense 43rd Street. The work on the building was expected to cost about $10 million, according to documents filed with the New York City Department of Buildings. The play, a two-part experience with a running time of more than five hours, is a sequel to the series of young adult fantasy novels written by J.K. Rowling about a boy wizard. “Cursed Child” takes place 19 years after the final book, at a time when Harry and his friends have become parents. “Cursed Child” was written by Jack Thorne, based on a story by Mr. Thorne, Ms. Rowling and the director John Tiffany. It was developed in Britain and has been sold out in London’s West End for 22 months, and last year it won a record nine Olivier awards — the British equivalent of the Tonys — including one for best play. A third production, in Melbourne, Australia, is scheduled to open next year. In response to questions about the show’s finances, two of the lead producers, Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender, offered a tour of the renovated theater. Strolling through the theater, they showed off phoenix sconces and dragon lanterns and a lobby wall featuring prints of patronuses (silvery animal guardians). The color scheme is rich and dark — most of the walls are painted a color called raven plume — and a custom carpet features H monograms (for Hogwarts, Harry’s alma mater). The newly adorned exterior features giant wings and large sculptures of a child (symbol alert!) trapped in a nest. “We wanted to create a mood, without crossing a line into theme park,” Mr. Callender said. Ms. Friedman added, “It was really important to us that the lobbies and the front-of-house had the atmosphere of the Harry Potter world, because this is the beginning of the audience’s experience.” Ms. Friedman, who has been vocal about the high cost of working on Broadway, said that the play has cost significantly more to mount in New York than in London. Labor, marketing and theater rentals all tend to cost more in New York. The theater’s interior was dramatically altered to create a more intimate space with fewer seats and more character. CreditDorothy Hong “I find the costs here difficult to comprehend,” Ms. Friedman said. “It’s a number I do not like.” But she also said that particular aspects of “Cursed Child” make it expensive. A play in two parts required twice as much time to rehearse; the show’s elaborate illusions required significant substage mechanics and extra training. It took 16 weeks just to load the show’s set elements into the theater. Investment documents filed with the New York attorney general’s office offer a rough breakdown of the capitalization, including $11.7 million for the physical production, $7.8 million for “general and administrative” costs, including the design and signage of the facade, $3.4 million for advertising and publicity and $3.2 million for salaries. That money goes to pay a cast and crew that is much bigger than for most plays. According to Ms. Friedman and Mr. Callender, a shop crew of 220 people was assembled to build and install the scenery and lighting and costumes. The show has 40 actors, a stage crew of 26, some 16 people assigned to wardrobe and hair and 5 stage managers. “It’s very obvious where the money went — the whole theater has been transformed to fit the show, and the level of technical expertise is like nothing I’ve ever seen on Broadway,” said Jonathon Rosenthal, a 38-year-old I.T. consultant from the Bronx who runs a Harry Potter meet-up groupand who saw the play on Broadway earlier this month. “It looks like there is magic going on on the stage.” The Broadway production is already largely sold out through next March, although there are periodic releases of more tickets, including some low-priced ones every Friday. Each part of the show had a recent average ticket price of $164.83 and a top price of $286.50; 300 seats per performance cost $40 or less. The two parts can be seen on the same day or consecutive days. Among the biggest beneficiaries will be Ms. Rowling. The investment papers do not detail her compensation, but say that the “underlying rights owner, licensor and their affiliates” — a group that includes Ms. Rowling — will initially receive 31 percent of the play’s net profits, and that cut will eventually rise to 41 percent as the show moves deeper into profitability. Ms. Rowling can profit from the play in other ways as well; she is the third lead producer, through her company Harry Potter Theatrical Productions. Her deal appears to be more lucrative than the ones negotiated by other prose writers whose work was the basis of a Broadway show. Harper Lee, before her death, signed an agreement giving her 2.5 percent of the net profits, plus an author royalty, for a coming stage adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird” (that money will now go to her estate), while Ron Chernow, the author of a biography of Alexander Hamilton, gets 1 percent of the adjusted grosses from “Hamilton.” The comparisons, however, are imperfect. Fiction writers generally get a bigger share of profits than do writers of nonfiction, since the novelists actually dream up their characters. And, unlike “Mockingbird,” “Cursed Child” is not adapted from a novel — it is a new story, created for the stage.

Soon to be announced but a little news on the telecast... Can hosts Groban and Bareilles stop a Tony ratings nosedive? By Michael Riedel April 19, 2018 | 7:59pm | Updated Josh Groban and Sara Bareilles will host the Tony Awards on June 10.Getty Images MORE FROM: MICHAEL RIEDEL They’re not going to sing and dance like Hugh Jackman or get big laughs like James Corden, but Sara Bareilles and Josh Groban just might expand the Tony telecast demographic beyond the Actors Fund Home. Or so CBS and the Broadway League hope. “Maybe they don’t have that old-fashioned Broadway sizzle,” says a veteran producer, “but they’re popular and pretty cute together.” As co-hosts of the June 10 awards show, Bareilles and Groban come with built-in fan bases. Groban’s cornered the market on soccer moms, who buy tickets to Broadway shows, while Bareilles is popular with 30-something women who bring their husbands or dates to her concerts. And both are bona-fide Broadway stars. Groban propelled weekly grosses for last season’s “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” to $1 million. Whenever he missed a show, those soccer moms nearly rioted in the Imperial Theatre lobby. Bareilles has proved a major draw whenever she sang the lead in her show, “Waitress,” at the Brooks Atkinson. She also won raves and, with John Legend, attracted nearly 10 million viewers to NBC’s “Jesus Christ Superstar Live” on Easter Sunday. Nobody’s expecting huge numbers for the Tony telecast, but if Bareilles and Groban can halt the downward drift, Broadway will breathe a bit easier. Last year’s Tonys, hosted by he-who-must-not-be-mentioned (Kevin Spacey), drew just 6 million viewers. CBS hopes to goose ratings with a performance by Bruce Springsteen, who’s racking up $2.5 million week in, week out at the Walter Kerr Theatre. The Tony Award administration committee meets next week and will likely vote to give him a special Tony Award for injecting some excitement into a lackluster season. “We’re not idiots,” says one committee member. Musicals are the engine of Broadway and the Tonys, but aside from Tina Fey’s “Mean Girls,” there hasn’t been a breakout hit this season. “The Band’s Visit,” a terrific show, should pick up awards for Best Musical, Score and Actress (the marvelous Katrina Lenk), but it hasn’t penetrated popular culture the way “Hamilton” did in 2016 and Ben Platt in “Dear Evan Hansen” did last year. If I were producing the Tonys, I’d kick off with Bruce to grab viewers and then hold them with a number from “Mean Girls,” since everybody knows the movie. Bareilles and Groban should do a fun medley of Broadway duets, then have cameos by Fey, Platt and Lin-Manuel Miranda. I’d also have Bareilles reprise her touching rendition of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from “Jesus Christ Superstar” and then, for good measure, I’d bring on Brandon Victor Dixon to knock out the title song. Dixon stole the “Superstar” telecast right out from under Legend, and he’s on his way to becoming a major star. Mark my words: He’s going to host the Tonys himself one day. It sounds like a joke, but it’s not. Actors’ Equity has voted to change the name of the “Gypsy Robe,” worn as part of a longstanding tradition on a musical’s opening night. Some members think the name is offensive to gypsies, so they’re polling for a replacement. We’re not talking gypsies with crystal balls and caravans as in Maria Ouspenskaya in “The Wolf Man.” Gypsies, as everybody on Broadway knows, has long been the affectionate name for chorus kids who go from show to show. It’s never been used as a pejorative. This decision reminds me of what the late great Shubert leader Bernard Jacobs said of Equity: “It’s a union governed by a galaxy of lunatics.”

