Today’s Highlights:
Without You, written by & starring Anthony Rapp, directed by Steven Maler, opens at Off-Broadway’s New World Stages.
Albee / Pinter, a retrospective, directed by Marilyn Fox & Elina de Santos, featuring Jason Downs, Anthony Foux, Brad Greenquist, and Jennifer Knox, opens at Venice’s Pacific Resident Theatre.
Endgame, by Samuel Becket, directed by Ciarán O’Reilly, featuring Bill Irwin, John Douglas Thompson, Joseph Grifasi, and Patrice Johnson, begins previews at Off-Broadway’s Irish Rep.
Staged, world premiere by Martin Bergman & Rita Rudner, directed by Bergman, featuring Rita Rudner (Fenella Fennington) and Mike McShane (Jarvis Haverly), with Annie Abrams, Kelly Holden Bashar, Brian Jones, Brian Lohmann, Patrick Vest, and Lindsey Young, begins previews at Laguna Playhouse.
The Realistic Jones, by Will Eno, directed by Judy Hegarty-Lovett, featuring Joe Spano (Bob), Faline England (Pony), Conor Lovett (John), and Sorcha Fox (Jennifer), begins previews at Ventura’s Rubicon Theatre.
Piaf! The Show presentation, starring Nathalie Lermitte, at 8 PM at NYC’s Town Hall.
The Monterey Jazz Festival On Tour concert, with special guests Dee Dee Bridgewater and Kurt Elling, at 8 PM at Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Center.
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Broadway Grosses for the week ending Jan. 22. Click here for the complete analysis.
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Songbook Sundays next concert, Bewitched, Bothered and Rodgers and Hart, will take place Sun. Feb 5 at 5 & 7:30 PM at Lincoln Center‘s Dizzy’s Club, hosted by Deborah Grace Winer.
Emily Skinner, Kenita Miller, and Jarvis B. Manning, Jr.
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Danny Lee Wynter’s Black Superhero will run Mar. 14 – Apr. 29 (opening Mar. 21) at the Royal Court Theatre, directed by Daniel Evans.
Ben Allen, Dyllón Burnside, Dominic Holmes, Eloka Ivo, Danny Lee Wynter, Ako Mitchel, and Rochenda Sandall.
A subversion of the historical notion that a black, gay man – both in art and the world – is merely an adjunct, a side-note, an unserious man or a source only of amusement. He can, of course, be fun, but he’s also many other things; things the world has made him; things he has learnt to be for his own survival. I wanted to place him front and centre at the heart of the kind of narrative that many of us brown boys who like men have, for the most part, been culturally starved of since we entered the world. I have tried to present his myriad flaws, his fears, his sensuality, his intimate desires. To celebrate him, and those like him, by ultimately allowing him to own all of it; by becoming the hero of his own story.
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. Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell & Gordon Farrell’s The Lifespan of a Fact will run Feb. 15 – Apr. 2 (opening Feb. 18) at the Fountain Theatre, directed by Simon Levy.
Ron Bottitta, Inger Tudor, and Jonah Robinson.
The play follows young intern Jim Fingal, whose first assignment at an elite New York magazine is to fact check an essay written by a highly celebrated and cantankerous author. What Jim finds turns his world upside down.
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DC’s Signature Theatre has announced that its 2023 Annual Sondheim Award Gala will take place Mon. Apr. 3 at the Embassy of Italy.
Chita Rivera
TBA.
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Red Bull Theater has announced the world premieres of two plays at the Lucille Lortel Theatre:
Fall River Fishing (Feb. 18 – Mar. 9, opening Feb. 26), by Zuzanna Szadkowski, directed by Eric Tucker, featuring Zuzanna Szadlkowski, Susannah Millonzi, Tony Torn, and Jamie Smithson. The absurd comedy imagines what happened the day Lizzie Borden did (or didn’t) murder her parents with an axe in 1892 Massachusetts.
The Good John Proctor (Mar. 11 – Apr. 1), by Talene Monahan, directed by Caitlin Sullivan, featuring Tavi Gevinson (Abigail Warren), Brittany K. Allen (Betty Parris), Sharlene Cruz (Mercy Lewis, and susannah Perkins (Mary Warren). A new look at the lead-up to the Salem Witch Trials, imagining the inner lives of the real girls at the center of the trials as they hurtle toward the events dramatized in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
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Video: Stephanie J. Block performs “As If We Never Said Goodbye” from Sunset Boulevard at the Kennedy Center.
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Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap will run Feb. 24 – Mar. 19 (opening Feb. 26) at Boston’s Lyric Stage Company, directed by Michael Hisamoto.
