O.K. WE GIVE UP. WE’LL AGGREGATE.
AFTER TWO AND A HALF YEARS, after Broadway and Off Broadway reviews, columns on set design, themed articles on topics like “plays set in bars” and tributes to the recently departed, pressnights.com has finally realized what its readers want to know about theater: everything. So. O.K. We’ll try this aggregation thing. :
Here — from The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, Variety, Billboard, CBS and points east — is all kinds of news. We’ve got info on the online Tonys, a benefit for Nick Cordero, the streaming theater debate, the rentrée in London, September turning into January on the theater calendar and Anna Deavere Smith going PBS in the days of Black Lives Matter.
ALL THE WORLD’S NO LONGER A STAGE The 74th Tony Awards were scheduled for early June but delayed indefinitely. Now we know that the awards ceremony will happen, sometime this fall, online.
THE 2020 TONYS ARE HAPPENING AFTER ALL!
VARIETY
“Tony Awards Will Go Virtual This Fall,” by Cynthia Littleton, 8-21-20
____________________________________________________
WHEN THE WORST HAPPENED, in March, the big date June 7, 2020, was already on my calendar. The Tony Awards! But — it seemed inevitable at the time — if the Covid-19 pandemic had shut down all Broadway theaters well before the end of the official season, that had to be bad news for the Tonys, the industry’s biggest annual celebration.
The official word was “They’re postponed,” but as the Drama Desk Awards, the Obies and other awards presentations went on, with the help of everybody’s digital screens, it looked as if the 2020 Tony Awards were dead.
Happily, in late August, we received word from the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing. There will be a 2020 awards ceremony. It will be online, sometime in the fall. Which shows are eligible? Who’ll be there? Details will be announced “soon,” we are told.
Charlotte St Martin, the league’s president, just couldn’t resist saying — in the publicity release — “The show must go on.”
READ THE ENTIRE VARIETY ARTICLE.
___________________
THIS IS WHAT HAPPY LOOKS LIKE Nick Cordero with his wife, Amanda Kloots, and their son, Elvis, last year. The baby will be 15 months old this month..
A MOMENT OF SILENCE — NO, MAKE IT MUSIC — FOR NICK CORDERO
BILLBOARD
“Nick Cordero Memorial Tribute Set to Stream on Broadway on Demand,” by Heran Mamo, 8-25-20
____________________________________
Nick Cordero, who played adorably scary tough guys on Broadway, was 41 when he died on July 5.
That was after more than three months (95 days) of struggle at a Los Angeles hospital with the effects of coronavirus. His right leg had to be amputated. He was in a medically induced coma for six weeks. He had a tracheotomy and more than one heart attack. His wife, Amanda Kloots, chronicled his ordeal on social media — with hope in her online voice — until the very end.
Now Cordero is receiving a heartily deserved memorial and an album. The benefit comes first, on Sunday, Sept. 6, streamed on Broadway on Demand at 7 p.m. Eastern time, with special guests from his Broadway shows — “A Bronx Tale,” “Bullets Over Broadway,” “Rock of Ages” and “Waitress.” Proceeds go to the Save the Music Foundation.
On Sept. 17, which would have been Cordero’s 42nd birthday, Broadway Records releases “Live Your Life,” a concert album that Cordero recorded at Feinstein’s/54 Below in New York in April 2019, a year before his diagnosis. Proceeds will benefit Cordero’s family.
As Ben Brantley marveled in his New York Times review of “Bullets Over Broadway,” the man could play a “dopey, mass-murdering thug” and still come off as “far more endearingly earnest than anybody else” in the show.
READ THE ENTIRE BILLBOARD ARTICLE
… AND CORDERO’S OBITUARY IN THE NEW YORK TIMES
_____________
HEY, THIS DOESN’T FEEL L!KE APRIL! The Goodman Theater’s 2018 production of “A Christmas Carol.” Under the system Chris Jones proposes, December would be the end of the theater season.
START THE THEATER SEASON IN JANUARY? THERE GOES THE FALL PREVIEW ISSUE.
THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE
“After This Awful 2020, It Just Makes Sense to Start a Theater Season in January == This Is Our Chance to Change,” by Chris Jones
_____________________________________________
First, Chris Jones prepares us for the empty fall ahead: “This ain’t going to be much fun. You’d better prepare yourself in advance for a lot of screen time.” Then he notes that no real theater is likely to get started before January 2021 — and as long as we’re here, why not take the opportunity to shift the annual theater season? For good.
