September 29, 2021: Martyna Majok’s intense, well-meaning Sanctuary City has a split personality. The first hour of this tale of two young people struggling to deal with our inequitable immigration laws is told in short, fragmentary shards. Sometimes they are repeated to demonstrate the endless cycle of hope and betrayal encountered on the endless path to becoming legal. Most of these vignettes are less than a minute and their cumulative impact is like standing in the middle of a dramatic sand storm.
September 28, 2021: The year is 1985. It’s a warm winter day on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, where the Oki Dog, a hot dog stand run by a middle-aged Asian-American named Eddie (Amir Malaklou), serves as the meeting place and battleground for a rowdy clientele of drifters, drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes. The place is deserted, except for Twilight (Kara Arena), who sleeps on the table, and Eddie, who’s cleaning up, getting ready for the hot dog stand’s last day before the police shut it down for good. Apparently, the neighbors have had enough.
September 27, 2021: It takes a lot of chutzpah for a show to announce beneath the title on its Playbill cover, almost as a subtitle, “A New Musical Hit in the Making.” This is, after all, a city where the “h”-word rightfully belongs to works of creative genius, like Come from Away, Hadestown, and Hamilton, to name a few. In the case of A Commercial Jingle for Regina Comet, though, with its sixteen producers,it’s hard not to feel that pride goeth before a fall.
Moulin Rouge and The Inheritance nab Top Honors at the 2021 Tony Awards .
By: Patrick Christiano
September 27, 2021: Last night was an evening to celebrate Broadway! Broadway theaters are reopening and the long- delayed Tony Awards, originally scheduled for June 2020, finally happened at the ‘Winter Garden Theater. The ceremony follows the longest Broadway closing in history. “Broadway is Back” was the message that the Broadway community wanted to send to the public.
Tony nominees James Cusati-Moyer and
Ato Blankson-Wood in
“Slave Play”
By: David Sheward
September 27, 2021: The long-delayed Tony Awards (presented Sept. 26) were full of surprises from the Paramount Plus portion of the ceremony ending ten minutes early to an extra four minutes of Big Brother cutting into the opening of the CBS portion of the show to the unexpected shut-out of Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play. Harris’ controversial play about sex, race, and oppression received the most Tony nominations ever for a straight play with 12 and was thought to be a shoe-in to sweep the dramatic categories. But, Slave lost all of its categories.
September 26, 2021: After a year and a half, the long-delayed Tony Awards will finally be presented tonight. When all the Broadway theaters shut down in March 2020, the accolades were in limbo. The Drama Desks, Outer Critics and Obies decided to honor the achievements of the abbreviated 2019-20 theater season either online and by press release in the late spring of 2020. But the Tonys dithered for months, probably because they wanted to wait until all the theatres could be reopened to maximize the publicity values.
Between Fire & Ice:A Diabolical Weimer Berlin Kabaret
By: Paulanne Simmons
September 27, 2021: The year may be 2021. And The Triad Theater may be located at 158 West 72 Street in New York City. But on Saturday afternoon, Sept. 25, Adrienne Haan transported the audience at the Triad to Weimar Germany. Despite Germany’s “sad attempt at democracy,” this was a time when populism, militarism, racism and anti-Semitism were all on the rise. But, said Haan, it was also “the creative time of the great cabaret artists.”
The Tony Awards Will Feature Stars of Stage and Screen Live from the Winter Garden Theatre September 26
By: Ellis Nassour
September 24, 2021: CBS and the American Theatre Wing’s 74th Tony Awards will feature a huge roster of stage and screen stars on Sunday in an entertainment-jammed live, four-hour event. The Awards and special The Tony Awards Present: Broadway’s Back! will telecast from Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre, soon to be the home of the much-anticipated revival of The Music Man, starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster.
