edjames

Starring Charles Busch, and now running at the Cherry Lane theater tells the story of one woman’s tumultuous passage from convent girl to glittering cabaret chanteuse to infamous madame of a string of brothels—all while hiding her undying devotion to the child she was forced to abandon. Busch relies heavily on the story once told by Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas , and others, including Bette Davis in Pocketful of Miracles. Busch however camps it up mightily and tosses in a bit of Mae West, Marlene Dietrich and others. Add into the mix a really good supporting cast and it makes for a nice evening of off-broadway theater. I saw it on a TDf ticket and wound up in a first row center seat. Lots of fun! January 11 - March 5, 2020 2 hours with intermission Cherry Lane Theatre 38 Commerce Street

Stunning review from Ben Brantley in today's NYTimes. I love Laura Linney. No wonder tickets are hard to come by. Good seats are full price. Lower priced options are read (Imean last 2 rows) of the orch or rear mezz. MTC is largely subscriber-based and it's a very limited run. Sorry, but I refuse to pay $300+!!! Closing date: Feb. 29, 2020 Tickets Through Feb. 29 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. ‘Lucy Barton’ Review: Laura Linney Finds Her Perfect Match Ideally cast as a plain-spoken woman made of quiet steel, she acts the way Elizabeth Strout writes in this compelling adaptation of the 2016 novel. The title character of “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” Rona Munro’s crystalline stage adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 novel, is hardly a woman of mystery. On the contrary, as embodied with middle-American forthrightness by a perfectly cast Laura Linney, in the production that opened Wednesday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Lucy may be the most translucent figure now on a New York stage. Feelings seem to register on her face before her thoughts have a chance to catch up with them, so that we know when she’s hurting or happy almost before she does. A New York writer who grew up in rural Illinois, Lucy Barton is surely someone we can trust to speak plain. What a relief to be in the company, for once, of a thoroughly reliable narrator. And yet mystery — truly unfathomable and utterly ordinary — is at the center of this deceptively modest Manhattan Theater Club production, which originated in London and is directed with quiet care by Richard Eyre. I’m not referring to the classic suspense-making withholding of information that is usually a requisite of entertaining storytelling. Nor do I mean those moments in which Lucy, recalling a loveless childhood in poverty on an isolated farm, slams on the brakes of her narrative as she stumbles on a memory she would rather not talk about now. Give her time; she’ll come back to it. But Lucy also knows that full transparency does not equal full knowledge. This is true even when your primary sources are your own heart and mind. “I still am not sure it’s a true memory,” Lucy says, after describing the sadistic public humiliation of her brother by her father on the streets of a small town. “Except I do know it, I think. I mean: It is true …” That final affirmation rings slightly hollow. Because of course we can’t know the full truth of any person, including our own self. That’s part of what makes life so sad; it is an even larger part of what makes life such so wondrously fascinating. Every breath of Linney’s performance acknowledges this contradiction. Plays adapted as monologues from memoirs and close first-person fiction are seldom satisfying onstage. The magic that pulses in a book can disintegrate when these same words are interpreted by a performer who isn’t, as it were, on the same page. (When the great actress Vanessa Redgrave performed the great writer Joan Didion’s memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking” on Broadway, the result wasn’t a doubled greatness, but a dilution of the singular strengths of each.) Linney and Strout, in contrast, are almost seamlessly well-matched. Other actresses have beautifully portrayed Strout characters onscreen, notably Frances McDormand in “Olive Kitteridge.” But what Linney is being asked to do here is to embody not only a fictional person but also the literary voice that shaped that person. And using the artfully shaded directness she has shown both on film and stage (“Sight Unseen,” “The Little Foxes”), Linney indeed acts the way that Strout writes. As a storyteller, Strout’s Lucy is almost apologetic in her humility. But she is also possessed of an underlying strength that knows that she has had what it takes to not only endure but prevail. The setting of the play is largely a hospital room, evoked in Bob Crowley’s set by little more than an institutional chair and bed, with transformative lighting by Peter Mumford. (Video design by Luke Halls, which turns the hospital window into an aperture onto a hazy past, is fine, though I could have done without the intrusive melancholy music.) This is where many years ago, a younger Lucy spent nearly nine weeks of her existence, with a life-threatening infection that is never fully identified. Her hospitalization reunites her with the mother she hasn’t seen in years. In the scenes that follow, Lucy often becomes her mother — or rather Linney becomes Lucy becoming her mother. This is an important distinction to make, since Linney is not trying to create another, autonomous character here. When Lucy speaks as her mother, it’s with a sort of descriptive physical shorthand, conjuring sharp edges and a nasal twang. The caricature in the imitation underscores the distance between what Lucy came from and what she has become. But now, in extremis, all Lucy wants is mommy, and she wants mommy to tell her stories. And though she begins reluctantly, Lucy’s mother turns out to be a corn country Scheherazade, with successive stories of local women who aspired above their station and usually came to bad ends. They are familiar tales and yet utterly distinctive from one another, with startling details that suggest the perversity of flailing souls who misread their own intentions. “People,” Lucy says, wonderingly, after her mother finishes an anecdote about a runaway wife. Her mother echoes, “People.” It’s a gorgeous moment of fleeting complicity between mother and daughter. As for subjects closer to their Amgash, Ill., home, especially Lucy’s tormented father, her mother sidesteps those with discomfort and disapproval. It is for her daughter to fill in those gaps for us, with accounts of the kind of numbing, oppressive and outright abusive existence that so many people accept as a life sentence. Lucy did not, though. Why? Her trajectory from childhood to college, to marriage and motherhood, and ultimately to a career as a successful fiction writer, is fairly conventional in summary. It sounds like one of those inspirational survivor stories, of success against the odds, which are regularly packaged for mass consumption. But Lucy conveys an abiding air of surprise that all this happened to her. Linney’s presence here is deferential, almost shy. From the moment she enters, walking quickly and talking briskly, you sense that it requires conscious, self-preaching will power for her to tell us all this. But when Lucy says she has become ruthless — as those who first knew she wanted to be a writer advised her she would have to be — we believe her. This means that the truths she is telling hurt — us and her. And they of course aren’t the whole truth. But aren’t we grateful for the alchemical, unquantifiable mix of factors that allows this woman — embodied by this actress, at this moment, in this place — to share with us so raptly what she knows, or even thinks she knows? When Lucy says, with a satisfaction that’s bigger than happiness, that “all life amazes me,” we feel exactly what she means. My Name Is Lucy Barton Tickets Through Feb. 29 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