Today's NYTimes, Jessie Green called it "plush and thrilling".... Review: Whose ‘Fair Lady’? This Time, Eliza’s in Charge By JESSE GREEN. APRIL 19, 2018 Lauren Ambrose, at center, letting loose at the racetrack in the Lincoln Center Theater revival of “My Fair Lady.” Poor Eliza. It’s not enough that her own father sells her for five pounds to the bully phonetician Henry Higgins. Or that Higgins strips her of her ragged clothes and Cockney accent so she can become a refined if useless lady. No, the former flower girl is also a failure of feminism, if recent criticism is to be believed. Don’t believe it. The plush and thrilling Lincoln Center Theater revival of Lerner and Loewe’s “My Fair Lady” that opened on Thursday at the Vivian Beaumont Theater reveals Eliza Doolittle as a hero instead of a puppet — and reveals the musical, despite its provenance and male authorship, as an ur-text of the #MeToo moment. Indeed, that moment has made “My Fair Lady,” which had its Broadway premiere in 1956, better than it ever was. It was always good, of course, one of the gleaming artifacts and loveliest scores of the Golden Age of American musical theater — a canon now being contested, with cause, for its unenlightened sexual politics. Yet for all of the wrangling over abuse and objectification in “Carousel,” “Kiss Me, Kate” and other midcentury titles, “My Fair Lady” is a totally different beast, a satire of class and gender privilege rather than a harrowing drama or lightweight romp about them. In avoiding those extremes, “My Fair Lady” always seemed egalitarian enough, but perhaps too cool and refined for its own good: a perfect musical, not a great one. Ms. Ambrose, in flower-seller mode, meeting Harry Hadden-Paton as Henry Higgins.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times I’m not so sure anymore. The director Bartlett Sher’s production uses the current climate of re-examination not only to restore the show’s feminist argument — so lively in the George Bernard Shaw play “Pygmalion,” on which it’s based — but also to warm it up considerably. He achieves this with only minor additions to the text, all drawn from the 1913 original or from Shaw’s screenplay for the 1938 film starring Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard. Fittingly, the effect of these tweaks, along with some major nonverbal alterations, is transformative. So is Lauren Ambrose as a feral and then luminous Eliza. At first, Ms. Ambrose concentrates, perhaps too hard, on Eliza’s unlikeliness as the subject of a bet between Higgins and his friend Colonel Pickering. (Higgins wagers that he can pass Eliza off as a duchess after six months’ re-education.) She squints and lumbers and makes hay of the “bilious pigeon” sounds that drive Higgins to distraction. But she is also laying the groundwork for our understanding that Eliza is as powerful a woman as her circumstances permit. It is she who seizes the moment of a chance meeting, outside the Covent Garden opera house where she sells violets to the swells, to make changes she has clearly been imagining for years. She is not the ivory Galatea of the Pygmalion myth, sculpted by a man who despises real women. She sculpts herself, with Higgins as her tool. We understand this not only from the ferocity of her interactions with him but also from the way she sings. The big revelation of this production is that Ms. Ambrose has a stirring voice: lustrous and rich if without the bright ping of most Elizas. That turns out to be an advantage. She delivers her first number — “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” — very quietly and with an intense longing that digs beneath its surface charm to find its stillness and steel. This sets “My Fair Lady” off in a new direction. The question quickly becomes not whether Eliza will succeed — of course she will — but whether Higgins can accept her success. Will he join her in it, or get out of the way? Both outcomes seem possible in Harry Hadden-Paton’s wily interpretation, which puts the character’s mansplaining, blowhard ways in context. Younger than the typical Higgins (but more the age Shaw imagined), Mr. Hadden-Paton,best known for playing unambiguous good guys on “Downton Abbey” and “The Crown,” makes sense of the character’s on-off switch of vulnerability and hauteur. He is a baby. This makes him more coherent and potentially more forgivable; he, too, is a captive of his gender and class. As Ms. Ambrose’s Eliza completes her metamorphosis, increasing in stature and radiance and vocal power, he grows more baffled and petulant, more protective of his privilege. That privilege is on full display in this typically deluxe Lincoln Center Theater production. It has by now become almost unremarkable — until you look elsewhere on Broadway — that the company has sprung for 29 musicians to play the original, unimprovable orchestrations by Robert Russell Bennett and Phil Lang. Mercifully, the excellent work of the music director, Ted Sperling, is preserved in Marc Salzberg’s understated and naturally balanced sound design. Balance if not understatement is the production’s visual hallmark too; Mr. Sher alternates between very spare, contemporary stage pictures and Higgins’s imposing (and rotating) Wimpole Street townhouse. This alternation provides the wow factor we expect at Lincoln Center — the house heaves into view like the ship in Mr. Sher’s 2015 production of “The King and I” — but also serves a thematic purpose. At every turn the designers (sets by Michael Yeargan, costumes by Catherine Zuber, lighting by Donald Holder) ask us to consider the economic contrasts that govern Eliza’s world. Higgins’s home is a sybarite’s mansion, crowded with servants and modern art. The scene in which Eliza practices her shaky new identity at the opening day of the Ascot races — one of the greatest comic sequences in all musicals — is a gorgeous study of silver and lavender in elegant, forbidding silhouettes. And though Diana Rigg as Higgins’s mother is the definition of luxury casting, as a former Eliza (in the 1974 West End “Pygmalion” with Alec McCowen) she automatically suggests a kinship with her son’s pupil that locks their cross-class solidarity into place. A suffragist march that winds through one of the ensemble scenes underlines the idea. Such telltales of a feminist reading are not merely opportune; they are accurate to Shaw’s intent. It was he who had Pickering ask whether Higgins is a “man of good character where women are concerned” — to which Higgins in essence responds: There’s no such thing. Higgins, for all his brutishness, understands that relations between the sexes have been hopelessly muddled by social constructs of gender and class; as a wealthy intellectual he can try, as Shaw did, to abstain from the mess entirely. But “My Fair Lady,” being a classic musical and thus nearly synonymous with romance, keeps complicating that resolve. Infamously, Lerner and Loewe borrowed the ending that was tacked onto the 1939 film without Shaw’s prior approval: the one in which Eliza returns to Higgins’s study as if to become his helpmeet if not his wife. I don’t want to spoil this marvelous, redemptive revival’s resolution of that discrepancy. But Mr. Sher’s final image shows how history — even if it took 100 years — would eventually start to outgrow its brutes, and how it still might do so compassionately, by teaching them a lesson.

Thank you for your post. I had put this on the back burner but now you've given me the kickstart I needed to download onto my Kindle.

