Rock and pop royalty are coming to Broadway in a big way this season — with shows featuring the music of Green Day, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Sinatra, and (if all goes well) Bono and The Edge. Several of these shows had major announcements this past week in New York Theater, and there was even some odd theater news involving John Mellencamp and Elvis Costello and Sheryl Crow.

This is not to say that your more standard Broadway divas were absent from theater news, including Elaine Stritch and a bronco-busting revelation about Betty Buckley. There is even much to say about words without music, such as my reviews of the avant-garde shows of “Under the Radar” festival.

Monday, January 4, 2010

Twyla Tharp’s “Come Fly Away” with the music of Frank Sinatra, will be on Broadway at the Marquis Theater starting March 1, opening March 25. Tharp’s new musical (formerly called “Come Fly With Me”) follows four couples as they fall in and out of love during one evening filled with dance and song at a crowded nightclub. Sinatra’s vocals on such songs as “Fly Me To The Moon” and “My Way” will be combined with an on-stage 19-piece big band and 15 dancers.

The Barrow Street’s production of the 1938 play “Our Town,” already the longest-running in history, is extended to March 14th.

Stephen King and John Mellencamp are writing a musical called “Ghost Brothers of Darkland County” – starring Mellencamp himself as well as Elvis Costello, Neko Case, Kris Kristofferson, Rosanne Cash, Sheryl Crow, boxer Joe Frazier. This is not, however, for the New York stage…or for any stage. It’s for a CD-book package.

Tucker Max of “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell” fame may star on Broadway in a stage version of his blog-turned-book, reports Leonard Jacobs in ClydeFitch (@clydefitch)

Funny/sad account of the final performance of Superior Donuts on Broadway yesterday. doorknob kept falling off. (via @GratuitousV)

Steve Loucks (@SteveOnBroadway, an exuberant theatergoer, blogger and Twitterer): “Here’s my top 50 favorite shows of the Noughties.” Number 1: August: Osage County

The glamourous, Tony-winning Broadway musical diva Betty Buckley (@bettybuckley, star of Cats, Sunset Boulevard, etc.) just delivered up EIGHT TWEETS about the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl (college football)
e.g. “OOOOOO NOOOO–within striking distance in the last 30 seconds. Boise intercepted. We loooooooosssse…..O you poor Frogs!”
Who knew that she was (as @MrDavidTNYC put it) “Betty Lynn: Broadway Cowgirl”

Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Green Day’s American Idiot announces its Broadway run: previews start March 24 at the St. James, opens April 20.
Here is my review of American Idiot when it was at the Berkeley Rep: “I have little doubt that ‘American Idiot,’ Green Day’s hit 2004 album turned into a 90-minute punk rock musical, will wind up on Broadway. There is a saying in the theater that all that it takes to mount a show on Broadway is an American idiot with money. Ok, maybe that isn’t a saying in the theater, but it should be….more”

A new idea from BroadwayGirlNYC: “Want to go to the theatre for free, and find love in the process? Enter my #SingleOnBway twitter contest.” The contest runs through Saturday.

From Theater Development Fund (@TDFNYC)
People with disabilities can access Broadway deals with TDF’s Accessibility Program. Read about in this months AARP.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010
‘Orphans’ Home Cycle’ Aims for Broadway for the Fall Season - NY Times
Read my reviews of Part 1: Another Century of Struggle and Part 2: Love Makes A Difference While I love these shows, which you can attend for a mere $20 a pop at the Signature Theater, talk of moving this nine-play cycle to Broadway, with the higher ticket prices and more Byzantine pressures, makes me nervous.