A big hit with the over-60 crowd, I thoroughly enjoyed this production. A great cast and a fun, laugh out loud script. Highly recommended, especially if you're over 60 or have had parents in "independent living"! I saw it second row mezz on a TDF ticket. Available on other discounts. Opens Jan 23. NOW PLAYING THROUGH MARCH 1 / HAYES THEATER GRAND HORIZONS BY BESS WOHL DIRECTED BY LEIGH SILVERMAN WITH JANE ALEXANDER, JAMES CROMWELL, PRISCILLA LOPEZ, BEN McKENZIE, MAULIK PANCHOLY, ASHLEY PARK, MICHAEL URIE Bill and Nancy have spent 50 full years as husband and wife. As portrayed by Tony Award winner and Academy Award nominee Jane Alexander (The Great White Hope, The Sisters Rosensweig) and Academy Award nominee and Emmy Award winner James Cromwell (Babe, “Succession”), they practically breathe in unison, and can anticipate each other’s every sigh, snore, and sneeze. But just as they settle comfortably into their new home in Grand Horizons, the unthinkable happens: Nancy suddenly wants out. As their two adult sons struggle to cope with the shocking news, they are forced to question everything they assumed about the people they thought they knew best. By turns funny, shocking, and painfully honest, Bess Wohl’s new play explores a family turned upside down and takes an intimate look at the wild, unpredictable, and enduring nature of love. Also joining the cast are Tony Award winner and Broadway legend Priscilla Lopez (A Chorus Line, In the Heights), Ben McKenzie (“Gotham”, “The O.C.”), Maulik Pancholy (“30 Rock,” “Weeds”), Tony Award nominee Ashley Park (Mean Girls), and Michael Urie (Torch Song, “Ugly Betty”).

He was a hustler in his pre-Hollywood days. Who knew? Edd Byrnes, Who Combed His Way to TV Stardom, Dies at 86 He became one of television’s first teen idols as Kookie, the hair-combing, jive-talking youth on the hit series “77 Sunset Strip.” CHICAGO, Aug. 22, 1959 — Some fainted, others sobbed with delight and still others surged toward him to gaze into his face, crowned with a crop of wavy hair. And so went the mass love affair between Edd (Kookie) Byrnes, 26, and a throng of 18,000 cheering bobby sox fans yesterday at Midway Airport. — The Associated Press Edd Byrnes, who became one of television’s first teen idols as Kookie — the hair-combing, jive-talking youth on the — but found ever after that he could not live the character down, died on Wednesday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 86. His son, Logan Byrnes, said the cause was probably a stroke. Broadcast on ABC from 1958 to 1964, “77 Sunset Strip” starred Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and Roger Smith as a pair of suave Los Angeles private eyes and Mr. Byrnes as the parking-lot attendant at the restaurant next door to their office. As he ministered tenderly to the Thunderbird convertible driven by Mr. Zimbalist in the show, Kookie (né Gerald Lloyd Kookson III) ran his omnipresent pocket comb through his lush ducktailed pompadour, cracked his devil-may-care grin and spouted aphorisms that even at midcentury had all the gnomic obscurity of Zen koans: “A dark seven” (a depressing week); “piling up the Z’s” (getting some sleep); “headache grapplers” (aspirin); “buzzed by germsville” (to become ill); and, most emblematically, “Baby, you’re the ginchiest!” — a phrase of the highest Kookian approbation. Mr. Byrnes, an immediate object of desire for the show’s young female viewers, was soon receiving 15,000 fan letters a week. At public appearances he was pelted with combs. With Connie Stevens, he recorded a single, “Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb,” which sold more than a million copies and reached No. 4 on the Billboard chart, despite the fact that by his own cheerful admission he could not sing. Mr. Byrnes was an entirely self-taught actor — and originally hired to appear in only a single episode of the show. By his own account, his life began with a turbulent, impoverished childhood followed by a stint as a male prostitute; peaked with fame, riches and a roster of celebrity friends; and ebbed amid alcoholism and drug addiction before culminating in sobriety and steady, if relatively low-profile, television work. Edward Byrne Breitenberger was born in Manhattan on July 30, 1933, and reared in the Yorkville section, then a rough-and-tumble, down-at-the-heels ancestor of today’s gentrified Upper East Side neighborhood. His father, Augustus Breitenberger — alcoholic, verbally abusive, usually unemployed and often absent — was, Mr. Byrnes wrote in his memoir, “‘Kookie’ No More” (1996, with Marshall Terrill), the black sheep of a distinguished family: Augustus’s father was a noted civil engineer who had helped build the city’s subway system. From boyhood on, Ed — he would add the extra “d,” with its double dollop of cool, circa “77 Sunset Strip” — held a series of jobs to support his mother, brother and sister: shining shoes, delivering ice, coal and newspapers and operating a drill press. When Ed was 13, his father was found dead from a head wound of uncertain origin — the death may have been a homicide, Mr. Byrnes wrote — leaving Ed as the head of the family. His only escape, he later said, was the movies, and he dreamed of becoming a star. At 15, he dropped out of school, and at 17, his build honed by gymnastics, he began working as a photographer’s model. A photographer for whom he posed “set us up on dates with older, rich men,” Mr. Byrnes wrote, drawing him into hustling. “It was a strange world I had been introduced to,” his memoir continued. “Art, wealth, sadism, limousines, sex for money, theater and fine restaurants.” He kept watching movies, making a meticulous study of actors’ techniques. He gained valuable, if unorthodox, dramatic experience by helping a friend from the neighborhood, a New York police detective, interrogate suspects, playing bad cop to his friend’s good cop. His role, he wrote, consisted largely of whacking suspects over the head with the Manhattan Yellow Pages. Around this time, desiring a professional name and wanting to disavow his father, he began calling himself Edward Byrnes. The young Mr. Byrnes parlayed his N.Y.P.D. training into roles in summer stock. In 1955, he drove to Hollywood in search of stardom. He landed bit parts in television shows like “Wire Service,” “Cheyenne” and “Maverick,” and, eventually, larger parts in movies, including “Reform School Girl” (1957), “Life Begins at 17” (1958), “Darby’s Rangers” (1958) and “Marjorie Morningstar” (1958). In 1958 he was cast in “Girl on the Run,” a movie that became the de facto pilot for “77 Sunset Strip.” That film, which starred Mr. Zimbalist as a detective, was meant to be a one-off; Mr. Byrnes’s character was a murderous psychopath who, in a bit of business he came up with on the set, keeps running a comb through his hair. In test screenings, Mr. Byrnes engendered such a frenzy among the women in the audience that the film soon became a series and his character — resuscitated, one assumes, after a spin in the electric chair — was reborn as Kookie. (In later episodes Kookie has graduated from parking cars to playing junior detective.) Although Mr. Byrnes appeared elsewhere in other roles, he found it hard to slip Kookie’s yoke. He reprised the character on several shows of the early ’60s, including “Hawaiian Eye” and “Surfside 6,” as well as in “Kookie & Co.,” a 1964 movie for West German television. By the time “77 Sunset Strip” wound down, Mr. Byrnes wrote, he had become mired in drugs, alcohol and depression — first amid the pressures of fame, later amid the reality of being unable to land more significant roles. He hit bottom in 1982, eventually attaining sobriety with the aid of a 12-step program. Mr. Byrnes’s marriage to Asa Maynor, whom he wed in 1962, ended in divorce. In addition to their son, Logan, a news anchor at KUSI in San Diego, he is survived by his partner, Catherine Gross; a sister, Jo-Ann Breitenberger; and a brother, Vincent Breitenberger. His other television credits include “The Love Boat,” “Fantasy Island,” “Simon & Simon” and “Murder, She Wrote.” His film roles include Vince Fontaine, the oleaginous host of a TV dance-party show, in “Grease” (1978). If Mr. Byrnes’s later career did not accord him the stardom of which he had once dreamed, he was, by his own account, content. There was one topic, though, on which he would seldom consent to be interviewed. The subject was hair care. “I won’t talk about it,” he told The Washington Post in 1998, “unless someone’s paying me.”