More announcements on eligibility, some to elicit its share of controversy: Tony Rulings: ‘1984’ Can Vie for Best Play; Andrew Garfield and Nathan Lane Avoid Showdown By MICHAEL PAULSON. APRIL 12, 2018 Reed Birney, second from right, and Tom Sturridge, kneeling, in the Broadway production of “1984.” The Tony Awards had some doubleplusgood news for the producer Scott Rudin on Thursday. Five months after having declared last summer’s production of “1984”ineligible for awards consideration because Mr. Rudin had denied a member of the Tony nominating committee access to the show, awards administrators said it was back in contention. They offered no explanation for the change. The play initially was barred from consideration after Mr. Rudin, one of the lead producers, had declined to allow the nominator Jose Antonio Vargas, an immigration rights activist and writer, to see the show, apparently because of concern about Mr. Vargas’s prior writings. But Mr. Vargas has since recused himself from this year’s voting because he missed another show, which appears to explain the decision to allow “1984” back in the race. The play is Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s adaptation of the George Orwell novel. The action on “1984” was the most dramatic move taken by the Tony Awards administration committee at its regularly scheduled meeting, but other rulings are also likely to have an impact on several key contests. Nathan Lane as Roy Cohn in “Angels in America.” The committee averted a likely showdown between actors giving blistering performances in the revival of Tony Kushner’s two-part “Angels in America,”deciding that Nathan Lane, as the lawyer Roy Cohn, would be eligible in the featured actor category. Andrew Garfield, as Prior Walter, a gay man with AIDS who is left by his lover, remains in the running for a lead actor nod. That is a change from 1993, when “Millennium Approaches,” the first part of “Angels,” took the best play Tony. Ron Leibman won for leading actor, as Roy Cohn, and Stephen Spinella won for featured actor as Prior Walter. (The next year, in 1994, Mr. Spinella won for leading actor, playing the same character in “Perestroika,” the second part of “Angels.”) In a season of star-driven revivals, how to treat other ensemble casts was on the docket, too. In “Three Tall Women,” only Glenda Jacksonwill contend for leading actress; Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill will be considered eligible in the featured actress category. But in “Lobby Hero,” all four actors, including the film and television stars Chris Evans and Michael Cera, will be judged featured performers. To be eligible for Tony Awards this season, shows must open by April 26. The slate of nominees will be announced on May 1, with prizes presented on June 10 at Radio City Music Hall.

I agree Ben. many actors have been overlooked for their efforts.

Why ‘Carousel’ was a problem before #MeToo By Michael Riedel April 12, 2018 | 7:22pm “Carousel” is a great American musical. But it doesn’t come without baggage. A first-class revival starring Jessie Mueller and Joshua Henry opened on Broadway Thursday night trailed by talk of how a show whose protagonist beats his wife would stand up in the #MeToo era. As it turns out, the musical’s creators — Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein — had similar concerns back when they wrote it, in 1943. “They would not have talked about it in the terms we do today, but they knew they were grappling with a hero who had many unsympathetic elements,” says Todd Purdum, author of “Something Wonderful,” an engaging new biography of the legendary songwriting team. “Carousel” is based on Ferenc Molnar’s 1909 drama “Liliom,” about a carnival barker and his wife, Julie, who loves him even though he abuses her. It ends with a line no one could write today: “It is possible that someone may beat you and beat you and not hurt you at all.” Rodgers and Hammerstein cringed at that line. But they took up the challenge to make a cad not so bad, by writing three of the most celebrated songs in musical theater. Billy Bigelow and Julie Jordan fall for each other at first sight, though neither will admit it. They deflect their feelings by singing, “If I Loved You.” “It’s a masterpiece of spoken dialogue, underscoring and lyrics,” says Purdum. “They’re halting about their feeling, but there is no doubt they are in love. If he’s such a bad guy, how is he worthy of her love? And the song shows his vulnerability.” Later comes the famous “Soliloquy,” in which Billy, learning Julie’s pregnant, imagines having a son. But should he have a girl instead, he vows to find the money he needs to support her, even if he has to “go out and take it, beg, steal or make it or die.” “He grows up,” Purdum says. “He becomes a man.” Purdum also says Rodgers and Hammerstein intentionally made Julie a stronger character than Billy. When a robbery goes awry, Billy kills himself rather than face the consequences. “It is Julie who endures, who prevails,” Purdum says. “He is weak. She is strong.” Hammerstein rewrote Molnar’s ending so that audiences would come to embrace Billy — flawed or not. After his spirit’s sent back to earth to redeem himself, Billy mucks up and hits his daughter. When he does this in the musical, audiences gasp today as they did in 1945. But as Hammerstein has it, Billy’s overwhelmed by guilt. He appears and whispers to his widow, “I loved you Julie. Know that I loved you.” When the cast sings “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” there’s seldom a dry eye in the house. Rodgers and Hammerstein knew what they were doing. One night, Mel Tormé stood at the back of the house with Rodgers and told him, “This song makes me cry.” “It’s supposed to,” Rodgers replied. “Carousel” followed Rodgers and Hammerstein’s smash — and optimistic hit — “Oklahoma!” And while there were concerns that audiences would resist a show whose protagonist wasn’t a hero, “Carousel” ran 890 performances and toured America for two years. “The sting of Billy’s behavior is still there,” says Purdum, “more so than ever. But Rodgers and Hammerstein made him human, and the show endures.”

