Arts

THEATER

June 22, 2011, 2:00 pm

Casting Announced for ‘Relatively Speaking’ Comedies by Woody Allen, Elaine May and Ethan Coen

By DAVE ITZKOFF
Relatively Speaking Marlo Thomas, Steve Guttenberg and Julie Kavner will appear in the ensemble Broadway cast of “Relatively Speaking.”

What exactly results from a Broadway show featuring the works of Ethan Coen, Elaine May and Woody Allen? That vague if tantalizing proposition offered by “Relatively Speaking,” a triple bill of one-act comedies by those authors and directed by John Turturro, came into somewhat clearer focus on Wednesday with the announcement of its ensemble cast and other details.

Press representatives for “Relatively Speaking,” which is now described as a collection of comedies that each spring “from a different branch of the family tree,” said it would be presented at the Brooks Atkinson Theater, with previews to begin on Sept. 20 and an opening night planned for Oct. 20.

The cast will include Julie Kavner, a star of “The Simpsons” and several of Mr. Allen’s films including “Radio Days” and “Hannah and Her Sisters”; Steve Guttenberg, whose films include “Cocoon” and “Three Men and a Baby,” and who appeared on Broadway in “Prelude to a Kiss”; Marlo Thomas, the venerated “That Girl” star whose Broadway credits include “The Shadow Box” and “Social Security”; and Caroline Aaron, who has appeared in films by Mike Nichols (“Heartburn,” “Primary Colors”) and Mr. Allen (“Crimes and Misdemeanors”). Read more…

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June 21, 2011, 6:01 pm

Angela Bassett Will Star Opposite Samuel L. Jackson in ‘The Mountaintop’

By PATRICK HEALY

Angela Bassett’s only experience working with Samuel L. Jackson was in the early 1980s when she was an understudy, and he a star, in a Negro Ensemble Company production of “Colored People’s Time,” a play of vignettes set between the Civil War and the Montgomery bus boycott. This fall the two actors will reunite on Broadway — as co-stars — for another play inspired by history, Katori Hall’s drama “The Mountaintop,” about Dr. Martin Luther King on the night before his assassination.

Mr. Jackson has been attached to play King for some time; Halle Berry was initially lined up for the other role, a maid at the Lorraine Motel named Camae, but dropped out because of her child custody battle.

Ms. Bassett, a film and television actress who was nominated for an Academy Award playing Tina Turner in “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” will now be Camae in the production, which Kenny Leon is directing. Preview performances are set to begin at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater on Sept. 22, with opening night on Oct. 13.

In a telephone interview on Tuesday, Ms. Bassett said she had not been looking to do a play, but “The Mountaintop” appealed to her as “a new work by an exciting, fresh voice in the theater.”

Ms. Bassett, who was on Broadway in 1988 in August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” added, “My 5-year-old twins are at the age where they have a sense of what people do, and they think I just appear in posters. I’m excited for them to see me satisfied and working.”

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June 21, 2011, 1:44 pm

Times’s Outstanding Playwright Award Goes to Kristoffer Diaz

By PATRICK HEALY

Kristoffer Diaz is the winner of the 2011 New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award for “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity,” his satire of professional wrestling and the ethnic stereotypes and political imagery of that industry, The Times has announced. The award, created in 2009, recognizes an American playwright whose work recently received its professional debut in New York; “Chad Deity” was produced Off Broadway in 2010 by Second Stage Theater, drawing mostly positive reviews. (The play was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama that year.) Previous recipients of the Times playwright award, which comes with a cash prize of $5,000, were Tarell Alvin McCraney for “The Brothers Size” and Dan LeFranc for “Sixty Miles to Silver Lake.”

The selection committee included the Pulitzer-winning playwrights James Lapine and Lynn Nottage; the playwright Richard Greenberg, who has been nominated twice for a Pulitzer; as well as Times writers and editors. The committee chairwoman, Sylviane Gold, said in the statement announcing the award, “The play appropriates both the comedy and cruelty of professional wrestling in order to explore the complex dance America does with its minorities.” She added, “We were floored by its swaggering language, vivid theatricality and sheer energy.”