Broadway great Jerry Herman has passed away. His brilliant talent will be missed but lives on in his award winning scores. Jerry Herman, Composer of ‘Hello, Dolly!’ and Other Broadway Hits, Dies at 88 His rich melodies and powerful lyrics, also heard in “Mame” and “La Cage aux Folles,” dazzled critics and kept audiences returning for more. Jerry Herman, the Broadway composer-lyricist who gave America the rousing, old-fashioned musicals “Hello, Dolly!” and “Mame” in the 1960s and Broadway’s first musical featuring gay lovers, “La Cage aux Folles,” in the 1980s, died on Thursday in Miami. He was 88. His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by Jane Dorian, his goddaughter. Mr. Herman wrote music that left the nation singing — rich melodies with powerful lyrics that stopped shows, dazzled critics, kept audiences returning for more and paved Broadway with gold for producers and performers. Obit too long to post, please go to NYTimes website for entire article. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/theater/jerry-herman-dead.html

Hurry! Groff ends his run on January 19. Tickets are on sale thru March 15. Jonanthan's replacement will be: Gideon Glick Will Take Over as Seymour in Off-Broadway's Little Shop of Horrors; Production Extends Again Don't it go to show, ya never know! On the heels of a two-week run in off-Broadway's Little Shop of Horrors while Jonathan Groff was on leave, Gideon Glick has signed on to succeed Groff as Seymour Krelborn in the new production at the Westside Theatre next year. Glick will play the role from January 21 through a new extension date of March 8, 2020, with Groff slated to take his final bow in the revival on January 19. Glick earned his first Tony nomination this past season for his performance as Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird, during which he vlogged for Broadway.com. His résumé also includes a Broadway-debut turn in Spring Awakening (alongside Groff), as well as Significant Otherand Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. He has previously appeared off-Broadway in The Harvest, Into the Woods and Wild Animals You Should Know. Glick will join a cast that includes Tammy Blanchard as Audrey, Christian Borle as Orin Scrivello D.D.S., Tom Alan Robbins as Mr. Mushnik, Kingsley Leggs as the voice of Audrey II, Ari Groover as Ronnette, Salome Smith as Crystal and Joy Woods as Chiffon. Rounding out the company are Stephen Berger, Chris Dwan, Kris Roberts, Chelsea Turbin, Eric Wright and Teddy Yudain.