NYTimes reviewed the musical revival in today's paper: Review: A ‘Carousel’ That Spins on a Romantically Charged Axis By BEN BRANTLEY. APRIL 12, 2018 Blame it on God, or the fates, or — to use the metaphor of choice here — the stars. But when Billy meets Julie in the heartfelt, half-terrific revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel” which opened on Thursday night at the Imperial Theater, you can tell they’ve been felled by a force beyond their comprehension or control. Look at the dazed, questioning expressions on the faces of Billy Bigelow (Joshua Henry), the restless carnival barker, and Julie Jordan (Jessie Mueller), the homebody mill worker, as they sing that greatest of all ballads of romantic ambivalence, “If I Loved You.” They’re scared, all right, him especially. You sense that if they do get together — and though they’ve just met, it’s already a done deal — it’s going to end in tears, and they know it. But to borrow a lyric from a later song in this ravishingly scored musical from 1945, “What’s the use of wond’rin’?” Erotic attraction, as cruel as it is transporting, is not to be denied. The tragic inevitability of “Carousel” has seldom come across as warmly or as chillingly as it does in this vividly reimagined revival. As directed by Jack O’Brien and choreographed by Justin Peck, with thoughtful and powerful performances by Mr. Henry and Ms. Mueller, the love story at the show’s center has never seemed quite as ill-starred or, at the same time, as sexy. Both sides of that equation are given equal weight in this probing production, which takes the liberty of beginning not on the grounds of a carnival in Maine, as is customary, but in heaven, where destinies are foreseen. Clearly, this is not going to be a gritty, social-realist “Carousel” in the vein of Nicholas Hytner’s benchmark London-born incarnation, which came to Lincoln Center in 1994. Instead, Mr. O’Brien and Mr. Peck (and director and choreographer justly receive equal billing here) are taking a really long view — as in cosmic — of one short, fraught relationship. A celestial character named the Starkeeper (the great Shakespearean actor John Douglas Thompson) assumes new visibility throughout, taking on the role of Billy’s angelic supervisor. But don’t worry that flesh and blood will not be given their due. Julie and Billy may be mere mortal specks in a divine scheme. But they also pulse in the foreground of a palpable here and now, in which people exult in the pleasures afforded the body, from lingering kisses to hard-eating clambakes. The “Carousel” ensemble in the “Blow High, Blow Low” number, a highlight of the production.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times The same is true of the other supporting humans in this unselfconsciously colorblind “Carousel,” as vibrant a team of courters and sparkers as you could wish for. Lindsay Mendez and Alexander Gemignani turn in expertly crafted and beautifully sung performances as Carrie, Julie’s best friend, and her fish-scented swain, Mr. Snow. As Jigger Craigin, Billy’s pal and nemesis, the ballet dancer Amar Ramasar makes an electric Broadway debut. Margaret Colin offers a razor-sharp take on toxic possessiveness as Billy’s boss and older paramour. And the fabled opera star Renée Fleming is a delightful, refreshingly hedonistic Cousin Nettie. (Oh, she can sing, too, and makes fine, purifying work of that enduring sentimental war horse “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”) It is gloriously clear throughout that what animates these disparate souls, who wear Ann Roth’s handsome period costumes as easily as if they were track suits, is the mating instinct. What’s bustin’ out all over in June, to crib from the show’s sunniest set piece, is sex. And Mr. Peck, the resident choreographer of New York City Ballet, has channeled that urge into some of the most thrilling and original dancing seen on Broadway in years. That includes, as you might expect, the opening fairground number, in which dancers become both the horses and riders of the titular carousel, and that spirited serenade to the merry month of June, in which lust seems to spread across the stage like an epidemic. But Mr. Peck’s great choreographic coup comes, unexpectedly and exhilaratingly, toward the end of the first act with, of all things, “Blow High, Blow Low.” That’s the song with the repeated lyrics, “a-sailin’ we will go,” which usually comes across as a blustery, hokey ode to the maritime life. But this production expands that number (with some artfully extended orchestral music) to become a display of hormonal energy run rampant. Led by Mr. Ramasar the male corps de ballet configures itself into a sea-ploughing boat, its industrious crew and, most dazzlingly, the very waves of the ocean. In such moments, the performers become conduits for an irresistible life force, the same spirit that pushes Billy and Julie into each other’s arms. Santo Loquasto’s picturesque, deliberately artificial sets suggest that the world is but a provisional stage in a larger, more mysterious universe. You either go with its natural flow, or you don’t. And it is Billy and Julie’s misfortune that they are opposites in this regard. Ms. Mueller (who won a Tony as ”) uncannily combines strength and serenity, quiet joy and accepting sadness, qualities that flow through her liquid soprano. She is about as close to Zen incarnate as a down-home New England Christian gal can be. Renée Fleming, center, moves from the opera stage to Broadway to play Nettie Fowler.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times In contrast, Mr. Henry (“Violet,” “The Scottsboro Boys”) portrays Billy as a figure of agitated, unceasing rebellion. He refuses to let himself relax into his genuine love for Julie. In the “Blow High, Blow Low” number, he’s the dancer who can’t find his feet. Billy’s great solo, “Soliloquy,” performed with a heaven-rumbling voice by Mr. Henry, is a battle of conflicting feelings. You are always aware of this man’s anger, and where it comes from. That rage propels him to commit the crime in which he loses his life and, most notoriously, to hit Julie. This act of violence is not seen but described, and it is echoed in an awkwardly muffled encounter in the play’s second act. That’s when Billy’s ghost returns to earth years later to visit his unhappy teenage daughter, Louise (Brittany Pollack). The mother-daughter dialogue that falls so abrasively on contemporary ears — about it being possible to be hit loud and hard and “not hurt you at all” — is delivered quietly and unconvincingly, almost as if hoping to pass unnoticed. A similar queasiness pervades much of the rest of the second act, especially in the scenes set in heaven, which looks like a rough draft of a starry paradise by Rockwell Kent, inhabited by angels who quaintly bring to mind arty Denishawn dancers of the early 20th century. Even back on earth, Mr. Peck’s usually sure hand feels a bit shaky. The danced sequence in which Louise is rejected by prim Maine society and seeks comfort with a vagabond fairground worker doesn’t entirely track. (It was only then that I started to miss Agnes de Mille’s more lucid story balletsfor the original.) I always squirm through the undeserved uplift and optimism of the final scene, and this time was no different. For its first two-thirds, though, this “Carousel” tingles with the rapture of life in all its contradictions. And the chemistry between this show’s leading, mismatched couple is so charged, that when tree blossoms fall mysteriously over their first meeting on a windless night, it makes perfect sense. The real spinning carousel in this production is love. That, for better and worse, is what makes nature churn — and the world go round — in this show’s blissful, anguished universe.

Actors Push for Two New Tony Awards: Ensembles and Choruses By MICHAEL PAULSONAPRIL 11, 2018 Jane Krakowski and Christopher Jackson, at the 2017 Tony nominations announcement. The theater performers’ union is proposing new categories starting in the next theater season. The union representing theater performers said on Wednesday that it was beginning a national campaign to persuade the Tony Awards to create annual prizes for ensembles and choruses. The Tonys, which each year recognize work in plays and musicals on Broadway, currently honor performances only by actors in leading and supporting roles. But many regional theater contests honor the work of the rest of the cast — for example, the Jeff Awards in Chicago have an annual prize for the best ensemble. “We feel like everybody onstage needs to be able to compete to receive recognition for their performance,” said Mary McColl, executive director of the union, Actors’ Equity, which represents more than 51,000 actors and stage managers. “There has been this wide swath of actors that have not had the opportunity to be rewarded that way, and for multiple reasons this seems like a very good time for us to make this request and have this conversation.” Equity said it had already informed the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing, which oversee the Tony Awards, of its request, and that it would now press its case with an online petition. The union said it was hoping to see the categories added in the next theater season. (It is too late to add categories for this season, which ends in a few weeks.) Equity is proposing two awards, one for the best ensemble — which it defined as the entire cast — in a musical or play, and one for the best chorus — which it defined as a group that sings or dances, or both — in a musical or play. This season’s Tony Awards ceremony will be held on June 10 at Radio City Music Hall, and broadcast on CBS. Among the categories this year: best sound design, in a play and in a musical — categories that had previously been eliminated and have now been reinstated.

