Today’s Highlights:
for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, by Ntozake Shange, directed & choreographed by Camille A. Brown, featuring Amara Granderson (Lady in Orange), Tendayi Kuumba (Lady in Brown), Kenita R. Miller (Lady in Red), Okwui Okpolwasili (Lady in Green), Stacy Sargeant (Lady in Blue), Alexandrea Wailes (Lady in Purple), and D. Woods (Lady in Yellow), opens at Broadway’s Booth Theatre.
The Huntington Theatre‘s Our Daughters, Like Pillars, world premiere by Kirsten Greenidge, directed by Kimberly Senior, featuring Lyndsay Allyn cox (Zelda), Lizan Mitchell (Yvonne), Julian Parker (Paul), Postell Pringle (Morris), Nikkole Salter (Lavinia), and Cheryl D. Singleton (Missy), opens at Boston’s Calderwood Pavilion.
Octet, by Dave Malloy, directed by Ann Tippe, featuring Adam Bashian, Kim Blanck, Alex Gibson, Justin Gregory Lopez, J.D. Mollison, Margo Seibert, and Kuhoo Verma, with Nicole Weiss, begins previews at CA’s Berkeley Rep.
I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, by Joe DiPietro & Jimmy Roberts, directed & choreographed by Paula Hammons, featuring John Adkison, Sophia Swannell, Danny Crowe, and Alison Nusbaum, begins previews at Laguna Playhouse.
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Reviews for Manhattan Theatre Club’s How I Learned to Drive at Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre:
NY Times (Maya Phillips): It’s rare to encounter the kind of breathless silence I experienced during an unnerving hotel room scene in the unforgettable revival… If I could direct a scene representing why I love theater, it would look something like this: Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse delivering crushing performances — both sentimental and horrific, utterly complex… And yet How I Learned to Drive is also funny. The play doesn’t sink with the gravity of its subject matter; it finds moments of levity without minimizing the tragic parts of the story… Occasionally, however, Brokaw doesn’t have the lightest touch with the production’s comedy and often fails to give the more stirring scenes the extra beat they require before things move along…
Daily News (Chris Jones): …it is a fascinating experiment involving two immensely skilled, in-the-moment performers who always grasped the importance of understating what is a horrific relationship, so as to better make the playwright’s point that intimacy evolves easily in close family settings… He leads her in such an awful way that she becomes, she eventually tells us in her narration, unable to live any longer in her own body… Parker, a riveting, restless explorer of the human psyche who can bend time, it seems, it truly does… Morse feels rather less sexually menacing. That might well be a smokescreen or even a dangerous learned stereotype, given the way abuse issues often play out in reality.
Broadway News (Naveen Kumar): …It would be some comfort to say that Vogel’s taxonomy of how men and women are socialized into sexual beings feels outdated or old-fashioned, but it surely doesn’t. This reunion of original stars Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse rather feels like a kind of haunting, confronting the present with ghosts who never left… bracing, intimate, expertly inhabited and a rare chance to see artists reanimate their work with the benefit of wisdom… Vogel’s writing has a distilled quality, whittling events down to their essence as the mind does with memory… navigating an impossibly thorny landscape with ease and agility… a terrifically powerful vehicle for reprised performances from its leading stars.
New York Post (Johnny Oleksinski): …Parker…She’s a deep-feeling actress and an unfailingly genuine presence, and is always a wonder to watch… How I Learned to Drive…is lighter than I have ever seen it… That resistance to anguish is confusing when there are should-be visceral scenes… what was once quietly frowned upon is now rightly seen as a grievous sin of the abuser. The scene doesn’t quite reach those heights of emotion… The younger supporting cast…play a number of parts, none of which they fully embody and their acting is overly presentational. Johanna Day…has some spot-on moments, though, including a heart-wrenching speech where she acknowledges her husband Peck’s penchant for cheating and a funny one where she lists off rules for women drinking.
Video: Teaser
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GRACE NOTES Quote of the Week: “If you give an audience a chance, they will do half your acting for you.” ~Katherine Hepburn
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Broadway Grosses for the week ending Apr. 17. Click here for the complete analysis.
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The world premiere of Matthew Lombardo’s When Playwrights Kill will run July 26 – Aug. 7 at Hartford’s Bushnell Theatre, directed by Noah Himmelstein.
Jeremy Jordan (Jack Hawkins), Harriet Harris (Brooke Remington), and Andre De Shields (Maurice Khalan Walker).
Jack, an spiring playwright on the verge of making his Broadway debut, must deal with the notoriously difficult actor Brooke Remington as the production’s Boston tryout turns into a disaster. Jack wants a new actor in the role, but the producers won’t fire her, so Jack resorts to desperate measures.
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Complete casting has been announced for Anna Ouyang Moench’s Man of God, to run May 10 – June 19 (opening May 20) at the Geffen Playhouse, directed by Maggie Burrows.
Shirley Chen (Samantha), Emma Galbraith (Jen), Erin Rae Li (Mimi), Albert Park (Pastor), and Ji-young Yoo (Kyung-Hwa.
