Category: theatre

As expected, the musical “Hairspray” dominated Tony Award nominations Monday, “named in 13 categories that included best musical, best original score and best costumes. ‘Movin’ Out,’ Twyla Tharp’s dance show set to the music of Billy Joel, received 10 nominations, including one for best musical, even though it has no words and only one singer. In the straight-play category a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night,’ which opened last week, received seven nominations, including one for Vanessa Redgrave, her first.”

Mark Twain was not a successful playwright. “This fall, however, the University of California Press is publishing a three-act play it says is not only worthy of Twain’s legacy as America’s greatest humorist but that also has already been optioned by a Broadway producer.”

Tony award nominations are due out Monday. Early betting is that “Hairspray, the smash musical hit based on the cult John Waters film about a chubby high school girl, is likely to sweep the 2003 Tony Award nominations.

British directors seem to have taken over Broadway. “No fewer than eight major British directors have been gainfully employed this season on Broadway. And three of them — Jonathan Kent, David Leveaux and Sam Mendes — are reviving the kinds of time-honored Broadway musicals that were once the sole province of American creators. The transatlantic shift in directorial talent hasn’t happened overnight.”

Howard Sherman resigned as executive director of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut to become more involved in full-scale theatrical producing elsewhere

Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne werre America’s greatest theatre couple. In the early 1900s the Lunts built an estate in Wisconsin as a retreat, “filling it with treasures of antiques and decorative arts, and luring such luminaries as Laurence Olivier and Noel Coward to rest here outside the spotlights’ glare. Now it has joined the ranks of Wisconsin’s historic home-museums. Upwards of 20,000 visitors a year are expected to tour the Lunts’ estate, which has been turned into a world-class center for theater history and arts.

“After decades of irrelevance and indirection, musical theater has stumbled on a new formula to revitalize itself: mounting shows around the music of beloved pop artists.”

Though Stephen Sondheim is considered a master of musical theatre, the esteem isn’t shared by a popular audience. So should his pieces be performed by opera companies instead? “Sondheim himself makes no secret of thinking otherwise. He even affects not to like opera, and has never written a work intended for opera-house production. Still, the alacrity with which ‘Sweeney Todd’ and ‘A Little Night Music’ have been taken up by major opera companies in America and elsewhere raises the question of whether they might really have been, all along, modern operas in disguise.”

Elton John has been hired by Warner Bros to write a Broadway musical based on “three of Anne Rice’s best-selling novels about a sauve vampire named Lestat.” John’s longtime collaborator Bernie Taupin will write lyrics.

London’s Globe Theatre is producing Shakespeare with an all-woman cast. “The Globe’s audiences have proved ready to accept all-male productions. Will they feel the same about all-female casts? In our modern culture, one might as well ask whether it is more difficult to accept a woman as chief executive or as wooing partner. Statistics might suggest that it is, but many men and women do accept, and indeed flourish within, these reversals of traditional roleplay.”