I wasn't that thrilled. It somehow seemed unresolved to me. I wouldn't buy a full-rice ticket. Mr. Cera, seemed to have a cold, or allergies, he kept wiping his nose throughout. It should be noted that the play is set in 1995, a time when politics and ethics were different. This is a story of ethics and morals, a "what would you do if you were these characters" tale. It was good, but not great. Here's what the NYTimes said: Review: Chris Evans and Michael Cera Tell Lies to Live by in ‘Lobby Hero’ LOBBY HERO 2 hrs. and 25 min. Closing Date: May 13, 2018 Helen Hayes Theater, 240 W. 44th St. By BEN BRANTLEY. MARCH 26, 2018 Shut up. Keep talking. Those clashing orders whisper side-by-side in your mind as you watch the meticulously acted revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s “Lobby Hero,” which opened on Monday night at the renovated Helen Hayes Theater, the new Broadway home for Second Stage Theater. because you will probably come to — if not like — then feel personally invested in the four self-sabotaging New Yorkers so completely embodied here by Michael Cera, Chris Evans, Brian Tyree Henry and Bel Powley. And none of them can participate in the simplest exchanges of words without doing serious damage. Sure, the talk at first seems merely casual as these four characters pair off to shoot the breeze in and around an apartment building lobby where it always feels like 3 a.m. But lives as well as livelihoods are possibly at stake in what’s being said, and everyday conversation becomes a minefield. Whenever someone starts talking again after a long silence, you feel an “Ouch!” coming on. At the same time, you can’t wait to hear what’s about to emerge from the mouths of Jeff (Mr. Cera), a newbie security guard (don’t call him “doorman”) and his exacting boss, William (Mr. Henry); and the Mutt-and-Jeff police partners who drop by. They are the swaggering Bill (Mr. Evans,in a terrific Broadway debut) and his rookie partner, Dawn (Ms. Powley). For one thing, much of what they have to say is both achingly funny and so pathetic it verges on tragic. For another, the combined wit and non-wisdom of these fallible (i.e. human) beings offers a fascinating reflection on those shaky internal compasses we call moral instincts. As to the ethical quandaries and quagmires in which these people are mired, they feel even more pointedly and sadly relevant than they did when “Lobby Hero” was first performed at Playwrights Horizons 17 years ago. References to sexual harassment, abuses of power in the workplace and racial profiling scarcely seemed to raise an eyebrow when I first saw the show in 2001; they evoke audible, anxious murmurs in the audience of 2018. Bryan Tyree Henry, at right, as Mr. Cera’s boss in the play, which is having its Broadway premiere 17 years after its debut. In the age of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, Americans may be newly receptive to “Lobby Hero.” But don’t imagine that this work, directed with savvy restraint by Trip Cullman, is an agenda-driven debate. Mr. Lonergan, you see, doesn’t work in bold blacks and whites, but in compelling shades of gray. He understands that purity of thought and deed is pretty much impossible in this muddy world. As a creator of plays (“This Is Our Youth,” “Hold On to Me Darling”) and films (“You Can Count on Me,” “Manchester by the Sea”), he specializes in screw-ups, compromised souls who would like to do the right thing, if only they had the backbone for it, or if they could figure out what it is. His dialogue is fueled by vacillation, equivocation and contradiction, with sentences that seem to eat their own words. Few actors are as qualified to deliver such precisely indefinite speech as Mr. Cera, a veteran of the ace 2014 Broadway revival of “This Is Our Youth.” Mr. Cera’s Jeff is a quintessential Lonergan loser, an uneasy 27-year-old who was thrown out of the Navy for smoking pot and has vowed to become a real adult. So now he works the night shift in a residential lobby that reeks of urban loneliness. (David Rockwell is the set designer.) It’s a job that’s hard to take seriously. But Jeff’s disciplined supervisor, played with bone-tired alertness by Mr. Henry, has a strict list of rules and regulations. He, at least, seems to be someone who knows what’s what. So, at first glance, does Mr. Evans’s Bill. He’s a cocky, friendly guy who oozes self-assurance and is known around his precinct as Super Cop. (And, yes, this is the same Mr. Evans who played the superhero Captain America onscreen.) Bill is just the person for someone like the eager, dewy Dawn, fresh out of the Police Academy, to have as a protective mentor, right? And there you have the tidy setup for a play that operates on a system of moving parallels. Jeff’s admiration for his boss is tested after William learns that his older brother has been arrested in connection with the murder of a nurse and William is asked to provide an alibi. William, who is African-American, knows how easy it would be for his brother to get lost in the legal system. Dawn’s hero worship of Bill is complicated by their having slept together. Disenchantment will set in fully when she learns why her partner is paying such regular visits to the building where Jeff works. Mr. Evans, in his first time on Broadway, portrays a police veteran who takes a rookie (Bel Powley) under his wing. These characters wind up unwisely confiding in one another; they can’t help themselves. And by the play’s end everyone will have betrayed or been betrayed — in most cases, both. The first time I saw “Lobby Hero,” it felt a bit too openly schematic. It still does occasionally, especially during a protracted stretch of secret sharing in the second act. But the performances here are all so grounded that you never doubt their characters’ authenticity or (pardon the word) sincerity. And because each portrait is so completely and ingeniously physicalized (watch how they each inhabit a uniform), we soon learn their “tells”; we know when they’re deceiving themselves. Mr. Evans is a marvel of smooth calculation and bluster. His Bill is the most blatantly manipulative of the characters, which means the most likely to succeed. Ms. Powley’s avid, impulsive and dangerously green Dawn is the perfect sidekick to this handsome sleaze. Mr. Henry (FX’s “Atlanta”) offers a deeply moving study of resignation and rebellion, courage and compromise in uneasy counterpoint. Mr. Cera’s perfectly uneasy Jeff gives full weight to both the hopeful decency and bad faith that lurk in all Lonergan characters. It makes sense when others say they can’t tell when Jeff is joking; he doesn’t always know himself. There’s a reason that Mr. Rockwell’s set revolves between scenes, forcing us to adjust our angles of observation. Like morality, identity is relative in “Lobby Hero.” Few playwrights match Mr. Lonergan in making confident art out of such constantly shifting uncertainty.

You should see both parts.

