GRACE NOTES is taking a brief hiatus, and will return Thursday, Apr. 13
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Today’s Highlights:
2023 Lucille Lortel Award nominations announced at 3 PM ET here.
Plagues for the Plague Year, featuring the music & plays of Suzan-Lori Parks, directed by & choreographed by Niegel Smith, performed by Edward Astor Chin, Rona Figueroa, Leland Fowler, Danyel Fulton, Greg Keller, Orville Mendoza, Lauren Molina, Joe Osheroff, Danea Osseni, Suzan Lori Parks, Nathan M. Ramsey, and Martin Solé, opens at Off-Broadway’s Public Theater.
Eleanor and Alice, by Ellen Abram, directed by Francis Hill, featuring Mary Bacon (Alice Roosevelt Longworth) and Trezana Beverley (Eleanor Roosevelt), begins previews at Off Broadway’s Urban Stages.
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Reviews for Shucked at Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre:
NY Times (Jesse Green): Puns, the pundit John Oliver has said, are not merely the lowest form of humor but “the lowest form of human behavior.” The academy agrees… John Dryden denounced lowbrow verbal amusements that “torture one poor word ten thousand ways.” You may know how that one poor word feels after seeing Shucked… For more than two hours, it pelts you with piffle so egregious — not just puns but also dad jokes, double entendres and booby-trapped one-liners — that, forced into submission, you eventually give in… the audience may have difficulty extracting the gems from the corn. For one thing, there is so much corn to process… Low but hard not to laugh at… Shucked has very little actual plot, and what there is, much of it borrowed from The Music Man, is rickety…
New York Theatre Guide (Joe Dziemianowicz) …in the deliriously dopey countrified musical comedy Shucked, corn is cause for nonstop funny business — and some terrifically catchy tunes… They [the creative team] are fully aware their show is wall-to-wall silliness, and they embrace that concept whole-hog. Even when the goings turn sappy, another pun, punchline, or double entendre awaits… Do the jokes yield diminishing returns over the show’s two hours? Yep, they do. But are you apt to have such a good time that you won’t mind? Yep, you will… The show is buoyed along on easy-to-like songs by Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally…
Daily News (Chris Jones): Like an episode of “Hee Haw” written by Mel Brooks … [Robert] Horn has not let the narrative necessities of the typical Broadway experience get in the way of his jokes… Shucked ain’t based on no movie; it’s a vehicle for laughs. And snorts, giggles and rolled eyes are what it delivers. For good or ill… At times, you feel like are watching a theme-park show at Dollywood, which is no knock on that slice of East Tennessee paradise… In essence, you get a couple of hours of Horn’s signature howlers interspersed with a country-pop-vibed score by Brandy Clark and Shane McNally. Of limited ambition, it offers a little suite of accessible ballads and specialty numbers….
Theatermania (Pete Hempstead): You could fill a silo with all the eye-rolling puns and cornball one-liners in the new musical Shucked … a show that knows what it wants to be — a rootin’ tootin’ hootenanny with, yeah, a little message to take home and ponder… Shucked isn’t a show for the ages, but then again, it isn’t trying to be… Caroline Innerbichler embodying sassy innocence… Maizy’s instinctively savvy cousin and Cob County’s premier whiskey distiller, Lulu (Alex Newell in a star-turn performance)… Fortunately, director Jack O’Brien knows how to milk comic material like this…
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Broadway Grosses for the week ending Apr. 2
Click here for the complete analysis.
Click here for the 2022-23 season year to date analysis.
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Langston in Harlem will take place Thurs. May 4 at 7 PM at NYC’s 54 Below, directed by Jerry Dixon.
Branden Victor Dixon and more TBA.
The concert explores the Harlem Renaissance world of poet Langston Hughes, set to the music of Walter Marks. Using the poet’s own words, the concert presents a musical journey into the life of Hughes, who, as a Black, gay man, became the voice of his people despite living in a society that sought to silence and shun him. The portrait is made more vivid and expressive by fusing Langston’s words with the music of the period: jazz, blues, gospel, ragtin, boogie, afro-Cuban, and Yoruba chant
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The Huntington Theatre has announced complete casting for the world premiere of Taylor Mac’s Joy and Pandemic, to run Apr. 21 – May 21 at Boston’s Calderwood Pavilion, directed by Loretta Greco.
Ella Dershowitz (Young Pilly), Stacy Fischer (Joy / Pilly), Breezy Leigh (Melanie / Marjorie), Marceline Hugot (Rosemary), and Ryan Winkles (Bradford), with Thomika Bridwell, Rebecca Whitney Klein, Alexander Platt, and Marina Re.
The first half of the play is set in 1918 Philadelphia, where force-of-nature Joy Eldridge runs an art school for children with the help of her husband and teenage daughter. Amid concerns around a burgeoning health crisis, Joy is confronted by Melanie Plachard, the mother of one of her most talented students, who does not share her Christian Science faith. In the second half of the play, set in 1952, Melanie’s eldest adult daughter Marjorie revisits her old art school to find Joy’s daughter Pilly revisits her old art school to find Joy’s daughter Pilly, who now serves as Joy’s full-time caregiver.
