We are excited to announce the release of the app you’ve all been waiting for. iBroadway is finally here! It’s the easiest, most savvy way to access all things Broadway, all via you iPhone and iPod touch. Watch exclusive videos, read from Theater’s top bloggers (more on that to come), get show listings, and be able to buy tickets all from your phone. To download the app, visit http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ibroadway/id349362702?mt=8. It’s fast and free!
It’s awards season, in case you haven’t noticed, and we can’t tell you how proud we are of our wonderful clients!
Winner 2009 Lortel Awards
Outstanding Musical
Outstanding Choregrapher: Bill T. Jones
Outstanding Costume Design: Marina Draghici
Drama Desk Award Nominations
Outstanding Musical
Outstanding Actor in a Musical: Sahr Ngaujah
Outstanding Choreographer: Bill T. Jones
Outstanding Orchestrations: Aaron Johnson and Antibalas
Drama League Nominations
Distinguished Production of a Musical
Distinguished Performance: Sahr Ngaujah
New York Magazine: Best Play 2008
TONY Award Nominations
Best Musical
Best Actor in a Musical: Constantine Maroulis
Best Direction of a Musical: Kristin Hanggi
Best Costume Design: Gregory Gale
Best Sound Design: Peter Hylenski
Outer Critics Circle Award Nominations
Outstanding New Broadway Musical
Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical: Wesley Taylor
Drama League Nominations
Distinguished Production of a Musical
Distinguished Performance: Constantine Maroulis
A million congratulations to all the nominated Lortel shows and artists, most especially those closest to AMC’s heart, our cool clients:
Fela! (5 total: Outstanding Musical, Outstanding Choreographer for Bill T. Jones, Outanding Lead Actor for Sahr, Outstanding Scenic Design AND Costume Design for Marina Draghici)
Vineyard Theatre: Outstanding Musical for This Beautiful City, Outstanding Scenic Design for James Schuette, Wig Out!
Woohoo, way to go!!
We went to see This Beautiful City, the new show at the Vineyard Theatre. (We work with them on their internet marketing and created the trailer above.)
The Civilians were already in Colorado Springs (the unofficial capital of the Evangelical movement) when Ted Haggard, their leader, was busted for doing snow with an angry hustler. This makes for an awesome story.
The ensemble was tight and filled with the energetic force of love in God…and, being raised Baptist, I had several flashbacks of the time my youth ministers would try to relate to us kids by jumping up and down and singing God Songs to the tune of Extreme’s More Than Words.
This Beautiful City, you will leave inspired. They do a great job of giving you the interviews of the real people of Colorado Springs. The best story in the show is one of a Transgendered female who speaks about her experience with God and church. It’s an amazing character (spinoff?). You won’t hate the Evangelicals after seeing this. In fact, it’s a refreshing approach to seeing just how passionate people can get about something they love.
The last line of the show wraps it all up nicely when a local Park Ranger says: While headed up to Pikes Peak, if you get lost you will eventually get found, dead or alive. So, just try to stay alive.
L.A. doesn’t know what’s it’s in for, but we do! No, we don’t have access to a magic seismograph, but if you saw Stitching starring Meital Dohan last year at the Wild Project, you know that good old Southern California is in for a rock ‘em, sock ‘em theatrical earthquake. Written by controversial Scottish playwright Anthony Neilson, Stitching is a fine example of “in-yer-face theatre,” the controversial dramatic style that emerged in Great Britain in the early years of this decade. Both the NYC and LA productions are directed by our own Timothy Haskell.
The play received critical acclaim in its NYC premiere last year, many kudos going to Meital Dohan, who you might remember as a feisty—and ferociously sexy—rabbinical scholar on Showtime’s Weeds. John Ventimiglia (Artie Bucco on The Sopranos) also stars.
Take a look at the graphic identity we created for the show. To my mind, it does just what good show art should do: captures the emotional essence of the piece in a visually arresting, yet enigmatic way. The play is a tasty little chunk of psycho-love-drama, depicting two people who love each other in a brutally tender way, odd as that sounds. Their bond is painful to the touch; it hurts as much as it heals them. And though the piece is sometimes painful to watch, it’s also an intimate look at a couple trying to love each other in the only way they know how.
A West Village theatre institution is making a comeback: The Actors’ Playhouse on Seventh Avenue South has had an exteme makeover and will re-open on March 5 with the one-man show Blood Type Ragu, an exploration of the Sicilian immigrant experience written and performed by Frank Ingrasciotta.
Since its founding in 1956, the theatre has hosted the likes of Colleen Dewhurst and George C. Scott in Cocteau’s The Eagle Has Two Heads in its inaugural year, James Earl Jones in Clandestine on the Morning Line (1961), Al Pacino The Local Stigmatic (1969), Harvey Fierstein and Matthew Broderick in Torch Song Trilogy (1982) and Eric Bogosian in his own Fun House (1983). Click here for a full archive in the Lortel Archives
With so much chilling news in the theatre world these days, it’s nice hear about a survivor, isn’t it?
We’ve seen two comedies in the last couple of weeks, which couldn’t be more different from one another, but that had the (packed) Off-Broadway audiences laughing their fool heads off.
First up was The Cripple of Inishmaan a co-production of Druid Theatre Company and Atlantic Theater Company. If you’re familiar with Martin McDonagh’s work (The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, The Lonesome West, A Skull in Connemara and The Pillowman on stage; In Bruges and Six Shooter on film), you know that despite his often grim (and frequently grisly) subject matter, he is, no kidding, one of the funniest playwrights working today. And Cripple is vintage McDonagh. The dialogue is crisp, the jokes are rapier sharp and, under Gerry Hynes’s direction at Atlantic, the cast is sublime.
A few days later we caught Enter Laughing at The York Theatre Company, which had an initial run in early fall and is being reprised through March 8. This musical, with a book by Joseph Stein and music and lyrics by Stan Daniels, is based on the play by Joseph Stein from the novel by Carl Reiner, is a classic screwball comedy, made for laughs and unashamedly played for laughs.
What struck me on both occasions is how truly wonderful the Off Broadway experience can be, particularly at a skillfully produced and performed comedy. It’s really something to sit in the dark, laughing and hearing everyone around you laughing at the same thing. The sound and energy just buoy you, and it’s extraordinary to feel the energy cascading back and forth between performers and audience, each propelling the other. Movies, even really funny ones, just can’t deliver the same punch, can they?