New York Post wasn't overly thrilled either... How Tina Fey messed up ‘Mean Girls’ musical By Sara Stewart 2 stars April 8, 2018 | 10:01pm | Mean should never feel this warm and fuzzy. Tina Fey’s musical opened on Broadway Sunday night, in a high-budget but watered-down adaptation of her wonderfully nasty, 2004 hit comedy. This is “Mean Girls” lite. Directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw, the musical starts on a high note, with stage-wall projections of the infamous Burn Book’s slams — “I suck in all ways,” “Can’t contour for s - - t.” A likably daffy Erika Henningsen gets out from under the long shadow cast by the teenage Lindsay Lohan as Cady Heron, transported from the Kenyan savannah, where she was homeschooled, to suburban Chicago. Once there, she’s thrown into a different wild kingdom — high school, where a clique known as the Plastics reigns supreme. Narrating the action is the outsider duo of Janis (Barrett Wilbert Weed, who makes an excellently sardonic Goth girl) and the “almost too gay to function” Damian (a droll Grey Henson), who befriend Cady and goad her into going undercover to undo the Plastics’ queen bee. Here’s the thing: As off-Broadway’s “Heathers” proved, it’s tough to transfer a big-screen bitch onto the stage. As Regina George, Taylor Louderman can really belt, stomping around on a cafeteria table in tight white denim announcing she’s a “massive deal.” But she comes across as less cruel nightmare, more future reality-show star. As her wingwomen, Ashley Park’s Gretchen Wieners is a fluttery mass of insecurity, while Kate Rockwell’s Karen Smith is still dumb as rocks but not as overtly laughable; here, thanks to Fey’s updated book about the hazards of social media, Karen’s a sexting victim. “Mean Girls” fans will love hearing their favorite lines, from “On Wednesdays we wear pink” to “Stop trying to make ‘Fetch’ happen!” and “You go, Glen Coco!” To their credit, Fey, her composer-husband Jeff Richmond and lyricist Nell Benjamin have resisted crafting these into shameless musical numbers (though I’d have liked to see Coco get his moment in the spotlight). But many of the songs feel like padding, including an uninspired ballad (“More Is Better”) between Cady and her love interest, Aaron (Kyle Selig). “Mean Girls” the musical is best when it breaks from the movie. Damian amps up the energy in the room with a tap-dancing ode to the perils of smartphone addiction (“Stop”), and another song, “Apex Predator,” links Cady’s zoologist past to the primal rites of high school. In this post-“13 Reasons Why” world, some of Fey’s script changes are for the better. The film’s racially branded social groups are exchanged for monikers like “Woke Seniors,” and there are far fewer mentions of “sluts” and “whores.” Fey still finds her way to the core of the story. “Calling someone ugly doesn’t make you better looking,” says math teacher Ms. Norbury (Kerry Butler, doing a credible Fey imitation). “We have to stop beating each other up over every little thing, ’cause meanwhile men are running around grabbing butts and shooting everybody!” But let’s be real: Fey is at her funniest when she’s brutally cutting, and songs like Getchen’s lament, “What’s Wrong With Me?,” and Karen’s PG-rated ode to racy Halloween costumes (“Sexy”) fall far short of the so-real-it’s-painful zingers from her film. Fey’s show has heart, but it’s not terribly fetch.

Alas, the reviewers were not enthusiastic about this show. Alas, it is not on my list of shows I am interested in, however, given its subject matter and the association of Tina Fey, I'm sure it will find an audience of teenage girls...although I will admit that the photo with the football player looks intriguing! Kyle might have an unexpected stage door visitor! LOL Here is "Mean Girl" critic Ben B of the NYTimes take on this show... Review: ‘Mean Girls’ Sets the Perils of Being Popular to Song MEAN GIRLS By BEN BRANTLEY. APRIL 8, 2018 Let me say up front that if I were asked to choose among the healthy lineup of girl-power musicals now exercising their lungs on Broadway, you would have to count me on Team Regina. That’s a reference to the alpha leader of the nasty title characters of “Mean Girls,” the likable but seriously over-padded new show that opened at the August Wilson Theater on Sunday night. I hasten to add that I am in no way endorsing the crushing elitist behavior of Regina George, a teen clique queen embodied here with red- (or rather pink-) hot coolness by Taylor Louderman. I was once a public high school student myself, and writhed painfully beneath the long, glossy talons of many a Regina. But the jokes, poses and put-downs that Regina delivers and inspires in others in this musical, adapted from the 2004 film, are a lot more entertaining than the more earnestly aspirational doings of the heroines of “Frozen,” “Anastasia” and, their deathless sorority founder, That’s because Regina and her frenemies converse in dialogue by the peerless comic writer Tina Fey. The creator of the dearly departed television series “30 Rock,” “Saturday Night Live” alumna, sometime movie star and best-selling essayist, Ms. Fey the creator of the dearly departed television series “30 Rock,” “Saturday Night Live” alumna, sometime movie star and best-selling essayist, Ms. Fey has one of the most appealing satirical sensibilities on offer. Her wit is both caustic and polite, stinging and soothing at once, though it’s the sharpness that lingers afterward. That perspective was transformed into box-office gold in the film “Mean Girls,” Ms. Fey’s first screenplay, based on a nonfiction book about the perils of popularity by Rosalind Wiseman and directed by Mark Waters. Starring a young Lindsay Lohan as an outsider who insinuates herself into a high school “in” crowd and loses her identity (a part ably assumed in the musical by Erika Henningsen), fantasies with sunny life lessons, and it lives on as a mood-elevating cult favorite. As for me, I was laughing guiltily even before the show started, gazing at the onstage video wallpaper of annotated yearbook photographs. Representing the title characters’ so-called “Burn Book,” which figures in a crucial plot point, these are images of class portraits decorated with cruel phrases like “If cornflakes were a person” and “Only made the team because his mom slept with the coach.” That this “Mean Girls” takes place (still at an Illinois high school) 14 years later than the film has proved no obstacle to Ms. Fey. After all, social media only increases opportunities for social climbing and subversion. The disconnect that troubles this musical isn’t a matter of adapting to changing times. Scott Pask’s set, Gregg Barnes’s costumes and Finn Ross and Adam Young’s video designs render sociological exactitude with flat comic-strip brightness. No, the trouble lies in the less assured translation of Ms. Fey’s sly take on adolescent social angst into crowd-pleasing song and dance. Mr. Richmond and Ms. Benjamin’s many (many) musical numbers are passable by middle-of-the-road Broadway standards (though Ms. Benjamin’s shoehorned rhymes do not bear close examination. Kyle Selig with Ms. Louderman, one of the designer-garbed despots of the musical’s title. Yet they rarely capture either the tone or the time of being a certain age in a certain era. A couple of songs tip their caps to Katy Perry/Pink-style ballads of empowerment (“It Roars,” “Fearless”), but they lack the energizing pop snap you long for. A rap number, for a party sequence, is embarrassing, and not only because it’s intended to be. By the end, when the feuding students have learned the errors of their divergent ways, high-volume hymns of uplift have taken over. Only an occasional number — like “What’s Wrong With Me?,” a cri de coeur of insecurity, affectingly performed by Ashley Park — offers essential insights into character or truly propels the plot. These songs are why the show weighs in at two and a half hours, as opposed to the movie’s zippy 97 minutes. And often when I sensed that a character was feeling a song coming on, a grumpy voice in me murmured, “Oh, I wish you wouldn’t.” As long as they’re talking, the leading students of “Mean Girls” exude an idiosyncratic, carefully exaggerated comic charm. You have, on the one hand, the designer-garbed despots of the title: Ms. Louderman’s Regina, Ms. Park’s terminally insecure Gretchen and Kate Rockwell’s terminally stupid Karen. On the other, there are the “Freaks and Geeks” misfits: Grey Henson’s “almost too gay to function” Damian and Barrett Wilbert Weed’s deadpan goth-girl Janis. Kerry Butler is very funny as a variety of grown-ups (including parts portrayed by Ms. Fey and Amy Poehler in the film). Ms. Henningsen, left, with Kerry Butler, who is very funny portraying a variety of the show’s grown-ups. Ms. Henningsen’s Cady, the new girl (she was home-schooled in Kenya by her parents), is less specifically defined, but she has plenty of presence. Her radiant, confused blankness effectively summons memories of being young, unformed and desperate to be liked. The show itself suffers from a similar indecisiveness, especially in its structure. It employs two separate, fitfully used framing perspectives — that of Damian and Janis as droll narrators and commentators on the action, and of Cady, who grew up in the wilds of Kenya, and sometimes observes her fellow students as if they were zoological specimens. At some point, a choice between these two should have been made. As he demonstrated in “The Book of Mormon” and “The Drowsy Chaperone,” Mr. Nicholaw specializes in spoof choreography that both celebrates and satirizes Broadway dance conventions. It’s an approach that feels only intermittently appropriate here. He does an amusing, if underdeveloped, riff on “The Lion King” and borrows from “Mormon” for the production’s showstopper, a tap sequence called, uh, “Stop.” The wittiest musical moments include a Halloween-party number in which young women defend tarty costumes as emblems of feminist independence. And I have to admit I had a great time whenever Ms. Louderman’s Regina strutted her calculating, vampy stuff in songs of malicious intent. Not that I would ever root for the dastardly Regina, with her plastic values and vicious whims. On the other hand, there’s a reason the show is called “Mean Girls.” They’re the next-door versions of those cosmetically perfect pop and movie stars whose public vanities and follies we savor with such glee. Ms. Fey is an ace student of this universal prurience. She’s also smart enough to let us wallow in and renounce it at the same time.

