Today’s Highlights:
Roundabout‘s Trouble in Mind, by Alice Childress, directed by Charles Randolph-Wright, featuring LaChanze (Wiletta Mayer), Chuck Cooper (Sheldon Forrester), Millie Davis (Jessica Francis Dukes), Simon Jones (Henry), Don Stephenson (Bill O’Wray), Michael Zegan (Al Manners), Danielle Campbell (Judy Sears), Brandon Michael Hall (John Nevis), and Alex Mickiewicz (Eddie Fenton), opens at Broadway’s American Airlines Theatre.
Four Quartets, adapted, directed by & starring Ralph Fiennes, opens at London’s Harold Pinter Theatre.
Otello, by Verdi, a world premiere re-imagination, featuring Allison Charney (Desdemona), Errin Brooks (Otello), and Jordan Charney (The Narrator), begins streaming on demand at 8 PM ET at NYC’s Town Hall.
Fiasco Theater‘s Imogen Says Nothing, by Aditi Brennan Kapil, directed by Jessie Austrian, featuring Natalie Woolams-Torres, Devin Haqq, Noah Brody, Emily Young, Paul L. Coffey, Zack Fine, Gabriel Neumann, and Ben Steinfeld, opens at Off-Broadway’s Connelly Theater.
Paradise Blue, by Dominique Morisseau, directed by Stori Ayers, featuring Tyla Abercrumbie (Silver), Wendell B. Franklin (Blue), Alani iLongwe (P-Sam), John Earl Jelks (Corn), and Shayna Small (Pumpkin), opens at LA’s Geffen Playhouse.
The Vocal Ease Benefit FREE streaming concert, hosted by Karen Mason, featuring Beth Leavel, Tamara Tunie, Christine Pedi, and Steve Ross, at 8 PM ET here.
Rhinebeck Writers Retreat Fundraiser, hosted by Tracie Thoms, including interviews with Joe Iconis, Max Vernon, Dawn Landes, Lynne Shankel, and Eric Ulloa, and special appearances by Beth Malone, Emily Saliers, Cinco Paul, and Kyle Jarrow, and performances by Micaela Diamond, Bonnie Milligan, Zachary Noah Piser, and Heath Saunders, streams at 8 PM ET.
Nunsense, directed by Michelle Lauto, featuring Missy Aguilar (Sister Robert Anne), Cynthia Carter (Sister Mary Regina), Landree Fleming (Sister Mary Amnesia), Rebecca Keeshin (Sister Mary Leo), and Kyra Leigh (Sister Mary Hubert), closes at Chicago’s Porchlight Theatre.
Steven Brinberg’s Simply Barbra closes at Palm Springs’ Oscar’s.
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Diana: The Musical at Broadway’s Longacre Theatre:
NY Times (Jesse Green): … it may well win the prize as the tawdriest and least excusable wholesaling of a supposedly true story ever to belt its way to Broadway… Still, it’s worth asking, as the poor woman’s corpse is forced to rise again, what its authors could possibly have been thinking… The cynical answer, as always, is money… The real problem is intrinsic, arising from the choice to tell the story in song at all… Musicals, like laws, are often compared to sausages: You don’t want to know what goes into them. In this case, you don’t want to know what comes out, either. if you care about Diana as a human being, or dignity as a concept, you will find this treatment of her life both aesthetically and morally mortifying…
Broadway News (Charles Isherwood): …Why, yes, Diana, The Musical is every bit as abysmal as rumored… (the) long delayed by the pandemic — almost feels like a pointless afterthought… The question more pertinent to those who treasure fond memories of the worst musicals they have seen: Is Diana so bad that it simply must be seen… The answer to both is a qualified yes… rife with moments that will make you titter or howl, or, more respectfully, stifle the titters and howls… History is being made at the Longacre Theatre. Briefly, one suspects… slouches toward tedium quickly… even the ghoulish fun of witnessing a magnificently misbegotten show palls by the end of the first act… you’re left with two and a half hours you’ll never get back… I suspect the Queen — the real one — would not be amused. Certainly this queen wasn’t.
NY Daily News (Chris Jones): …this tawdry affair… Diana the Musical offers no meaningful insights (nor even ones lacking in meaning) into a woman who really should be allowed to rest in much-deserved peace. Dramaturgically speaking, this trashy show makes “The Crown” look like Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”… a melodrama of retribution that is perhaps best summed up by another of the show’s immortal lyrics, deftly referencing one of Diana’s famous attempts at exacting revenge through her couture, “a feckity-feckity, feckity-feckity, feck-you dress”… As Camilla Parker Bowles, Erin Davie does all she can do not to play merely a well-spoken rottweiler, but the audience, frankly, has other ideas.
New York Stage Review (Elysa Gardner): The true key to female empowerment has at long last been revealed: Christian Dior. At least, that’s the apparent message of “Pretty, Pretty Girl,” the Act One finale of the long-anticipated—and, thanks to a Netflix preview, already widely mocked—Diana, The Musical… Surely, it took great restraint for Bryan and DiPietro to not rhyme “Camilla” with “gorilla” in a song until well into Act Two… I could cite a number of even more cringe-worthy lyrics, but why bother? In truth, Diana isn’t much more insipid than any number of musical hagiographies that have popped up in recent decades, and director Christopher Ashley, to his credit, guides it with a light hand, having fun with the dishier aspects of the story rather than wallowing in the pathos.
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Cullud Wattah at Off-Broadway’s Public Theater:
NY Times (Naveen Kumar): Water can be a force for life or death. That the municipal supply of Flint, Mich., is slowly killing three generations of Black women living under one roof isn’t a dramatic revelation, but the grim, yearslong reality embodied in Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s Cullud Wattah… the playwright excavates the human costs behind familiar and devastating headlines… Dickerson-Despenza’s lyrical prose is laced with humor, and she creates lively and warmhearted characters. Which makes it all the more enraging to watch them struggle against a steady poisoning. Her narrative mode is one of querying the past, not so much to expose fresh facts as to ensure that what should already be known is also deeply felt.