Straight off the success of the Oklahoma revival, director, Daniel Fish, has announced his next project. Once again, he is intent on a non-traditional production, and including members of the LGBT community in the cast. Whether or not it transitions to another home after it's summer run upstate is another story, and as the article mentions, they are still in negotiations with the Loesser estate for the rights. As with his revival of Oklahoma, it's sure to cause a lot of discussion and controversy. Daniel Fish’s Post-‘Oklahoma!’ Musical: ‘The Most Happy Fella’ The 1956 musical drama, with an acclaimed operatic score, will premiere this summer at Bard SummerScape in Annandale-on-Hudson. Daniel Fish, the director behind the Tony Award-winning “Oklahoma!” revival, has a new midcentury musical reinvention project in the works: Frank Loesser’s acclaimed, quasi-operatic “The Most Happy Fella.” The 1956 “music drama,” as it was then coined in a New York Times review, is an unorthodox love story between a middle-aged vineyard owner and his mail-order waitress bride. Fish’s production will open this summer at the Bard SummerScapefestival in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. Details are still being discussed with Loesser’s estate; his wife, Jo Sullivan Loesser — whom he met after she starred as Rosabella in the original “Most Happy” production — died in April. If the first line of the casting announcement is any indication, Fish will be working in a similar vein to “Oklahoma!”: “This will not be a conventional production of ‘The Most Happy Fella.’” He is gathering a small ensemble of seven performers, according to the casting notice, who will not be divided into the show’s traditional roles. The production is “strongly” encouraging performers who identify as transgender, nonbinary or queer to audition, the notice said. Expect “a nontraditional treatment of the existing material,” a SummerScape spokesman said, “with an emphasis on Loesser’s exquisite score.” The “Oklahoma!” revival, which stresses the underlying darkness in what had been seen as a sunny American story, took shape at the same Bard festival in 2015, going on to Broadway earlier this year. One of the bigger changes came through in the stripped-down score, orchestrated by a music team that will also join “The Most Happy Fella.” Loesser wrote the music, book and lyrics for “The Most Happy Fella,” which is based on Sidney Howard’s 1924 play “They Knew What They Wanted." The show is more dramatic than some of Loesser’s better-known comedic hits — including “Guys and Dolls” and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” — but the music has long been cited as one of his most striking compositions. The show was revived on Broadway in 1979 and 1992, and enjoyed a New York City Opera production in 2006. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/theater/daniel-fish-the-most-happy-fella.html

I listened to the live broadcast on WQXR here in NYC Saturday afternoon and the music blew me away. Friends who also listened agreed it was thrilling. Alas, it was the very last live performance of the season and a huge sold-out hit for the Met. But the good news is that the Met has rescheduled this opera for the season after next, so they'll be another chance to see it. I look forward to seeing it live....so perhaps an encore movie theater performance from Met Opera Live. Also waiting to see countertenor Jacob Josef Orlinski in concert but no USA scheduled performances.

A really good show filled with outstanding music. A note-worthy performance by Adrienne. Recommended.

I saw this play at the Atlantic and enjoyed it very much. It had a great cast. Most of which came from the London production. It was a sold-out hit. Due to other obligations they weren't able to take the production to Broadway, so I hope the cast returns for this production. Martin McDonagh’s ‘Hangmen’ to Open on Broadway in March The drama, set in a British pub owned by a onetime executioner, won the 2016 Olivier Award for best new play. “Hangmen,” Martin McDonagh’s dark drama about a British executioner, will open on Broadway this winter after successful runs in London and Off Broadway. The show, first produced in 2015 by the Royal Court Theater, transferred to the West End and won the 2016 Olivier Award for best new play, and then was presented in New York last year by the Atlantic Theater Company. Set in Oldham, England, in 1965, when capital punishment for murder was being banned in Britain, the play takes place largely in a bar run by the executioner and disrupted by a mysterious visitor from London. McDonagh is an acclaimed playwright, nominated for Tony Awards for “The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” “The Pillowman,” “The Lonesome West” and “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” and a filmmaker (he wrote and directed the Oscar-nominated “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”). The play is directed by Matthew Dunster and produced by Robert Fox, Jean Doumanian and Elizabeth I. McCann. It is scheduled to begin previews Feb. 28 and open March 19 at the Golden Theater. Casting has not yet been announced.

The show has various discounts available. Show of the Month Exclusive! $79 Orchestra Tickets //www.broadwaybox.com/shows/inheritance/ Valid Thru: January 16, 2020 TICKETS FROM $39!* http://www.playbill.com/discount/playbill-discounts-for-the-inheritance Rush Tickets: $40.00 - Available at the Box Office only on the day of the performance - Limit 2 tickets per customer - May not be available for all performances - Subject to availability. https://www.telecharge.com/offerslist.aspx?productid=13020 And no doubt day-of-performance tickets available at TKTS in Times Square @ 47th St at reduced prices.