September 21, 2021: At first, Ngozi Anyanwu’s The Last of the Love Letters seems like a conventional breakup story. The audience enters the Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater to find Anyanwu herself on stage as a character listed in the digital program as “You.” (The others are enigmatically called You No. 2 and Person.) This You is scribbling in a notebook, evidently she is writing the missive alluded to in the title. As the play begins, Anyanwu launches into a 20-minute monologue describing the defects of her relationship with the addressee and the reasons why she is breaking up with him or her. It’s funny and entertaining enough, with some sassy barbs aimed at the rejected lover. Anyanwu is a sharp writer and a confident performer, but this is familiar territory.
“The Tony Awards® Present: Broadway’s Back!,” Live From the Winter Garden Theatre in New York City, Sunday, Sept. 26 on CBS and Paramount+
September 23, 2021: CBS and The American Theatre Wing’s Tony Awards announced that a bevy of stage and screen stars that will appear on “The Tony Awards® Present: Broadway’s Back!” live from The Winter Garden Theatre in New York City, Sunday, Sept. 26 on the CBS Television Network and available to stream live and on demand on Paramount+. The special will celebrate the return of live theatre and commemorate the 74th Annual Tony Awards® for the 2019-2020 season in a four-hour television and streaming event.
Ben Platt and Co-stars on Bringing Dear Evan Hansen from Stage to Screen
By: Ellis Nassour
September 23, 2021: Bringing the Tony-winning, generation-defining Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen (Universal Studios; two hours and 17 minutes [which includes the credit crawl] from stage to screen was a long-time dream of Tony, Grammy and Emmy winner Ben Platt, who in one of those rare occasions gets to reprise his critically-acclaimed performance for the movie. It must have been the same for the Oscar, Grammy and Tony-winning composers Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (La La Land, The Greatest Showman) and Tony-winning book writer Steven Levenson, who, thankfully for the most part, got to do the screenplay. With the reviews and sold-out performances, it must have not have been a matter of when, but how soon.
September 21, 2021: Martyna Majok, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for Cost of Living, her touching play about disabled people, continues to examine issues relevant to the socially dispossessed in Sanctuary City. It’s at the Lortel after its opening at the New York Theatre Workshop last year was suspended when the pandemic hit. Still under the NYTW’s aegis, the fitfully engaging Sanctuary City offers insights into the lives of young immigrants, the kind usually referred to as “dreamers.” Those, of course, get their name from the Dream Act proposal—swiftly alluded to-that would allow undocumented immigrants eventually to be granted permanent residency. It has other things on its mind as well.
New production of Closer Than Ever debuts on BroadwayHD September 23.
September 21, 2021: Ginger Quiff Media and BroadwayHD, the premier streaming service for live theater, are partnering to bring the Outer Critics Circle Award-winning and Drama Desk Award nominated musical revue of Maltby and Shire’s Closer Than Ever exclusively to the platform. The brand-new filmed production will featureX Factor (UK Edition) winner Dalton Harris, along with West End stars including musical theatre icons Lee Mead (Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat; Wicked), Kerry Ellis (Wicked; We Will Rock You) and Grace Mouat (Six; & Juliet).The film will be available on BroadwayHD exclusively to subscribers across the globe this September.
Extraordinary women over 40 compete in the 7th Annual contest at The Triad Theater on Monday, October 4.
September 22, 2021: Delayed over a year, the finals of the 7th annual “Tomatoes Got Talent” contest will take place at The Triad Theater, 158 West 72nd Street, on Monday, October 4th at 7pm. The contest celebrates women over 40 with careers outside of entertainment and is co-produced by Cheryl Benton and Randie Levine-Miller, who will host and perform. The finals feature 11 uniquely talented women who have been waiting since last April 2020, when the Tomatoes contest was uprooted. This year’s outstanding jury is comprised of Tony nominee Lee Roy Reams, and the Tony Award-winning Broadway producers Margot Astrachan and Ken Waissman. The show’s music director is Paul Chamlin.