Cast announcements:
Michelle Williams, formerly of Destiny’s Child, will play Roxie Hart in “Chicago”
Lili Taylor, formerly of “Six Feet Under,” will play a part in the revival of the Terrence McNally play, “Lips Together, Teeth Apart”
Viola Davis, Oscar nominee for her role in the film version of “Doubt,” will appear with Denzel Washington in “Fences”. This will be the 12th time that an August Wilson play has appeared on Broadway, and the third of these plays in which Davis had appeared: She was also in “Seven Guitars” (1996) and King Hedley II” (2001, for which she won a Tony)

How does one combine theater-going with get-into-shape new year’s resolutions? Walk to the theater? Avoid “Intermission” candy bars?
From Pia Wilson (@pwilson720, playwright): You can sit in your seat and flex isolated muscles.
From Erica McLaughlin (@ezmac99, actress, employee of TKTS Times Square ticket booth): Climb TKTS red steps while your friend waits in line

Thursday, January 7, 2010
Video Is The New Mud: my review of “John Cassavetes Husbands”: “A wise playwright once succinctly explained avant-garde theater: ‘Sooner or later,’ he said, ‘the stage always winds up covered with mud.’ That was a long time ago, though. Nowadays, it’s covered with video.
Such was certainly the case with the first of 20 works presented as part of the 12-day Under the Radar Festival 2010…more”

Begins today! Lincoln Center launches its own TKTS discount booth $20 tickets for 20 days

COIL, a dangerous theater” festival At P.S. 122 now through Jan 17.

Times rave of Sondheim songfest at Cafe Carlyle by “loudmouth life-of-the-party” Elaine Stritch, 84.

Norbert Leo Butz (”Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” “Thou Shalt Not”) cast in role of Jeffrey Skilling slimy head of Enron. opens April 27.

Circle Mirror Transformation extended for the last time, to Jan. 31, at Playwrights Horizon. Here’s my review Falling In Love, Imagining Yourself A Baseball Glove, And Other Theater Exercises
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Annie Baker, the 28-year-old playwright of “Circle Mirror Transformation,” talks about her new play “The Aliens.” Before her playwriting career took off, she had an unusual day job for someone who doesn’t own a TV set — researcher for “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”

Anne Bogart, director of the Siti Company and all-around seminal influence in the avant-garde, was quoted by many theater twitterers: “The problem with American theater is we feel we have to produce product. Why not show more process?” Can somebody explain to me what this means?

Friday, January 8, 2010

That Was Entertainment: my review of Chautauqua! “‘Chautauqua!’, which is part of the Under The Radar Festival, begins with Dr. Dick Pricey dressed in a formal 19th century suit giving a lecture, and ends with him buck naked in front of three dozen musical theater majors from Pace and NYU playing a guitar. In-between…more

From Lincoln Center Theater (@LCTheater): $20 tix to SOUTH PACIFIC available again today through #20for20. Get in line early - South Pacific tickets went FAST yesterday! The atrium box office opens at noon.

Million Dollar Quartet celebrates the anniversary of Elvis Presley’s Birthday today! He would have been 75 years old. The show opens on Broadway on April 11. The musical is based on the real-life recording session held on December 4, 1956 by Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Elvis Presley, never to be repeated.
Elvis songs have been featured in two previous Broadway shows, “All Shook Up,” which lasted six months in 2005, and “Rock ‘N Roll! The First 5,000 Years,” which closed a week after it opened in 1982.

Santino Fontana, who was much-praised in the role of the older brother in Brighton Beach Memoirs, suffered a concussion doing “A View From The Bridge” and is out temporarily.

The close of “Ragtime” on Sunday, at a loss to its investors of $8.5 million, was the subject of an article in the New York Post by Michael Riedel that prompted much tweeting: “It should never have come to Broadway in the first place…[it was] a solid regional theater production…At least cute little Bobby Steggert got something out of this disaster….He’s not going back to Maryland anytime soon.”
From Nella Vera (@spinstripes, theater marketer): I didn’t love it either, but don’t understand the vitriol from Michael Riedel to Ragtime
From Kevin Daly (@kevinddaly, theater blogger): Why does Michael Riedel speak of regional theatre as though it were a bad thing?
From Ted Murphy (@Ted_Murphy, “critic on sabbatical“): Cause he knows nothing about theater?
Scott Rosenblum (@sdrosenb, theater producer): Seems that the marketing of the musical was questionable, but yes, it does seem like a lot of schadenfreude from the Post
Bobby Steggert (@bobbysteggert, played Young Brother in “Ragtime”): Funny how people who call themselves reporters don’t check their facts. I’ve lived and worked in New York for 10 years.