Ben Brantley in NYTimes: ‘The Inheritance’ Review: So Many Men, So Much Time https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/17/theater/the-inheritance-review-broadway-matthew-lopez.html Breadth doesn’t always equal depth in Matthew Lopez’s supersize, vividly painted portrait of gay life in the 21st century, featuring E.M. Forster as a spirit guide. Ardent aspiration glows in every moment of Matthew Lopez’s “The Inheritance,” which opened on Sunday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. That is, to be sure, a whole lot of moments. This two-part, novelistic doorstop of a play, a portrait of 21st-century gay men in search of their collective past, occupies more than six hours of stage time. And everything about it — its themes, its form, its frame of reference and the desires of its characters — is of a scale with its length. Consider, to begin with, that Lopez — whose earlier, respectfully received plays (“The Whipping Man,” “The Legend of Georgia McBride”) scarcely anticipated a blockbuster like this one — is making his Broadway debut with a work that courts direct comparison with two daunting predecessors. They would be“Howards End,” E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel of England at a moral crossroads, and “Angels in America,” Tony Kushner’s two-part, Pulitzer Prize-winning drama from the early 1990s about the beleaguered soul of gay America (which was spectacularly revived only last year). The young New Yorkers who populate “The Inheritance,” directed with a forward-charging breathlessness by Stephen Daldry (“Billy Elliot”), all dream big as well. At their noblest, they’re searching to summon the gay pioneers of the past who made their present lives possible. And who should they enlist as their spirit guide in this endeavor but Forster himself? Portrayed with wide-eyed curiosity and a diffident mien by the British actor Paul Hilton, Forster steps out of the past and into the play’s opening scene like a tutelary don strolling through a campus quad, where clean-cut acolytes sprawl and frolic like models for a J. Crew back-to-college catalog. Forster generously gives the boys of “The Inheritance” his blessing to use “Howards End” as the template for the story they’re telling. He even lets them construct a variation on its opening line for their starting point, so that “One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister,” becomes, “One may as well begin with Toby’s voice mails to his boyfriend.” That tale is set in a Darwinian New York City where “every summer, waves of college graduates wash up on its shores to begin the struggle toward success and achievement.” The description is delivered early by one of the show’s narrators (and in this play, everybody’s a third-person narrator as well as a first-person character). At that point, you may be tempted to think “The Inheritance” has as much in common with the vintage naïfs-in-the-big-city potboilers of Rona Jaffe and Jacqueline Susann as it does with “Howards End.” The combination of skyscraping reach and soap opera-ish pulp makes “The Inheritance” both easy to make fun of and hard to dislike. First staged in London, where it won the Olivier Award for best new play, the script merges the self-consciousness and avidity of its creator, Lopez, with that of its dramatis personae, who are in effect making up the work in which they appear as they go along. You can’t just give Lopez patronizing points for attempting to write a significant piece of literature, because he cleverly makes this attempting the very dynamic of his play. It opens — on Bob Crowley’s blank white platform of a set — with most of its cast in an orgy of creative stasis, peering into laptop screens and scribbling on note pads. How can they possibly say what they want — no, need — to say about who and what they are in a moment when gay rights in America feel both more of a given than ever before and newly under siege? Or as the avuncular Forster puts it, “All your ideas are at the starting post, ready to run. And yet they must all pass through a keyhole in order to begin the race.” One person in particular emerges as the leader of this race. First identified as Young Man 1, and played by Samuel H. Levine in a wow of a Broadway debut, he will go on to embody two of the show’s main characters, an actor on the rise and a hustler on the decline, who happen to look nearly identical. What? You don’t remember anyone like that from “Howards End”? Well, the hustler, Leo, serves the function of two Forster characters — a married couple, as it happens. But before we go down that labyrinthine byway, let’s establish some rudiments of the plot. At the show’s center — standing in for Forster’s temperamentally opposite sisters, Margaret and Helen Schlegel — are the serious, self-doubting social activist Eric Glass (Kyle Soller, a poignant anchoring presence) and his flamboyant playwright boyfriend, Toby Darling, who has a Hidden Past he pretends never happened (an electrically vivid Andrew Burnap). While the self-destructive Toby pursues fame and endless sex, the nurturing Eric makes friends with the older man upstairs, Walter Poole (Hilton again), the physically frail, unexpectedly heroic partner of the strapping billionaire businessman Henry Wilcox (John Benjamin Hickey). Yes, Henry Wilcox is an important figure in “Howards End.” And, yes, like that Henry, this one has a country house that becomes the moral nucleus of the work he belongs to. Lopez’s use of that house — as a window into the generation of gay men lost to AIDS — packs the play’s most devastating emotional punch. I challenge any theatergoer with a heart not to cry during the sun-saturated scene that concludes the first half of “The Inheritance.” Never mind that it’s partly borrowed from This bravura sequence is a vibrant and essential reminder of the terrifying years when a diagnosis of H.I.V. was a death sentence. That effort to conjure a nightmare era in danger of being forgotten by many young people today captures what’s best in “The Inheritance.” It yearns, with an almost physical intensity, to realize the much-quoted dictum from “Howards End”: “Only connect.” For Lopez, that means forging bonds not only with a previous, decimated generation of gay men in New York but also between the rich and the poor, the right and the left, the prosaically minded and the poets. That’s a hell of a lot of territory to cover, even with six hours as a playing field, especially if you’re trying to establish point-by-point parallels with events in “Howards End.” The show features a bright assortment of political and cultural debates, given spirited life by the baker’s dozen of male cast members and replete with of-the-moment name dropping. There’s even an amusing conversation about the enduring value of camp as a part of the gay sensibility. That last discussion acquires unintended relevance during scenes of heavy-breathing confrontation. (“I once loved you, Toby, but I am cured of that. Everything you touch you destroy.”) Such vignettes, and those that portray the heart-smashing theater world in which Toby operates, had me thinking of the Douglas Sirk weepie and wondering if camp clichés are now so genetically encoded into gay culture that they’re recycled without reference to (or even awareness of) their original contexts. Yet there’s rarely anything arch about Lopez’s highly explicit descriptions of erotic encounters (rendered with nonexplicit, metaphoric choreography). And the rapturous monologue by Adam (the young actor played by Levine) about a long session in a gay bathhouse in Prague is notable for its haunted ambivalence about transcendent, dangerous sex. Ambition and achievement are not entirely commensurate in “The Inheritance.” Its breadth doesn’t always translate into depth. As fine as the acting is throughout — and quietly brilliant when the extraordinary veteran Lois Smith takes the stage, toward the very end, as the show’s sole female character — none of the charactershere have the textured completeness of those created by Forster and Kushner. Ultimately, the play twists itself into ungainly pretzels as it tries to join all the thematic dots on its immense canvas. Yet even by the end of the overwrought second half of “The Inheritance,” you’re likely to feel the abiding, welcome buzz of energy that comes from an unflagging will to question, to create, to contextualize, to — oh, why not? — only connect.