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Playwrights Dominique Morisseau and Jasmine Lee-Jones are the 2023 drama winners of the Windham-Campbell Prize (for literary achievement across multiple mediums.
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Red Bull Theater will present Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle Apr. 17 – May 13 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, directed by Noah Brody & Emily Young.
Jessie Austrian, Royer Bockus, Tina Chilip, Paul L. coffey, Devine E. Haqq, Teresa Avia Lim, Darius Pierce, Ben Steinfeld, Paco Tolson, and Tatiana Wechsler.
A joyful celebration of the universal capacity to improvise. A delightful Elizabethan comedy that is a rough and rowdy romp. As a group of players gathers to present a play about the elopement of star-crossed lovers, they are abruptly interrupted by a grocer and his wife. They have a different kid of play in mind – an outrageous hero’s quest of derring-do. And they know just the fellow to star – their apprentice, Rafe.
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Upcoming concerts at Hollywood’s Catalina Jazz Club:
An Evening with James Syder (Apr. 27 at 8:30 PM). 
here.
An Evening with Aaron Lazar (June 1 at 8:30 PM). here.
Alison Porter: The Songs That Made Me (June 24 at 8:30 PM). here.
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Mrs. Doubtfire will launch its North American tour this Fall.
Casting, tour dates, and additional information TBA. This is an AEA tour.
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As part of Off-Broadway’s Signature Theatre‘s Annual Gala, a benefit reading of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice will take place Mon. Apr. 24 at 6:30 PM, directed by Les Waters.
Stephanie Hsu (Eurydice), Bill Irwin (Eurydice’s Father), Tom Sturridge (Orpheus), Wallace Shawn (A Nasty Interesting Man/The Lord of the Underworld), and more TBA.
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The upcoming horror film, “Beau Is Afraid” will be released in theaters on Apr. 2, directed by Ari Aster.
Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Nathan Lane, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Amy Ryan, Richard Kind, Kylie Rogers, Denis Ménochet, Parker Posey, Hayley Squires, Michael Gandolfini, and Bill Hader.
An anxious man never knew his father. After his overbearing mother dies, his journey home take a supernatural turn, forcing him to confront his fraught relationship with his parents, alongside some wild threats.
Video: Trailer
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VA’s Signature Theatre has announced complete casting for Broadway In The Park, to take place Fri. June 24 at 8 PM at Wolf Trap, directed by Matthew Gardiner, with music direction by Jon Kalbfleisch.
Megan Hilty, Lea Salonga, Phillip Attamore, Austin Colby, Felicia Curry, Katie Mariko Murray, Kevin McAllister, Tracy Lynn Olivera, Nova Y. Payton, and Bobby Smith.
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Video: Alex Newell performs “Independently Owned” from Shucked.
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Second Stage Theater has announced it Judith Campion Reading Series ….. and the inaugural Nancy Denoyan Musical Reading. Both programs will provide one-night-only public readings to early career writers. 
All reading will take place at 6:30 PM on Monday evenings at the Tony Kiser Theater.
The Apiary (Apr. 24), by Kate Douglas, directed by Kate Whoriskey. It’s 20445. Bees are extinct in the wild, kept alive inside synthetic apiaries where they live year-round in perpetual Spring. Through a freak accident, lab assistants Zora and Pilar discover the bees have an unusually positive response to…an unconventional diet. As the bees begin to thrive, Zora and Pilar must find a way to satiate their new, extreme, appetites.
The Woods (May 1), by Jahna Ferron-Smith. The play explores our learned relationships to nature and the “American” landscape. Who’s taught to love it? Who’s taught to fear it? who’s allowed to claim it? The play explores the consequences those cultural narratives have on young Black Americans only just learning what being Black in today’s “American landscape” might mean for them.
Britton & The Sting (May 15), by Britton and The Sting. A funk liberation band fueling the NYC music scene. Powerful songs are interwoven by narrative testimony that takes us on a journey to discover within our most authentic selves, a pathway to radical liberation. The music and environment has led to strangers dancing together in fellowship, spontaneous three-part harmonies breaking out, and the impromptu passing of the metaphorical plate as if it was a Sunday morning church service.
Chinese Republicans (May 22), by Alex Lin, directed by Chay Yew. When high-flying finance it girl Katie Liu loses out on the promotion of a lifetime to a nepo-baby co-wrorker, she embarks on a treacherous endeavor to make a worker’s union out of her Republican work aunties. Welcome to the world of Chinese Republicans, where the best bags are Birkins, the best shoes are Prada, and the best president is Reagan.
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An Evening with Megan Hilty will take place Tues. Apr. 18 at 8 PM at Malibu’s Pepperdine University.
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Center Theatre Group‘s 2023 Light Up Los Angeles Gala will take place Sat. Apr. 15 at 6 PM at the Mark Taper Forum.
Deborah Cox, Carmen Cusack, Peppermint, Cheyenne Jackson, Julia Lester, George Salazar, Culture Clash, and more TBA.