fuck yeah, Broadway!

curating all of our favourite things in theatre from around the globe: Broadway, Off-Broadway, London, and more! Established May 26, 2010.

[kaitkerrigan]

FUN HOME’s Superpower

This is a reprint of an essay I wrote for The Dramatists Guild Magazine in the Spring of 2014. I went into “Fun Home” at the Public Theater prepared to fall hard. I have enormous talent crushes on all of the artists involved so it was not very surprising that I loved it and it was one of my favorite productions of the season.

“Fun Home” is a musical and musicals have an extraordinary ability to make you identify with someone who’s different than you - even more than a movie or play. That’s one of the reasons why I like them. I sit in a darkened theater and I’ll go with you on any joyride you want to take me on. I’ll identify with a dog or a fish or a dictator. I’ll search until I find my protagonist and when I do, I’ll stick with him, because let’s be real, it’s usually a him.

Over my many years of theater-going, I’ve identified with orphans, a very loud stage mom, salesmen, plenty of sociopaths, even knights and kings. I have almost nothing in common with any of these people but in that darkened theater, I’m game. Until “Fun Home”, no one ever asked me to go with a little girl who was trying to figure out her sexual identity as she comes of age. But Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori did, and I went. Their song “Ring of Keys” opened up young Alison’s world to me - a little girl standing in a coffee shop identifying with a kind of adult woman that she didn’t know existed and immediately wanted to become when she grew up. With disarming candor, she sings, 

“Your swagger and your bearing and the just right clothes you’re wearing. Your short hair and your dungarees, and your lace-up boots and your keys - your ring of keys. I know you.” 

My eyes filled with tears and I felt gobsmacked that I’d never seen this kind of character musicalized before. Was this the first song ever written from this perspective about this feeling?

Writers are always trying to make something that feels new but, in the commercial hubbub of Broadway, we inevitably fall back on tropes and stock characters and we rarely write moments, songs, or experiences that haven’t been written before. That “Fun Home” is an adaptation of the brilliant Alison Bechdel’s writings and illustrations doesn’t undermine the point. Musicals make you identify with someone who is different than you. That’s their superpower. What we musicalize should be used to broaden the scope of the audience’s empathy.

Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori wrote a character that has no exact blueprint in musical theater. They put me in the ill-fitting docksiders of a little girl who’d prefer lace-up boots. As writers, that’s our job. We have to write the songs that haven’t been written. We have to write the things we don’t know how to write. That’s where the most exciting work comes from. “Fun Home” taught me that. 

[fyeahbroadway]

Kait Kerrigan has joined tumblr and you should give her a follow!

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The cast of Come From Away performing on Good Morning America.

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Simon Bowman and Lea Salonga performing ‘Sun and Moon’ from Miss Saigon.

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Cheyenne Jackson and Kate Baldwin performing 'Old Devil Moon' from Finian's Rainbow.

[fyeahbroadway]

Collaboration is the biggest word in the theatre. It is the most important element in theatrical success... the theatre is a welding of many arts into one. No one person can be efficient or talented in all of these arts, and if any man could write and produce and direct and act and play the music, shift the scenery, design the costumes and, in short, do everything that could be done on one stage and come up with what was literally a one-man show, he would still need one more thing: an audience. You cannot get away from collaboration.

Oscar Hammerstein II

[fyeahbroadway]

Brian Stokes Mitchell performing ‘Make Them Hear You’ from Ragtime.

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Nikki Renee Daniels as Belle in American Musical Theatre of San Jose's 2008 production of Disney's Beauty and the Beast.

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[fyeahbroadway]

The Great Comet is burning out, and taking Natasha and Pierre with it. 

Unlike the recent closing of the play Indecent, which managed to go out as a triumph, with its final week also its bestselling after a six-week reprieve, Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 is closing amid controversy, rancour and disappointment. This is a shame for a work that was in many ways more ambitious than much of what reaches Broadway. Great Comet ends its run on September 3. 

Recapping what Mark Shenton has already chronicled, the producers of Great Comet had replaced their original Pierre, Josh Groban, at the end of his planned run, with Okieriete Onaodowan, a member of the original cast of Hamilton. However, seeing that the show's grosses were declining, and projecting further drops, the producers, led by Howard Kagan, announced just weeks after the actor began that Onaodowan, known to all as 'Oak', would depart early. His last three weeks would be performed by Mandy Patinkin, the original star of both Evita and Sunday in the Park With George on Broadway, who himself would stay for only three weeks. 

The news that Patinkin would supplant Oak was met with significant pushback online, decrying the sudden decision to replace an actor of colour with a white performer. Within a day, Patinkin withdrew and Oak made clear he wouldn't be returning. 

After the initial wave of anger over what many perceived as racial insensitivity, if not outright racism, the story took a turn. Some pointed out that the production had a racially diverse cast and that, in defending Oak, they might be dooming the show without the box office boost from Patinkin. Dozens of people would be put out of work. Some will undoubtedly argue that that is what has come to pass. 

 But is that the case? 