An earlier version of this post misidentified Richard Greenberg as a winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

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June 20, 2011, 3:31 pm

Broadway’s Prince Revisits Material That Earned Him the Title

By PATRICK HEALY

Harold Prince, who has won more Tony Awards than anyone in history — 21 — for producing and directing some of the greatest musicals of the 20th century, is planning a return to Broadway in the fall of 2012 with a new show that celebrates and re-examines some of the material from his theater career. Dancap Productions announced on Monday that the new musical, “Prince of Broadway,” is in development for a production to begin in Toronto in the summer of 2012 to be followed by a Broadway run.

In a telephone interview on Monday, Mr. Prince said the production would draw on roughly 40 songs (and orchestrations of several more songs in the overture) from some of his best-known musicals over the last six decades, including “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” “Company,” “Damn Yankees,” “Fiorello!,” “Follies,” “Grind,” “It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Merrily We Roll Along,” “Parade,” “She Loves Me,” “Show Boat,” and “Sweeney Todd.” He and his collaborators will choose specific songs in the coming months, he said.

“It’s bound to be like a revue, but we also have thoughts about a real subtext for the whole piece, ideas that we want to build the show around,” said Mr. Prince, whose last outing on Broadway was in 2007 when he directed the musical “Lovemusik.”

“The producers pitched me this idea a few months ago, and I got on the computer — I love making lists — and eventually had 55 pages of songs from shows that I’ve done that I wanted to consider,” he continued. “Some of the songs were realized in great shows, and some of the songs were great but they were in musicals that did not work because the books were not good enough or there were other problems. This is a chance to revisit so much great material.”
Read more…

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June 20, 2011, 3:08 pm

Little Girls, Everywhere: Portraits From the ‘Annie’ Open Casting Call

By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Sophia Caruso, 9, of Spokane, Wash., rehearsed while in line at the open casting call for the Broadway revival of Michael Nagle for The New York TimesSophia Caruso, 9, of Spokane, Wash., rehearsed while in line at the open casting call for the Broadway revival of “Annie.”

Residents of several Upper East Side blocks awoke one recent Sunday morning not to the peals of church bells or birdsong, but to Katie Schults, of Glen Ridge, N.J., belting out “Tomorrow,” from the musical “Annie,” as if her 14-year-old life depended on it.

“It was like my favorite movie when I was a kid,” she said.

Michael Nagle for The New York TimesKatie Schults

Katie was one of hundreds of girls (and their parents, guardians and vocal coaches) who were in line to audition at an open casting call for the coming Broadway revival of “Annie,” set to open in the fall of 2012. The producer Arielle Tepper Madover greeted people in line and helped oversee the auditions, where it was hoped potential Annies and orphans would shine.

“We said we’re open to everybody, which we are,” Ms. Madover said as she surveyed the racially-diverse crowd.

This interactive feature, compiled by Erik Piepenburg, a producer for NYTimes.com, and Michael Nagle, a photographer, includes portraits and selected audio interviews with 43 girls waiting in line to audition.

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June 20, 2011, 12:34 pm
Beatles Tribute ‘Rain’ Will Dry Up on Broadway | 

And in the end, “Rain: A Tribute to the Beatles on Broadway,” a production that recreates the music of the Fab Four, will play its final performance at the Brooks Atkinson Theater on Sept. 4, its press representatives said on Monday. Rather than splitting into separate tribute shows for Wings and the Plastic Ono Band, “Rain” will embark on a national tour through 2012. (Productions in Singapore and Johannesburg are scheduled for this summer as well.) The Broadway production, which opened at the Neil Simon Theater in October, will have played 8 previews and 341 regular performances when it closes.

June 20, 2011, 11:45 am

Curtain Down Heads Up: Advice for Broadway Producers and Casting Directors

By ERIK PIEPENBURG
From left, Andrew Rannells and Brian Tyree Henry in Photographs by Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFrom left, Andrew Rannells and Brian Tyree Henry in “The Book of Mormon”; Reeve Carney and Jennifer Damiano in “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”

Readers had a lot to say about two recent theater-related articles, one that explored the line between success and struggle on Broadway and another that took a close look at the challenging work of Broadway casting directors.