As Jones points out, a fall-to-spring theater season “has been the core of most all artistic endeavor for generations.” An “archaic way of doing business,” it’s based on “the academic year and the old social calendar.” As for the January start, the only advantages Jones mentions are that the snowbirds will be out of town for the first big shows of the calendar year (does he hate snowbirds — or Florida?) and that the season will end with the big Christmas/holiday productions.
If that happens, I’ll miss The New York Times’s New Season issue, which has long appeared around Labor Day (and where I spent, strangely, some of my happiest workdays — proofreading the lists made us a little daffy). If New Season is published in December, just ahead of the big Broadway opening nights in January, they’ll have to combine it with the holiday film issue.
But it would be nice to have something festive to look forward to after New Year’s Day.
READ THE WHOLE CHICAGO TRIBUNE ARTICLE.
AND READ CHRIS JONES’S HERE’S-ANOTHER-IDEA ARTICLE, PUBLISHED THE NEXT WEEK:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/theater/chris-jones/ct-ent-chicago-theater-season-no-dates-0828-20200826-3x32to7zrze2xlqbdqisef7s6q-story.html
________________
TYPICAL BEVERLY HILLS FAMILY Which includes the maid and the tennis pro, of course. Charles Busch, top center, with castmates in his streaming version of “Die, Mommie, Die,” shown on Plays in the House earlier this year..
LET’S KEEP THOSE STREAMING PLAYS STREAMING
THE NEW YORK TIMES
“This Is Theater in 2020. Will It Last? Should It?,” by Ben Brantley, Jesse Green and Maya Phillips, with Scott Heller, 7-8-20
____________________________________________________
Four New York Timespeople — two critics, one arts fellow and the theater editor — discuss the new form of theater that’s arisen since the pandemic began: the streaming play. The conclusion was mostly positive.
“I hope this new form will continue,” Jesse Green said. But then Green professes a very broad definition of the art form. After praising a recent production, he added, “That I saw it on television means nothing.”
Maya Phillips (the fellow, who joined The Times in June ) was more insistent on seeing theater as an in-person form. “Part of the thrill of theater is that you get to be present in this human moment,” she said, adding, “You get to experience art as though it is something real.”
Another question was posed: What’s the big deal about a new art form if it deals with the same old subjects — like family? (A reference to the two new Apple family plays.).
Ben Brantley had a quick answer: “The form, in this case, puts a new perspective on the content.” His verdict on streaming theater: “Let it grow and mutate and thrive.”
Green had a last-minute thought about the productions. “I want them to proliferate. And then we can hire a new critic to cut them down.”
_______________________________
ABOUT LAST NIGHT An 1851 Edwin Landseer portrait of Bottom the Weaver (transformed into a donkey) and Titania in “A Midsummer’s Night Dream.” A New York Times critic was amazed by how much she was affected by watching Bottom’s morning-after scene in a streamed production from London.
COUNTERPOINT: LET’S NOT.
THE NEW. YORK TIMES
“Digital Theater Isn’t Theater. It’s a Way to Mourn Its Absence,” by Laura Collins-Hughes, 7-8-20.
_________________________________________________________
On the same day that “This Is Theater in 2020” appeared, another regular contributor to Times theater criticism weighed in with a Critic’s Notebook essay that took a less charitable attitude.
Laura Collins-Hughes had just watched a streaming National Theater production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and was dazzled by how much she’d gotten from it. Particularly in the scene in which Bottom, a workingman, wakes up from the dream and remembers that he had been transformed into a donkey and had had quite an eventful evening.
“And just like that, I was in tears at ridiculous dialogue the had never moved me in the slightest before,” Collins-Hughes wrote. (As a theater writer, she’s seen the play a number of times). She found the scene a ‘wrenching metaphor for the collective dreams we dream” when live theater is part of our lives. But she rejects streamed theater in principle.
“What theater people do is put on a show,” she wrote. “What audience members do is gather.” She does have a point there.
READ THE FULL “CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK.”