I always say that the best movies and plays are the ones that are based on true life. This is no exception. I was impressed. Great cast. What a group of dysfunctional and greedy people. I laughed out loud when old JP refuses to meet any ransom demands. Brendan Frasier has really turned into a chub. I saw him on Broadway in Elling several years ago and even though he walked around in a dirty, torn pair of BVD's, he had really gone to pot. BTW Ben, I thought young JP III (Actor Harris Dickinson) looks like a slightly younger version of you! Take that as a compliment, please... http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/newpix/2018/03/17/21/4A4B285F00000578-5513647-Pictured_here_is_the_grandson_of_millionaire_J_Paul_Getty-a-11_1521322893782.jpg Pictured here is the grandson of millionaire J. Paul Getty http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/newpix/2018/03/17/19/4A4B402400000578-5513647-image-a-18_1521315116987.jpg Donald Sutherland, Harris Dickinson

I'd be seated next to you! I Love Laurie!

Any details...date, time, etc....?

I don't know what play Mr. Als saw, but I totally disagree with his assessment and comments regarding this production. I saw it last night and I was mesmerized by the brilliance of the acting in this pay. Glenda Jackson is a revelation. At age 81, she commands the stage. All attention and focus are on her character. No ear pieces to feed her dialogue or cues, this woman is a totally consummate actress and never once did I see or hear her stumble or forget a line. Bravo! The audience was in sync with her and you could her a pin drop. The 1 hour and 45 minutes of the show (no intermission) went by in a flash as you witnessed a brilliant ensemble act out this story. And, not to let someone else steal the thunder, Laurie Metcalf holds her own against Ms. Jackson and turns in a A+ performance. Poor Alison Pill has to keep her head above water to try to keep up with the two, but also does a fine job. Tonys all around for the gals. I would suggest the Tony Committee establish an "Outstanding Ensemble" category and let the casts of Angels in America and Three Tall Women battle it out. I don't know if they'll extend this show, so I would suggest immediately going to the website and grabbing a ticket asap!

‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ fans are packing bars like sports nuts By Christian Gollayan April 5, 2018 | 5:07pm | Updated It's standing room only at Boxers bar on Ninth Avenue, where "RuPaul's Drag Race" has become a beloved spectator sport.Stefano Giovannini; Courtesy of VH1 On Thursday nights, gay bars in the city get as packed as sports bars on Sundays during football season. The reason? “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” a weekly reality show where drag queens compete to be crowned “America’s next drag superstar.” Ever since its Season 10 premiere in March, watering holes in Hell’s Kitchen have been teeming with fans. “This is our football season and the finale is always our Super Bowl,” says Marti Cummings, a drag queen based in Hamilton Heights. In lieu of a halftime show, Cummings asked two guests to stand on a bar table for an impromptu twerking competition. One of them was Sean, a 26-year-old teacher based in Bloomfield, NJ. After shaking his bum for the crowd while Top-40 music played, he won the dance-off and was rewarded with a vodka-cranberry cocktail. “Just give me a stage and I’m on it!” says Sean, who didn’t want to disclose his last name for professional reasons. Meanwhile, a few blocks away at Mom’s Kitchen & Bar, Terry Preston, a 24-year-old publicist and competitive pole dancer, was at another “Drag Race” viewing party sipping $5 vodka sodas and cheering on his favorite drag queen, Miz Cracker. “At first I didn’t understand why straight people like getting drunk and yelling at the TV over a game,” Preston says. “But now I get it … it’s a really fun way to meet people.” ‘At first I didn’t understand why straight people like getting drunk and yelling at the TV over a game. But now I get it .’ Viewers say that the series portrays the LGBT community in a positive light to a mass audience. “A lot of what [RuPaul ] does is empowerment — teaching people how to push their boundaries . . . and that resonates with the queer community,” Rye, back at Boxers, says. And while the on-screen competition may be fierce, it’s a bonding experience for everybody. “It’s an opportunity to watch queer people on TV and see ourselves, and it’s great seeing [contestants] from all different cultural backgrounds — there’s somebody for everybody to watch,” Cummings says. “This show is a great dialogue for people to bring their straight friends to watch, and they get invested . . . it brings people together.

So? What does this have to do with the price of coffee in Brazil? I only mentioned other productions as a reference that this was not my first My Fair Lady rodeo. I know the show. I know the score. I've seen good and bad. My focus, as usual, is not in the past but in this current production at LCT. Now when you get to the theater and you've seen the show, I'll listen to what you have to say.

"The Tony Award-winning Best Play returns to Broadway in a “near-miraculous production” of “mind-bending splendor” (The New York Times). In 1917 Zurich, an artist, a writer and a revolutionary collide in a kaleidoscopic thrill-ride that’s “wickedly playful, intensely entertaining, infectiously theatrical” (Time Out London)." Perhaps others will be more thrilled than I viewing this show which I think is aptly titled! I found it boring and somewhat Marx Brothers zany. Repetitive scenes only helped make it seem endless. Wordy and inane. Sorry, I really didn't like it and bolted the theater, along with others, at intermission. Some did not have the patience to wait for intermission and exited half-way through the first act. Looking around I spotted a number of patrons dozing. The guy behind me snored loudly! It was a TDF ticket, so I did not have a lot invested in it.

1976 Broadway - Ian Richardson and Christine Andreas 1993 Broadway - Richard Chamberlain and Melissa Errico 2007 New York Phil with Kelli O'Hara and Kelsey Grammar and 1987 revival of Pygmalion with Peter O'Toole and Christopher Plummer

Saw this production at LCT Friday evening and....I LOVED IT! One of the best productions of My Fair Lady I have seen. Everything about this show is perfect. Great music, great cast, great costumes, sets, choreography, and direction. Every minute was Broadway heaven. If you loved LCT's past productions of South Pacific and The King and I, this newest will not disappoint.