NYPost review: ‘The Inheritance’ is a touching call to action on Broadway While some ignorant millennials snipe “OK boomer”at anyone with a gray hair, a new play is clapping back. Its powerful take-away: Instead of saying “OK boomer” to a gay New Yorker who survived the AIDS epidemic, try “thank you.” But “The Inheritance,” which opened on Broadway Sunday night after an acclaimed run in London, isn’t interested in starting a Twitter war. Matthew Lopez’s empathetic drama is simply — well, not so simply — a moving call for an intergenerational conversation, using a tale of modern-day, young gay men whose lives collide with that of their older peers. It’s also a very long one, with two separate parts, each running more than three hours. Luckily, there are three nearby Starbucks you can reach during intermissions. In a show that’s as lengthly as a flight to Europe, there’s going to be a lot of plot. But thanks to director Stephen Daldry’s sprint of a staging, which sets the play on an elegant, bright wooden platform, “The Inheritance” clips along. What unfolds (and unfolds, and unfolds) is the story of 30-somethings Toby (Andrew Burnap), a high-energy playwright on the verge of Broadway success, and Eric (Kyle Soller), his more grounded, kinder boyfriend of eight years. While Toby clings to booze and sex, Eric befriends their much older neighbor, Walter (Paul Hilton), who leaves his home in upstate New York to Eric in his will. It was on that serene property where, in decades past, Walter selflessly cared for young men dying of AIDS. But Walter’s conservative widower, Henry (John Benjamin Hickey), keeps the inheritance a secret from Eric, wanting the estate for his own sons from a previous marriage. By now, Eric has split from Toby, and he and Henry form a relationship of their own, adding a political edge to the play as liberal Eric dates a seasoned, wealthy Republican. The first part takes a while to click in. The use of author E.M. Forster as a narrator, the ensemble chirpily finishing each others’ sentences and the abundance of graphic sex-talk can grow cloying. The play finds its soul near the end of the first portion, which is a well-earned tearjerker. To reveal much of Part 2 would rob the drama of its suspense. As the story moves forward, the 15 actors embody a clown car of different characters. The most heart-wrenching are Adam, an actor Toby falls in love with, and Leo, a male escort who’s a dead ringer for Adam. Both men are played by Samuel Levine, who, as Leo, gives a moving and truthful performance of someone in immense pain. Burnap makes a memorably eccentric Toby, an artist who falls apart and could have been ripped from one of Patricia Highsmith’s thrillers. Think of him as the Talented Mr. Toby. The better half is Part 2, which finally brings the heat and anguish. In the show’s gutsiest moment, Henry is eloquent arguing in favor of his Republican politics in a room full of wine-glugging millennials, when a young man goes, “But other gay men your age . . .” Without taking a breath, a ferocious Henry yells, “THERE ARE NO GAY MEN MY AGE.” Shattering. So is a touching speech from the wonderful Lois Smith. In one devastating passage, she describes reuniting with her gay son on his deathbed, and how, in the years since, she’s tried to make amends. It’s in this part that the second meaning of the title comes into view: the learned responsibility these men inherit to care for each other in their greatest time of need. Sure, “The Inheritance” has its flaws. Plenty of them. But it’s promising to see, during a glut of overly academic plays, something that’s written totally from the heart. https://nypost.com/2019/11/17/the-inheritance-is-a-touching-call-to-action-on-broadway/

This topic of discount tickets has been discussed before, but a quick recap: TDF offers discounted "day-of-performance" tickets at their Times Sq TKTS location. Most seats are half-priced. You cannot select your seats. If you are eligible for membership, tickets for some advanced performances are available on-line. Membership is not free and there are requirements for membership (full-time student, retiree, etc) TKTS Times Square Located "under the red steps" in Father Duffy Square at Broadway and 47th Street HOURS For Evening Performances:Monday:3:00pm - 8:00pmTuesday:2:00pm - 8:00pmWednesday:3:00pm - 8:00pmThursday:3:00pm - 8:00pmFriday:3:00pm - 8:00pmSaturday:3:00pm - 8:00pmSunday:3:00pm - 7:00pm For Matinee Performances:Wednesday:10:00am - 2:00pmThursday:10:00am - 2:00pmSaturday:10:00am - 2:00pmSunday:11:00am - 3:00pm Otherwise, check out the Playbill.com website or the Broadway.com website for discount codes. Finally, check out Goldstar.com for seats. Not all shows, but discounts available. You may have to join to participate. Remember, not all Broadway shows have discounts.

Last chances...closing January 5, 2020...shame, it is a fun production. ‘Tootsie’ to Pack Up Her Wig on Broadway The musical comedy, which earned Santino Fontana a Tony Award for best actor, will close after its Jan. 5 performance. “Tootsie,” the Broadway musical adaptation of the 1982 movie of the same name, will close in January, the production announced on Monday. Despite having earned critical approval and two Tony Awards, the show, which opened in April, is unlikely to recoup its investment costs. The show was capitalized for up to $19.975 million, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Like the movie, the musical tells the story of a struggling actor named Michael Dorsey who finds success disguised as a woman named Dorothy Michaels. (In the film he lands a part in a soap opera, but in the show he is hired for a musical theater role.) “Tootsie” features a high-powered creative team that includes the Tony-winning composer David Yazbek and the director Scott Ellis. The show was nominated for 11 Tonys and won two: for Santino Fontana in the lead role and for Robert Horn’s book. But in a crowded moment for new musicals, including several others based on popular films, the show never truly broke out. For the week ending Nov. 10, it grossed $943,765 — a solid total but only 58 percent of its potential in the comparatively large Marquis Theater, meaning many seats had been sold at a discount. The show’s final performance will be Jan. 5. At that point it will have played 293 performances and 25 previews. A North American tour will begin at Shea’s Buffalo Theater in Buffalo, N.Y., in October 2020, with additional cities to be announced. In a statement, the producers said that international productions were also in the works.