Barlow Adamson, Jihan Haddad, Gary Thomas Ng, and Tyler Simahk.
The play offers compelling storytelling, humor, and the power of second chances together to tell the story of one promising basketball player’s incredible journey to China to play the game he loves but winds up destined for something far greater. It’s 1989 San Francisco and Manford Lum, a gifted, fast-talking teenager, dominates the high school basketball courts. Facing an uncertain future, he convinces Saul, a cynical and crusty coach, to let him travel to Beijing for a “friendship” game in China. Waiting there is a Chinese national coach with unfinished business, both with Saul and with Manford. On the eve of historic demonstrations, all three men are challenged to define their pasts and their futures.
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Red Bull Theater has announced two upcoming productions, both at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. Casting for both productions is TBA.
Arden of Faversham (Mar.6 – Apr. 1, opening Mar. 16), adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher & Kathryn Walat, directed by Jesse Berger. It’s Macbeth meets “Double Indemnity” meets “Fargo.” It’s Valentine’s Day and Alice Arden wants her husband dead. He’s come into money and all she can think about is her lover, Mosby. So, the pair enter into a pact to murder Arden and engage a cluster of killers to do the deed. If only they weren’t so spectacularly inept. Inspired by actual events, this sexy thriller of unknown authorship – some say, Shakespeare – is a bloody, darkly comic Elizabethan noir.
The Knight of the Burning Pestle (Apr. 17 – May 13, opening Apr. 27), by Francis Beaumont, directed by Noah Brody & Emily Young. This delightful Elizabethan comedy is a rough and rowdy romp. As a group of players gather 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 kind of play in mind – an outrageous hero’s quest of derring-do…The Knight of the Burning Pestle. And they know just the fellow to star–their apprentice, Rafe. This new subplot–invented on the fly–takes over the stage in surprising and disruptive ways. Everyone shares in the triumph of love and the singular, anything-can-happen adventure that is live theater.
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Sweeney Todd will run Apr. 21 – May 14 (opening Apr. 28) at Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre, directed by Jay Woods, with music direction by Matt Perri, with choreography by Katy Tabb.
Yusef Seevers (Sweeney Todd), Anne Allgood (Mrs. Lovett), Deon’te Goodman (Anthony Hope), Leslie Jackson (Johanna), Nik Hagen (Tobias Ragg), Sean David Cooper (Judge Turpin), Jason Weitkamp (The Beadle), Porscha Shaw (Beggar Woman), and Anthony Webb (Adolfo Pirelli), with Ethan Carpenter, John Coons, Ann Cornelius, Alyza Delpan-Monley, Joel Domenico, Eric Jensen, Alexander Kilian, Cassi Q Kohl, Trina Mills, Bianca Raso, Cameron Widmark, Brandon O’Neill, Beth DeVries, Mark Emerson, Miranda Antoinette, Kooper Campbell, and Casey Raiha.
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The world premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of Letters From Max will run Feb. 7 – Mar. 19 (0pening Feb. 27) at the Signature Theatre, directed by Kate Whoriskey.
Jessica Hecht, and Ben Edelman & Zane Pais (alternating as Max).
An adaptation of Ruhl and Max Ritvo’s 2018 epistolary book, “Letters from Max: A Poet, a Teacher, a Friendship.” As the press materials describe, in these notes, verses, and utterances, her former student, the late poet Max Ritvo, openly discusses terminal illness and tests poetry’s capacity to put to words what otherwise feels ineffable. The piece is a hybrid work that blends poetry, music, and dialogue.
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Second Stage Theater has announced that Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Between Riverside and Crazy, directed by Austin Pendleton, has been extended through Sun. Feb. 19 at Broadway’s Hayes Theater.
Common (Junior), Stephen McKinley, Victor Almanzar, Elizabeth Canavan, Rosal Colón, and Michael Rispoli.
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Christopher Renshaw, Andrew Delaplaine, Aurin Squire, Annastasia Victory, Michael O. Mitchell’s A Wonderful World will have two out-of-town tryouts — in New Orleans and Chicago this Fall, prior to arriving on Broadway, directed by Christopher Renshaw, with music direction by Michael O. Mitchell, and choreography by Rickey Tripp. Click here for more information about the musical.
James Monroe Iglehart (Louis Armstrong) and more TBA.
The singular story of jazz legend Louis Armstrong, as told by the women in his life. Armstrong’s innovative musicianship and incredible charisma as a trumpet player and vocalist would lead him from the early days of jazz in his native New Orleans to five decades on international stardom.
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Read: Sondheim almost cut “You Could Drive a Person Crazy” from Company, and how Donna McKechnie saved it. Video of the recording session of the song included.