Seeing this on Thursday evening... Review: Glenda Jackson Gets Her Queen Lear Moment in ‘Three Tall Women’ THREE TALL WOMEN 1 hr. and 45 min. Closing Date: June 24, 2018 John Golden Theater, 252 W. 45th St. By JESSE GREEN. MARCH 29, 2018 Her jaw thrust forward like a prow, her elfin eyes belying her regal bearing, her wide-screen mouth wrapping itself around those slashing, implacable consonants — they’re all exactly as you remember them and want them to be. Or if you’ve never experienced them, welcome to the pleasure. Either way, Glenda Jackson is back; even better, she’s back in a role that’s big enough to need her. Aptly, the name of the role is A. A is the oldest of Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women,” which opened on Thursday night in a torrentially exciting production that also stars Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill. It not only puts an exclamation point on Ms. Jackson’s long-shelved acting career but also serves as a fitting memorial, which is to say a hilarious and horrifying one, to Albee, who died in 2016. Though “Three Tall Women” won him his third Pulitzer Prize, in 1994, and marked his return from the critical wilderness after two decades of disrepute, this is the play’s Broadway premiere. Joe Mantello’s chic, devastating staging at the Golden Theater was worth the wait. The wait for Ms. Jackson seemed less likely to be rewarded. A highbrow star of classy film and television in the 1970s, with two best actress Oscars and a handful of Emmys, she pulled the plug on her acting career in 1992 when elected to the House of Commons on the Labour ticket. That doesn’t mean she stopped performing, exactly, . But by the time she retired from politics, in 2015, few expected the 79-year-old to show up onstage again. Then came an exhilarating “King Lear” at the Old Vic in 2016, announcing that Ms. Jackson had lost none of her power and verve. So how do you top “King Lear”? In a way, “Three Tall Women” — a comedy about decrepitude or a tragedy about survival, depending on how you look at it — is “Queen Lear” in a fun house mirror. A is a rich old lady, 92 but vainly pretending to be 91: a fossil of the old guard with all the imperiousness, mischief and grit that suggests. She spends most of her time abusing the memory of a bad marriage and an even worse son — worse because gay. Still, you are never sure how much of what she says is true; her grievances, like her racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia, seem almost rote. For A, hanging on to a sense of identity means maintaining the enamel shell of her narcissism even as she forgets what she once found so fascinating inside it. Ms. Jackson, in a lilac dressing gown and a marcelled silver wig, digs deep into that contradiction, producing huge laughs from the grim idea that awfulness is a damn good habit as death hovers. The audience for her awfulness, in the first act anyway, consists of Ms. Metcalf as B, her fiftyish seen-it-all caretaker, and Ms. Pill as C, an uptight twentysomething emissary from her lawyer’s office, trying to bring order to a chaos of unpaid bills. Ms. Metcalf, spiky and floppy, is particularly mordant in this material, sometimes bullying and sometimes coddling A in an effort to get through another unpleasant day with minimal fuss. Confined to her employer’s grand bedroom, she is a visual joke, stomping around in gray pants and sneakers. In the new configuration, with the whole cast dressed in coordinated purples — the superb costumes are by Ann Roth — the tone darkens even as the play remains raucously funny. You may never have heard a dirty story about a man’s anatomy told as Ms. Jackson does in the second act, but A, B and C, now a living time-lapse photograph, have more at stake in one another’s success, and more at risk in failure. Perhaps that’s because they are all, in essence, Albee’s mother, who (he always said) bought him from an adoption agency for $133.30 and forever after hoped to return him. “Three Tall Women” is based, in part, on conversations she had with him about her life, marriage and unhappy parenthood. In more ways than one, Albee hovers about the action. But unlike in much of his early work, he does not insist on dominating it. “Three Tall Women” is rigorous but also generous, even loving, to its characters — and audience. It honors the women’s flintiness and fear as C swears not to become B and B hopes not to become A. In doing so, it slips Beckettian existentialism through the commercial barricades by disguising it as comfortable mainstream entertainment. Well, not always comfortable. By the end, when Ms. Jackson gives voice to A’s terror as her faculties wane, and considers the idea that death will be a relief, you may be struck, as I was most recently in the Signature Theater’s revival of “At Home at the Zoo,” by Albee’s willingness to go anywhere. Or rather, his unwillingness not to. That doesn’t mean this is a perfect play. Given the Cubist structure, it’s not surprising that the themes eventually start to recycle with more panache than novelty. And C, as written, does not always stand for compelling. Still, time has been good to “Three Tall Women,” and Mr. Mantello’s production further burnishes its insights and confirms its originality. The staging tricks enhance the ones that Albee built in, with Miriam Buether’s astonishing set design, at first so pretty and cozy, holding unexpected dimensions of alienation in store. The lighting (by Paul Gallo) and subtle sound design (by Fitz Patton) beautifully support the idea of a play slipping identities in the same way its characters do. Finally, though, it comes back to the actors. Ms. Jackson’s history with us, and her aura of indomitability, mean that she is not merely a casting coup for A but a natural advocate for the play’s central themes. She is, politically and personally, the embodiment of not going gentle into that good night; death and Thatcherism are all the same to her. And though Ms. Metcalf and Ms. Pill look nothing like Ms. Jackson, or each other, they bring more important skills and associations to their roles. Ms. Metcalf, once known for tragedy but now transformed into a peerless comedian (thanks to “Roseanne,” “A Doll’s House, Part 2” and “Lady Bird”), is thus a very Albee creature. And it is not irrelevant, seeing Ms. Pill’s just-holding-it-together C, to think of the devastated young woman she played, under Mr. Mantello’s direction, in the Off Broadway premiere of “Blackbird.” Watching these three women in “Three Tall Women” means seeing the ghosts and echoes of many other women as well. They complete Albee’s imaginative leap into difficult souls, which of course means all of us. And they honor a play that despite its frailties and wrinkles has aged beautifully, into a burning, raving classic.

I ventured over to HK last night for an off-off-Broadway show called Afterglow. This show has been running for a few months and is advertised to take advantage of the nudity and provocative subject of production. Naked men, shower scenes, and threesomes all provide tantalizing fodder for a gay audience. And gay, it was, the audience, I mean. A small and uncomfortable theater space, yet surprisingly filled to capacity, with gay men, in a 60 seat theater. It was very warm, bordering on hot and smoky. The smoke is used to induce a hazy erotic atmosphere. Personally it had an odor I did not care for. I sat first row and had a view of, well, everything. The plot is rather simple. 3 gay men. Josh, Alex and Darius. Josh and Alex are involved in a long-term relationship and in the midst of a surrogacy. Darius is a young masseur who they add to the mix of their open relationship. Josh is self absorbed and as described by Alex, "Like a puppy that constantly needs to be played with." Alex is a successful researcher who, at first, is relieved when Josh and Darius take up a casual relationship, grateful to be relieved of the stress of work and his relationship. Things get complicated when Darius and Josh become more seriously involved. This is where the story goes downhill, and well, 2 plus 1 doesn't add up to a happy threesome. It all ends sadly. Ok, yes, lots of nudity, shower scenes and the constant rearranging of the set in various configurations. Penises, naked butts and Water sprays from the overhead shower. Clothes come off, clothes go on. After a while it became a bit tedious. Given the uncomfortablilty of the theater and the intermissionless 1 hour and 45 minute performance, I was relieved when it ended. I saw it on a TDF ticket, so I didn't have to invest a lot, except time. Actor, Brandon Haagenson was not in the performance I saw and his understudy, Tim Young played the role of Josh.