Saturday, January 9, 2010
My review of The Emperor Jones
Would anybody even consider putting on a production of a 90-year-old play that gave an African-American lines like “Oh Lawd! Mercy! Mercy on dis po’ sinner,” and that in the stage directions described another character as an “ape-faced old savage of the extreme African type,” if the author were not a playwright almost universally viewed as one of the greatest of the twentieth century?…

The recession leading us back to do-it-yourself art, according to an essay in Newsweek. The idea of the professional artist only began in the 20th century.

Martin Sheen launched his acting career by joining Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s avant-garde Living Theater! His essay is in Broadwayworld.com

Independent theater producer Michael Roderick (@MichaelRoderick) is inspired by the iPhone to muse on its lessons for an iTheater

Wanted: Single, Straight Guy Who Likes Theater (Or Maybe Just Two Theater-Going Lesbians)
Here is the report from BroadwayGirlNYC about her Twitter Broadway matchmaker service, which she stretched out all morning and into the afternoon:
The past few days w #SingleOnBway have been so much fun! Over 200 hashtagged tweets and so many of you involved! I pick the winners at noon.
Going through all of the #SingleOnBway entries now. Hold your breath, my lovelorn lovelies…
I heard from gay men, straight women, lesbians, a trans guy, and yes, even a couple of elusive straight male theatre fans
Many single, straight girls were complaining that very few single, straight men were participating. When a guy named “@Stagemanagerbg” appeared on the scene, the girls pounced and he was flooded with requests, so much so that he ended up locking his Twitter account (as you can see when you go to his page).

Artsblog saw a lesson in marketing for theater companies in BroadwayGirlNYC’s contest

Finally she announced the matched couple to whom she was going to give the tickets: @caterrachel and @diannab “Congratulations, ladies.”
From @PataphysicalSci: I think #SingleOnBway was a good idea in theory, but didn’t really work. I didn’t see too many people pairing up.

Sunday, January 10, 2010
Ending today on Broadway: Burn the Floor, Ragtime, The 39 Steps, In the Next Room (the vibrator play). Off-Broadway: Altar Boyz

Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark will not begin previews in February, Alan Cumming said Saturday [not a surprise], according to Playbill. The Times reports that he thought it “‘a really weird, frustrating thing to be waiting,’ but added that based on the music (by Bono and the Edge of U2), costumes and sets that he had seen so far, the musical would be ‘a new, very exciting experience’ for Broadway audiences.”

My review of Chekhov Lizardbrain: “Chekhov Lizardbrain”…is well-named, and not just because its hip-sounding title matches the hip aura of the Lower East Side’s rundown CSV Cultural Center in which it is being presented. The title also describes neatly the two halves of this appealing encore production by the Pig Iron Theater Company of Philadelphia — the more or less straightforward drama and the comically postmodern look at consciousness. Like the two halves of a brain, they work together simultaneously…

The most produced theater around the country in the decade just ended were all plays (not musicals) and all of high quality, says Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal.
The number one most produced was “Proof,” by David Auburn (54 productions), followed by
2. “Doubt,”
3. “Art,”
4. “The Drawer Boy,”
5. “Rabbit Hole,”
6. “Wit”
7. “I Am My Own Wife,”
8. “Crowns,”
9. “Intimate Apparel,”
10. tie between “The Glass Menagerie” and “The Laramie Project

On this date in Broadway history: the original Finian’s Rainbow opened in 1947 & ran for 725 performances. The revival closes next Sunday, after about 90.
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A Week of New York Theater Tweets appears every Monday in The New York Theater section of The Faster Times. To sign up to the New York Theater Twitter account, click on this link.

Past round-ups
A Week of New York Theater Tweets, 1/04/10

A Week of New York Theater Tweets, 12/28

A Week of New York Theater Tweets, 12/21

A Week of New York Theater Tweets, 12/14

A Week of New York Theater Tweets, 12/07

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