In Week in Review, Patrick Healy wrote about the differences between the boffo success of “The Book of Mormon” and the brutal trials of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”

One team — which includes Trey Parker and Matt Stone of “South Park” — creates “The Book of Mormon,” a naughty-but-nice comedy that opened to acclaim in March and won nine Tony Awards last week. The other team — which includes Bono and the Edge of U2 — creates “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” which limped through months of devastating reviews, creative upheaval and aerial acrobatics that went scarily wrong on a few occasions, and finally reached opening night last Tuesday.

Readers offered several opinions on what might account for the success of “Mormon” and the tougher times for “Spider-Man”: Read more…

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June 20, 2011, 9:15 am

Broadway Revival of ‘Born Yesterday’ to Close

By DAVE ITZKOFF
Born YesterdaySara Krulwich/The New York Times Robert Sean Leonard and Nina Arianda in “Born Yesterday.”

It’s here today, gone tomorrow for “Born Yesterday” as that Broadway play will close on Sunday, its press representatives said on Monday. This latest production of Garson Kanin’s comedy about a brutish tycoon, his girlfriend and the tutor entrusted with her education drew praise for the performance of its star Nina Arianda, who plays the dopey girlfriend, Billie. (Jim Belushi plays the tycoon and Robert Sean Leonard plays the tutor.) Ms. Arianda was compared favorably to Judy Holliday, who portrayed Billie in the original Broadway production and the George Cukor film version of “Born Yesterday,” and she was nominated for a Tony Award for leading actress in a play. The revival, directed by Doug Hughes (“Doubt”), also received a Tony nomination for costume design but did not win in either category. The production, which opened on April 24 at the Cort Theater, will have played 28 previews and 73 performances when it closes, its press representatives said.

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June 18, 2011, 9:16 pm

Taymor Calls New ‘Spider-Man’ Much Simpler

By PATRICK HEALY

LOS ANGELES – In her first public comments about “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” since the opening of the $70 million Broadway musical, the director Julie Taymor on Saturday described the new show as “much simpler” than the version she created before being fired in March. Speaking to a conference of theater leaders here, she also tacitly criticized her former producers for drawing ideas from audience focus groups.

“It’s very scary if people are going more towards that, to have audiences tell you how to make a show,” said Ms. Taymor, a Tony Award-winning director of “The Lion King” and other stage works and films. “Shakespeare would have been appalled. Forget about it. It would be impossible to have these works come out because there’s always something that people don’t like.”

Ms. Taymor bemoaned, too, the instant reviews that audience members posted on Twitter and blogs of the early preview performances of “Spider-Man.” The musical began running in late November even though work was still underway; the producers said the show had to start earning money given the expenses involved.

“Twitter and Facebook and blogging just trump you,” she said during a moderated discussion before an audience of 1,000 people at the annual conference of the Theater Communications Group, an umbrella organization of regional and nonprofit theaters. “It’s very hard to create, it’s incredibly difficult to be under a shot glass and a microscope like that.” Read more…

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June 18, 2011, 12:29 pm

One Musical Succeeds. One Struggles. Discuss.

By PATRICK HEALY
Different Fortunes Andrew Rannells as Elder Price; Reeve Carney as Spider-Man.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDifferent Fortunes Andrew Rannells as Elder Price; Reeve Carney as Spider-Man.

Why has “The Book of Mormon” emerged as the hit musical of the year on Broadway, while another artistically ambitious show a few blocks away, “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” has struggled?

They are Broadway’s two most talked-about productions, and each just reached very different milestones. “Mormon,” a $9 million musical comedy about two young missionaries put to the test in war-torn Uganda, won nine Tony Awards last Sunday — including the top prize, best musical.

“Spider-man,” a $70 million musical spectacle about a superhero put to the test in crime-ridden New York, delayed its opening night six times because of an unfortunate run of problems; it was originally scheduled to be in the running for the 2010 Tonys, and then the 2011 Tonys. Now it will be eligible for the 2012 Tonys, after opening last Tuesday.

Among the factors that influenced the very different paths for “Mormon” and “Spider-Man” were strong, clear storytelling; smooth creative collaboration; stable and foresighted producing; and artistic problem-solving well before audience members took their seats for the first performances. This Sunday’s Week in Review looks at these factors in a tale-of-the-tape; what other reasons account for the success of “Mormon” and the tougher times for “Spider-Man”?

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