When Hugh Jackman made his Broadway debut in 2003 playing songwriter Peter Allen in The Boy From Oz, he was at the center of a big, splashy musical with over 25 performers and a full band in the pit. After more than 365 performances in New York’s 1,417-seat Imperial Theatre, Jackman won a Tony Award. This Friday night, April...
“It is hard work,†actor/director Alan Mandell says of performing on stage. “I’ve told someone who asked me about learning lines that it was easier when I was 85.†Yet here he goes once more onto the boards in a new production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. The show begins previews this weekend and officially opens at the Kirk Douglas...
Bigger-than-life characters are perfect targets for parody. No doubt author Lauren Weisberger felt that way when she wrote The Devil Wears Prada, a novel in which a thinly disguised Anna Wintour is depicted as the boss from hell. Meryl Streep tackled the role of Miranda Priestly in a 2006 film; the performance resulted in one of her numerous Oscar...
Let’s throw it back to April 1, 1981 for a moment: It was two days after the attempted assassination of President Reagan. It was the day that Isuzu started selling automobiles in the United States. Blondie was topping the charts with “Rapture.” And husband and wife duo Marty and Elayne began what they thought was a two-week deal to...
One way of measuring the popularity of a work of fiction is how often it has been adapted for other forms. In the case of Somerset Maugham’s short story Rain, it has been turned into three movies (starring Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, and Rita Hayworth) and adapted for the stage as both a play and a play with music....
According to pianist Jason Moran, jazz legend Fats Waller “was a party animal.” Waller, who wrote classics like “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Honeysuckle Rose,” died young, but he left behind a piano style and a catalog of music that has been embraced for nearly one hundred years. Moran will be celebrating Waller’s music and putting a contemporary spin on it...
“The thing about doing concerts,” Brian Stokes Mitchell says, “is that it’s doing a live show. It’s on my schedule, it’s songs I want to sing, it’s saying what I want to say, it’s working with the people I want to work with. I don’t have to worry about pleasing other people—I can do what I want and people...
When you are the director and choreographer of one of the biggest hits in theatre history, you can pretty much do whatever you want. For Susan Stroman, who won Tony Awards for directing and choreographing Mel Brooks’ The Producers, she did what she always does after a show opens. “No matter what kind of review we get, I always...
"I still owe money on the first film. I did the second because I was worried that someone would make it, and now I’m afraid someone wouldn’t."
After making a name for herself playing Sally Bowles in a French production of Cabaret in 1987, singer-actress Ute Lemper was encouraged to make an album featuring songs from that show and other pop and Broadway tunes. The CD was called Life is a Cabaret. Since then she’s proven herself to be one of the most daring and innovative singers of...