Regardless of the make-up of the show's original or current cast, the decision summarily to replace an actor of colour, who was only scheduled to be in the show for two months, with a much older white man for a mere three weeks, was truly bad optics at the very least. At a time when racial representation in the arts is a subject of constant conversation, the decision looked awful, even if it was made with the intention of sustaining the show. But racial conflagration doesn't sell seats. At least, I hope not. 

No one claimed that Oak was giving a bad performance. Having seen two other Pierres, I can state that he was at least the equal of both. The fact that business fell off without Groban shouldn't have surprised anyone, least of all the producers, since they were going from a major recording star with a huge fan base to a talented working actor taking on his first above-the-title role. 

The cataclysm that hit Great Comet is rooted in the decision to cast Groban originally 

Pierre is, in many ways, not really a star part, except that a star has played it. 

On the one hand his presence no doubt lifted the show's economic prospects considerably. While Great Comet was stupendously creative and ambitious, unlike few Broadway entries in my 35-plus years of seeing Broadway shows, it was also sufficiently unconventional to make it difficult to compete with more conventionally structured works, whether Dear Evan Hansen or Waitress. Groban helped to bridge what, for some, might have been an unapproachable chasm of style. 

 But very often, once a show has a star, audiences come to expect a star throughout the run, even if each star is successively less famous. The Producers never really recovered on Broadway once Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick left (save for when they returned). Hello, Dolly! rides on the ability to cast almost any big-name musical actress over 40 in the title role, though Bette Midler is generating stratospheric grosses given her fame relative to the size of the theatre. But no one decides to see The Lion King or Cats based primarily on who is in it. The show, in effect, becomes the star. 

Would Patinkin have boosted the box office? Yes, I imagine so. I certainly would have enjoyed seeing him – although not once I understood his presence was unceremoniously supplanting Oak. 

 Let's also not forget that he was going in for only three weeks, until September 3. So what we have learned was that Great Comet was probably closing anyway. All Patinkin would have done was to yield three weeks of greater profits before the bottom fell out. If the producers had any idea, or plan, of what to do after September 3, it's not in evidence. 

 One has to admire the producers of Great Comet for getting it to Broadway, giving it wider exposure than it had at Ars Nova or Kazino, the tent that housed its runs in the Meatpacking District and in a parking lot off Eighth Avenue. 

 But just as Great Comet started with an entirely unnecessary dispute over a contractual billing credit for Ars Nova, which flared publicly in a very ugly fashion, so too it is going out the same way. The racial controversy arose out of an effort to squeeze the few last dollars out of the show, both Oak and Mandy were put into untenable positions, and all of that served to obscure the fact that the production was going to close no matter what. 

 Let's remember the creative success of Great Comet and the many talented people in and behind it. But let's also remember the unthinking and perhaps ugly producing decisions that marred its achievements, because they shouldn't have happened at all.

[fyeahbroadway]

The Kennedy Center Honors pay tribute to Barbara Cook

[shakespearesglobeblog]

Much Ado About Nothing: In Photos

Much Ado About Nothing is now playing in the Globe Theatre until Sunday 15 October. 

This classic tale finds an explosive new life as our Associate Director Matthew Dunster pins it against the backdrop of revolutionary Mexico, 1914. 

Take a peek at the action in our trailer. 

See how the costume designs came to life.

Book tickets

(Image credits: Tristram Kenton) 

[nicoleoftheisland]

Antigone at the National Theatre

Christopher Eccleston as Creon, Jodie Whittaker as Antigone

[nicoleoftheisland]

Judas: I’ll tell you what I know: I watched you trip over your own dusty feet to heal the sick, the blind, the lame, the unclean, any two-bit stranger stubbed their fuckin’ toe! When some lowly distant relative - too cheap to buy enough wine for his own fuckin’ wedding - suddenly runs out of booze - no problem, you just presto change-o and it was fuckin’ Miller time in ol’ Canaan again, wasn’t it, bro? But when I fuckin’ needed you - where the fuck were you, huh?! Jesus: Judas- Judas: You forgave Peter and bullshit Thomas - you knocked Paul of Tarsus off a horse - you raised Lazarus from the fuckin’ dead- but me? Me? Your ‘heart’? What about me? What about me, Jesus? Huh? You just, you just - I made a mistake! And if that was wrong, then you should have told me! And if a broken heart wasn’t sufficient reason to hang, THEN YOU SHOULD HAVE TOLD ME THAT, TOO! Jesus: Don’t you think that if I knew that it would have changed your mind… That I would have? Judas: All I know is that you broke me unfixable […]

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Stephen Adly Guirgis (via nicoleoftheisland)

[fyeahbroadway]

Brian Stokes Mitchell and Audra McDonald performing 'Wheels of a Dream' from Ragtime.

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The Broadway revival cast of Assassins performing 'Another National Anthem'

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Corbin Bleu performing an excerpt of Holiday Inn's 'Let's Say It With Firecrackers'

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James Cagney performing the title number in the film Yankee Doodle Dandy.