4 reasons, off the top of my old head... 1, London theater tickets are cheaper than NYC. I paid a small fortune for my center orchestra seats. $200 a pop, total $400 plus service fee, etc. They should have let me sleep with the cast for that price! (LOL), but I was in row D center and could see and hear everything. BTW, there is a bit of male nudity in this show. Otherwise, a lot of underwear and speedos. 2. Theater size. NYC production is at the Barrymore theater which has 917 seats, the Young Vic in London has about 420 seats. 3. Membership tickets? The Young Vic offers a "Become A Friend" program for advanced/preferred seating. On Broadway your at the mercy of Ticketmaster or Telecharge, unless you want to shlep to the box office. Some websites such as Playbill or BroadwayBox are offering discounted seats. TDF has tickets, too, sometime it pops up on the online site for advanced tickets. 4. Here in NYC, Friday evening was the coldest night thus far. The west side of Manhattan is much colder than the rest of the borough, due to the westerly winds off the Hudson River. It was "freezing" (low 30'sF) and very windy when we exited the theater! Normally I would have walked to the train or taken the bus home, but I jumped in the first taxi I saw, Brrrrr.... Anyway, I'm pulling for the show and hope the critics rave about it as much as they did in London and sweeps the 2019/20 Tonys1

Part 2 was every bit as dramatic, and emotional as Part 1. A truly great evening of theater. I enjoyed it very much, and once again, left the theater with a tear in my eye. One observation, for a Friday evening performance there were a number of empty rows in the back of the orchestra. I wonder if this play will resonate with a straight audience? The audiences at the performances I saw were primarily gay men, of a "certain age".

Tina made a special appearance on opening night and gave an emotional speech: https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Photo-Coverage-Adrienne-Warren-and-the-Cast-of-TINA-Take-Their-Opening-Night-Bows-20191108

And, Jesse Green in the NYTimes writes; Review: The ‘Tina’ Musical Is One Inch Deep, Mountain High Tina Turner gets the bio-jukebox treatment, with all its lows (emaciated storytelling) and one of its peaks (a star-making performance from Adrienne Warren). “What is a musical?” I heard the perpetual question raised again a few days ago, and not innocently or idly. A showbiz veteran was concerned about the prospects for “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” which opened on Thursday at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater. How would it be different from a rock concert? she wondered. Would a life story like Turner’s fit into the form? And why, she asked finally, “would anyone want to see that?” These are great questions, which is not surprising because the person asking them was Tina Turner herself. Now happily retired, and turning 80 this month, she discussed her initial misgivings in an article she recently wrote for Rolling Stone about the making of the $16.5 million bio-jukebox musical that now bears her name. Apparently, she got over her doubts; is it unfriendly to say that, having seen the show, I’m still working on mine? And make no mistake, I see Turner — the greatest rock queen ever to drag herself onto her own damn throne — as a friend, at least in the sense that millions of others do, as someone to admire and even protect. If hers has been the story of triumph rescued from the disaster of childhood neglect and horrendous spousal abuse, ours has been the good fortune to see that redemption rendered in real time as music and spectacle. So Turner’s last question is the easiest to answer: I’d hazard that almost anyone who’d ever heard or seen her might want to experience her tale told onstage. It’s a good tale, in theory, cut to the pattern of classic drama. Two elemental forces — hurricane-voiced Anna Mae Bullock and typhoon-tempered Ike Turner — are pitted in a struggle that nearly destroys both. But while Ike, for his sins, winds up a pariah and eventually dies of an overdose, Anna, rechristened Tina by her Svengali-like husband, rises from the depths, to greater glory solo than she ever achieved under his boot. More important, as far as pure entertainment is concerned, this story comes with songs that can thrill an audience when rendered as Turner sang them; at this, the musical “Tina,” directed by Phyllida Lloyd, happily succeeds. In a performance that is part possession, part workout and part wig, Adrienne Warren rocks the rafters and dissolves your doubts about anyone daring to step into the diva’s high heels. But as to Turner’s other questions, I’m afraid I share her initial skepticism. To rip the Band-Aid off quickly, the book (by Katori Hall, withFrank Ketelaar and Kees Prins) is so thin it’s see-through. You can’t really blame Hall, whose earlier work (including “The Mountaintop” and “Our Lady of Kibeho”) is complex and layered. No, this is a problem built into the biographical jukebox genre, whose songs leave the narrative only enough time for turning points and climaxes. Cherry-picked lives look ludicrous. Shuffling and reassembling events to smooth the arc may improve the shape, but at the cost of accuracy; the 1993 Turner biopic “What’s Love Got to Do With It” was almost as much fiction as fact. This stage musical, for which Turner and her second husband, Erwin Bach, are credited as executive producers, is truer but blurrier. It rushes so hard that Warren, who appears in almost every scene, has to swap emotions even faster than costumes. She sometimes seems more rattled than ravaged. The problem is exacerbated by another jukebox tic: songs bent into improbable shapes to serve a story they weren’t designed for. When Ike (Daniel J. Watts) proposes to Tina seemingly out of the blue, she responds by singing “You Better Be Good to Me,” from her 1984 comeback album. By 1984, she was divorced and had the guts to back up the lyric’s threat — but the scene is set in 1962, when she didn’t. Such gaps in logic can be bridged if you spend enough time thinking about them; perhaps it’s meant as irony that Tina sings the joyous “ ” — about a love that “gets stronger every day” — just after getting a black eye from Ike. But having to do that kind of mental work yanks you out of thestory. So when the song “ ” turns up to illustrate the moment when Tina, at her nadir, is working as a maid to make ends meet, I had to ignore the lyrics, about a prostitute who will “do what you want me to do,” and just enjoy Warren’s husky, pungent way with the tune. The same was true when “ ,” the apocalyptic anthem from the “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” soundtrack, was conscripted for a cremation. Is it a surprise that a show with 41 credited songwriters cannot sustain a coherent point of view on a main character who sings in 25 of the 27 numbers? Ike, with just a few musical and narrative gestures, is better articulated, and Watts is terrific delivering his gleaming menace. But Lloyd, in much of her staging, does not serve the book scenes well. The pace is too hectic except when it unaccountably grinds to a halt, which is an odd problem in a show that was already running in London for more than a year before being remounted for Broadway. And perhaps it’s only to be expected from the director of “Mamma Mia!” — the show that jump-started the jukebox genre — that the tone is generally coarse and obvious. Still, whenever you begin to despair of its story, “Tina” (and, with it, Lloyd’s sense of buoyancy) roars back in purely non-narrative ways. Suddenly, Bruno Poet’s lights bump way up. Mark Thompson’s costume designs provide the icons we want: the gold shimmy dress with tiers of fringe, the Alaia red leather mini zipped up the front. And Anthony van Laast’s choreography, perhaps too slick in the early scenes, when Tina and the (terrific) Ikettes would not have been so smooth, turns deliciously satisfying in the later ones, when the star owns her body at last. But what I’ve just described is a rock concert — which is what “Tina” essentially turns into. It’s a blast if that’s what you came for. If you meant to see a true union of song and story, though, you won’t get it here. Because that, to answer Turner’s first question, would be a real musical.