During a mission trip to Bangkok, the four members of a Korean Christain girls’ youth group discover that their revered pastor has hidden a camera in their hotel bathroom. Samantha is personally wounded that Pastor would this to her. Kyung-Hwa everyone needs to have lower expectations for men. Jen is worried about how this might affect her college applications. And Mimi’s out for blood, as usual. Their communal rage and disillusionment fuel increasingly violent revenge fantasies amidst the no-hold-barred neon bubblegum sex-tourism mecca of Bangkok.
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Efforts are underway to raise money towards establishing a museum and theatre education center on Doylestown, PA’s Highland Farm, where Oscar Hammerstein II spent the final 20 years of his life.
Hammerstein bought the farm in 1940, just as he was beginning his landmark collaboration with Richard Rodgers, as a quiet place to work outside Manhattan. The property would become Hammerstein’s creative epicenter and is where he wrote the lyrics for “Oh, What Beautiful Mornin’” and “Edelweiss.” The farm is also where Stephen Sondheim became Hammerstein’s protégé.
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RIP: Hollis Resnik, a staple in the Chicago theatre world, has died at the age of 66. Click here to read more about here career.
With extensive stage credits, Hollis was a 12-time Joseph Jefferson Award winner. “She always said, ‘I’m a scrapper from Ohio and I worked for everything I got and earned it,’” said actor-director E. Faye Butler. “And she made it. She was a star.”
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Harlem Stage will presents its annual gala/opening night of A Drop of Midnight, written & performed by Jason “Timbuktu” Diakité, on Mon. June 6 at 7 PM ET, directed by Jonathan McCrory, and hosted by Claire Danes and Hugh Dancy. The production will continue through June 11.
Carrie Mae Weems and Sum Kim.
Due to the international excitement about the premiere and run of A Drop of Midnight, the event will take place at two venues: live at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse and livestreamed at Harlem’s Malt House, as well as in your home.
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Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre has announced its 2022-23 season:
The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington (Sept. 1 – Oct. 9), by James Ijames, directed by Whitney White, featuring Celeste M. Cooper. A recently widowed “Mother of America” lies ill in her Mount Vernon home, attended to be enslaved people that will become free when she expires.
Bald Sisters (Dec. 1 – Jan. 15, 2023), world premiere by Vichet Chum, directed by Patricia McGregor. Two sisters settle the affairs of their mother while reconciling their family’s Cambodian heritage with their American present.
Describe the Night (Mar. 2 – Apr. 29), by Rajiv Joseph, director TBA. Jewish writer Isaac Babel’s 1920 journal is found 90 years later in the wreckage of a suspicious plane crash.
Last Night and the Night Before (Apr. 6 – May 14), by Donnetta Lavinia Grays, directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton, starring Namir Smallwood. Monique suddenly appears at her sister’s Brooklyn brownstone brining memories of the siblings’ abandoned life in Georgia and a cycle of despair.
Another Marriage (June 15 – July 23), world premiere by Kate Arrington, directed by Terry Kinney. The play revolves around an ever-changing relationship that may never be quite finished.
No Man’s Land (July 13 – Aug. 20), by Harold Pinter, directed by Les Waters, and starring Austin Pendelton and Jeff Perry. A generational power struggle, a tug of war between expert wordsmiths, a maze of murky meaning. Or perhaps it’s just two old English sots waxing nostalgic and waiting for the sun to rise. You can never be certain, and nothing is as it seems.
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Irish Rep‘s 2022 Annual Gala, A Celebration of the Musicals of Harold Prince, will take place Mon. June 13 at 7 PM ET at NYC’s Town Hall, directed by Charlotte Moore, with music direction by John Bell.
Loretta Brennan Glucksman
Michel Bell, Len Cariou, Glenn Close, Joel Grey, Ciarán Sheehan, Max Von Essen, Kaley Ann Voorhees…. and more TBA.
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Get Happy: Angela Ingersoll Sings Judy Garland will run May 5 – July 1 at Milwaukee Rep‘s Stackner Cabaret.
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MCC Theater has announced complete casting for the world premiere of Donja R. Love’s Soft, to run May 12 – June 19 (opening June 6), directed by Whitney White.
Leon Addison Brown (Mr. Cartwright), Biko Esisen-Martin (Mr. Isaiah), Dharon Jones (Antoine), Essence Lotus (Dee), Travis Raeburn (Bashir), Shakur Tolliver (Kevin), Dario Vazquez (Jamal), and Ed Ventura (Eddie).
Flowers are in full bloom — in Mr. Isaiah’s classroom, in the halls of the correctional boarding school where he teaches, and in the depts of his students’ imaginations. After one boy dies by suicide, Mr. Isaiah struggles to figure out how to save the Black and Brown boys he teaches from a world that tries to crush their softness.
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A filmed, Korean-language production of Phantom the Musical (with English subtitles) will be released in US cinemas throughout the month of May. Click here for more information.
Kyuhyun (Erik), Sunhae Im (Christine), Joowon Kim, and more.
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A stage musical adaptation of the 1959 film “Black Orpheus” is in the works, by Nilo Cruz, Carlinhos Brown & Siedah Garrett, to be directed & choreographed by Sergio Trujillo.
Originally planned for a 2022-23 Broadway run, the project is now aiming to arrive on Broadway during the 2023-24 season.
The musical resets the classic Greek love story of Eurydice and Orpheus against the backdrop of a Rio de Janeiro favela during Carnival.