_________________________
ESCAPING THE RIOTS, WITH ROOM SERVICE Anna Deavere Smith as Elaine Young, a real estate agent and movie star’s ex-wife (Gig Young’s) in “Twilight: Los Angeles,” her 1992 play, which streamed on PBS this spring. When the riots began, Ms. Young and some friends checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel.
‘TWILIGHT: LOS ANGELES’ ISN’T DIFFERENT WHEN IT’S STREAMING. HELL, IT ISN’T EVEN DIFFERENT WHEN IT’S 2020.
THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
“An ‘Insurrection’ Before, a Movement Now? Revisiting ‘Twilight:Los Angeles,’ ” by Lily Janiak, 7-1-20
________________________________________________________________
Anna Deavere Smith’s solo docudrama ”Twilight: Los Angeles 1992,” in which she plays some 40 real-life characters in and around the Rodney King riots, was supposed to have a revival at the Signature Theater Center in New York this spring. The coronavirus pandemic stopped that. So Liliy Janiak, a San Francisco Chronicle theater critic, prepared to watch it on PBS..
The first thing she noticed was that there was an updated introduction, with talking about lessons that might be relevant now. And then she laughed — or sighed — or rolled her eyes. The play had been written in reaction to the not-guilty verdict in the police beating of King. The “new” introduction had been recorded in 2015.
So what about now? Does Black Lives Matter mean things have changed, that Americans will finally make real progress on the road to racial justice?
“It’s relevant that it happened during the Pandemic,” Smith told Janiak this year, referring to the new movement. Maybe this time will be different.
Janiak knew the play would “dazzle me in its technical precision,” but what shocked her was how little things had changed. Both she and Smith were shocked when a Los Angeles police officer explained why the violence toward King took place. “We had to beat him,” the man said, because we “couldn’t use the choke hold.” It had been made illegal.
READ THE ENTIRE CHRONICLE ARTICLE
_____________________________________
NUNS WITH PASSPORTS. Whoopi Goldberg and Jennifer Saunders will star in “Sister Act” in London, opening in July 2021.
YOU COULD ALWAYS FLY TO LONDON (IS THE U.K. LETTING US IN?)
LondonDirectTheatre.com
“Shows You Can Safely Book for 2021”
____________________________________________
Ask any New York theatergoer: The West End in London is holy ground. And as things stand now, London’s theater schedules are returning to normal considerably sooner than New York’s.
Even this fall (now — fall 2020!), there are shows to see. “Aladdin” is opening on Nov. 19. “Pretty Woman: A Musical” — which had a mixed reception in New York, opens on Nov. 30, starring Aimee Atkinson and Danny Mac in the Julia Roberts and Richard Gere roles. Even “The Mousetrap,” the Agatha Christie mystery, which has been playing in London since 1952, is returning, on Oct. 23.
“The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” arrives on Dec. 1. "Doctor Who: Time Fracture” is due in February.
In the spring and summer, things turn starry.. “Hairsoray” opens in April, with Michael Ball as Edna Turnblad. Whoopi Goldberg will be headlining a new production of “Sister Act” (opening July 30), alongside the “Ab Fab” star Jennifer Saunders as the Mother Superior. There’s “Singing’ in the Rain” (July 20), with Adam Cooper in the Gene Kelly role. There’s word of a new “Cinderella” from none other than Andrew Lloyd Webber.
And if you absolutely must have theater right this minute, there’s a socially distanced production of “Sleepless: A Musical Romance,” based on “Sleepless in Seattle,” at the Troubador Wembley Park Theater, through Sept. 27. Hand sanitizer abounds, and food and beverage service is — somehow — contactless.
CHECK OUT THE LONDON THEATRE DIRECT WEBSITE.
________________________
“CABARET” MEETS “FIDDLER” MEETS “ALL THAT JAZZ” From left, Emily Blunt, James Corden and Lin-Manuel Miranda in “22 Musicals in 12 Minutes.” Press Nights is not responsible for typographical errors, German misspellings or misplaced French accents in the lyrics/subtitles.
AND A COMFORTING LATE-NIGHT SNACK: BROADWAY STARS SINGING AND DANCING
“The Late Late Show With James Corden,” CBS (now on YouTube)
“22 Musicals in 12 Minutes,” starring Lin-Manuel Miranda, Emily Blunt and Corden.
_____________________________________________________