Yes, critics agree its another jukebox musical but one with an outstanding roster of hits and a lead performance by Adrienne Warren that shouldn't be missed. I'm seeing it Thanksgiving Eve....can't wait! NYPost called it a "towering performance." https://nypost.com/2019/11/07/tina-turner-musical-review-a-towering-broadway-performance/ ‘Tina Turner Musical’ review: A towering Broadway performance If you want to relive Tina Turner’s prime, you can’t get much better than Adrienne Warren. The star of “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” which opened Thursday night on Broadway, has that smoky-but-booming voice, the Jupiter-sized charisma and those high-energy dance moves. And she can rock a highlighted wig. But there’s more to it than that. As John Lloyd Young and Jessie Mueller proved in their turns as Frankie Valli and Carole King, the best performances in jukebox musicals go beyond technically proficient impressions and shoot for something real. Warren’s galvanizing turn is, in every sense, in the same league as those Tony winners. The 79-year-old Turner has led a hard life, and Warren lets you know it. That said, “Tina” is still a by-the-numbers biomusical. It starts with the star’s childhood in rural Tennessee, when she was a young, spirited Anna Mae Bullock wailing gospel music in church. She grows up fast, meets Ike Turner at a St. Louis blues club, joins him on tour and helps create the Ike & Tina Turner Revue. That’s when things get dark. An artist’s big break is usually the most joyous part of a jukebox musical. Not in this case. As we now know, while the singer was belting out the enduring hits of the ’60s and ’70s — “Proud Mary” among them — she was being abused by her then-husband, Ike (Daniel J. Watts). He’d slap her around, cheat on her with his manager and subject her to all sorts of emotional torment. Watts manages to make the monstrous Ike seem human. Still, Act 1 is dominated by hardship. Luckily, the mood lifts whenever Warren sings. The “River Deep, Mountain High” recording session, the show’s single best performance, gives us our first thrilling taste of her vocal fireworks. (The role’s demands have her performing just six times a week; Nkeki Obi-Melekwe sings both matinees.) As Tina soon learns, she doesn’t need Ike on a single, let alone in her life. Act 2 finds the singer reinventing herself in London and exploring a more synthesized sound with the hit song “What’s Love Got To Do With It.” She also meets German producer Erwin Bach (Ross Lekites), the man who remains her husband to this day. Katori Hall’s book gives into the usual biomusical formula: wink-wink jokes for fans, stereotypical record producers and more slammed doors than “Noises Off.” But there’s an uneasy scene near the end of the show, in her mother’s hospital room. Despite Tina’s success, all her mom wants is for her to get back together with Ike. It’s the production’s best nonmusical moment. But let’s be real: You come to “Tina” for the songs. Director Phyllida Lloyd (“Mamma Mia!”) stages them smoothly, with vibrant pops of color that ripple off the shimmering fringe of Mark Thompson’s costumes. And all of them — including “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” “Private Dancer” and “We Don’t Need Another Hero” — sound glorious. During the exuberant final concert, Warren isn’t just rolling on the river: She’s stampeding through Broadway.

Opening night is Sunday, November 17. Reviews shouldd be available on Monday, November 18.

I saw Part 1 last night and all I can say..."it's fu*kin' unbelieveable!" And that's in a good sense. This is a magnificent production. Dramatic, emotional, and funny. The cast is superb. Despite it' length, at 3+ hours, it goes by remarkably fast. As a gay, NYC man, I was completely involved with the story and characters. The play has some interesting references to being gay in NYC,, for example, Musical Mondays at Splash(!) and there is a brief scene set in Peter Luger's Brooklyn Steakhouse where Eric, when asked what he'll be having, says "I think I'll have the sole." The audience roared at the NYTimes review reference. I had tears in my eyes at the final Part 1 scene. Can't wait for Part 2 on Friday night. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

AND...they don't take credit cards! Alas, the Times review shocked many but many native NYer's knew it all too well.

Bad service should be reflected in the tip. A word to the manager might also help future patrons.

Tony, Grammy, and Emmy winner Cynthia Erivo sang a snippet of “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Loved You)” on The Late Show with Stephen ColbertOctober 30. The song was made famous by Aretha Franklin, who Erivo will play in the upcoming NatGeo series Genius: Aretha. https://www.playbill.com/article/watch-cynthia-erivo-sing-i-never-loved-a-man-by-aretha-franklin-ahead-of-playing-the-musical-genius Fast forward too about 5:28 to watch how incredible this woman is. She blew me away in the Broadway production of The Color Purple.