Theatermania (Kenji Fujishima): Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s sprawling new play… couldn’t be more timely… But while anger at government malfeasance and the senseless tragedies that resulted is a driving force of the play, Dickerson-Despenza couches it in the context of a portrait of a five-member family of Black women, all of whom have been marked by the water crisis in some way… Though Marion and Ainee face off in a couple of electrifying arguments in the first act, Dickerson-Despenza gives each character’s motivations their due, refusing to break them down into simplistic good-versus-evil binaries… an imaginative production….
Time Out (Raven Snook): …Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s devastating new drama… Though billed as an Afro-surrealist piece, cullud wattah is dramatically straightforward and, despite moments of joy, predictably sad. Yet it transcends its issue-play roots. Dickerson-Despenza and director Candis C. Jones personalize Flint’s public-health crisis with poetry and feeling… The production isn’t perfect… But cullud wattah offers a powerful depiction of the toll that climate change, systemic racism and greed take on ordinary people. Its discomfiting truths leave you thirsty for justice.
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The Gingold Theatrical Group has announced its next script-in-hand performance of Project Shaw’s Village Wooing, to take place Mon. Dec. 13 at 7 PM at Symphony Space, directed by David Staller.
Maryann Plunkett and Jay O. Sanders.
Two people determined to remain single meet on an around-the-world cruise. This chance encounter changes their lives in the most unexpected ways. Shaw wrote this play while he was, himself, taking his first world cruise.
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Spamilton will run Mar. 25 – Apr. 10, 2022 at Long Beach’s Musical Theatre West (link TBA).
Director, cast, and additional information TBA.
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The Civilian’s production of Duncan Sheik & Kyle Jarrow’s Whisper House will run Jan. 11 – Feb. 6, 2022 at 59E59 Theaters, directed by Steve Cossin, with choreography by Billy Bustamante.
Casting TBA
The play is set in the lead-up to World War II in an eerie lighthouse on the coast of Maine, which may or may not be haunted.
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Video: Bob Mackie on his legendary career and new book.
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RIP: Playwright Ed Bullins, a leading dramatic voice in the Black Arts Movement, died Nov. 13 at the age of 86 from complications of dementia.
Mr. Bullins’ first produced work was How Do You Do in 1968. Inspired by Amiri Baraka’s The Dutchman, Mr. Bullins would become involved with the Black Arts Movement, a group of Black playwrights, novelists, and poets focused on capturing the modern Black experience of which Baraka was a leading member.
He won his first Drama Desk Award in 1968 for his trilogy play The Electronic N***** and Others, later re-titled Ed Bullins Plays, produced at New Lafayette Players.
Mr. Bullins would hold positions at several New York theatre institutions throughout the ’70s and early ’80s, including being playwright-in-resident at American Place Theatre in 1973, and the Public Theater’s New York Shakespeare Festival’s Writers’ Unit from 1975 to 1983.
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A Christmas Carol (touring production), adapted by Jack Thorne and directed by Matthew Warchus, will run Nov. 30 – Jan. 1, 2022 (opening Dec. 1) at the Ahmanson Theatre.
Bradley Whitford (Ebenezer Scrooge), Kate Burton (Ghost of Christmas Past), Alex Newell (Ghost of Christmas Present/Mrs. Fezziwig), Chante Carmel (Mrs. Cratchit), Dashiell Eaves (Bob Cratchit), Brandon Gill (Fred), Alex Nee (Ferdy/Nicholas), Sebastian Ortiz & Cade Robertson (alternating as Tiny Tim), Brett Ryback (George), Harry Thornton (Young Ebenezer), Glory Yepassis-Zembrou (Little Fan), Grace Yoo (Jess), Celia Mei Rubin (Standy for Jess and Mrs. Cratchit), and Andrew Mayer (Swing), previews at LA’s Ahmanson Theatre.
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The New Group has announced complete casting for the world premiere of Tariq Trotter’s Black No More, to run Jan. 11 – Feb. 17, 2022 (opening Feb. 8) at the Signature Center, directed by Scott Elliott, with choreography by Bill T. Jones.
Tariq Trotter, Brandon Victor Dixon, Lillias White, Jennifer Damiano, Tamike Lawrence, Theo Stockman, Tracy Shayne, Ephraim Sykes, Walter Bobbie. Leanne Antonio, Rhaamell Burke-Missouri, Elijah A. Carter, Ryan Fitzgerald, Polanco Jones Jr., Zachary Daniel Jones, Sarah Meahl, Mary Page Nance, Oneika Phillips, Nicholas Ranauro, Malaiyka Reid, Mars Rucker, Angela M. Sauers, Katie Thompson, Akron Watson, Nyla Watson, and Edward Watts.
The story of Max Disher, who’s eager to try the mysterious machine invented by Dr. Junius Crookman that guarantees to “solve the American race problem”—by turning Black people white.
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The world premiere of “Hershey Felder Presents — Live from Florence” will present 7 live streamed musical films at Beverly Hills’ The Wallis.
* “Dante & Beatrice in Florence”
* “Mozart and Figaro in Vienna”
* “The Verdi Fiasco”
* “The Assembly”
* “Chopin in Paris”
* “The Crazy Widow of Moses de Leon,”
* A musical surprise for the holiday season.
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Grease will run May 3 – Oct. 29, 2022 (opening May 10) at the Dominion Theatre, directed by Nikolai Foster, with choreography by Arlene Phillips
Casting TBA.