Corey Hawkins is about to break through with TV’s 24: Legacy, which is premiering this winter – but the actor is determined to keep working on his craft. And that is why he is turning to Broadway. Hawkins is headed back to the Great White Way (he appeared in 2013’s mixed-race Romeo and Juliet) to star with Allison Janney and John Benjamin Hickey in a revival of John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation – a play that has nothing to do with Kevin Bacon, btw. The Straight Outta Compton standout will play Paul, a young con man who pretends to be the college friend of the son of a well-to-do New York City couple, the Kittredges. How very The Talented Mr. Ripley. Emmy winner Courtney B. Vance originated the role on Broadway (all the way to a Tony nomination) before Will Smith portrayed Paul for the big screen back in his pre-Will friggin’ Smith early-’90s days. Six Degrees of Separation will kick off previews for a 15-week engagement on April 5. The show is set to open on April 25. Photo: WashingtonPost.com.
She Loves Me, the Tony-nominated musical revival, is poised to make some history later this month, thankyouverymuch. The show – starring Tony nominees Laura Benanti, Zachary Levi, and past winner Jane Krakowski (pictured here with Benanti) – is set to become the first-ever Broadway production to be streamed live on the Internet. So bookmark BroadwayHD.com and save the date for 8 p.m. EDT on June 30, everybody. Watching will set you back $9.99 – a veritable bargain when you consider how much it would cost ya to make it to the Great White Way. Go...get! Reserve your livestream pass to catch She Loves Me now. Photo: Variety.com.
Somebody wants an encore.... And, whaddya know. Somebody is getting one. Theatrical Viagra Nicole Kidman is set to get a rise outta Broadway once more this fall. I know. Good one! You see, the Academy Award winner is bringing her West End hit, Anna Ziegler’s Photograph 51, stateside. Anyway, the play – about Rosalind Franklin, the unsung scientist who pretty much cracked DNA at King’s College London (the titular picture refers to an X-ray diffraction image taken by a man named Raymond Gosling under Franklin’s supervision) – already has earned Kidman an Olivier Award nomination, and is expected to do great things for the actress on the Great White Way, which she first visited in the late ’90s when she starred in The Blue Room (another transfer). Once Photograph 51’s Broadway run is over, Kidman reportedly hopes to transfer the material to the silver screen. You know. ’Cause she can’t just court Tony. Oscar will get jelly. Photo: Broadway.com.
American Psycho has finally made it to Broadway, yo. Tall glass o’ waterBenjamin Walker’s starring as Patrick Bateman on the Duncan Sheik-written show, and the actor and his cast went on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night, to promote the show. Walker sang a song titled “Selling Out” all shirtless and s---, and it was quite the sight (love that the song opens with a passage from the book that is all about – if memory serves – about Bateman’s beauty regime). Check it out:
Based on the sensational Bret Easton Ellis novel, American Psycho is in previews now for an April 21 opening.
Derek Hough is going full Broadway (by way of a classic film). The Emmy-winning Dancing with the Stars hoofer is going to topline a Harvey Weinstein-produced staging of Singin’ in the Rain. Weinstein announced the news himself last night, at The Weinstein Company’s annual pre-Oscars party, before introducing a special performance by Hough. And the revival – the show first hit the Great White Way in 1985 – is shaping up fast. The new Singin’ in the Rain is reportedly set to open early in 2017. Photo: DigitalSpy.com.
Ha! Wouldn’t it be som’in’ if Cate Blanchett sucks on stage? You gotta admit that’d be som’in’. I guess we’ll just have to wait and find out for sure when the actress takes to stage for her Broadway debut in The Present, an update of Chekhov’s Platonov, which Blanchett’s husband, Andrew Upton, is adapting. John Crowley (Brooklyn) is directing Set in the ’90s, around the birthday celebration of an independent but compromised widow (the two-time Academy Award-winning Carol star) and the people who come to the party to wish her well, including Richard Roxburgh’s witty and acerbic character and his wife. Pleasantries soon give into an undercurrent of regret, denial, and desire, and then things get real interesting. The Present will arrive on the Great White Way early next winter. A Tony (a nomination, at the very least) should follow soon after. Photo: FabFashionFix.com.
When Bette Midler gets her tease on, she makes good on it. The Divine Miss M – who is modeling for Marc Jacobs and working on a reunion with her fellow First Wives, Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton, for Netflix – is also on her way back to Broadway, where she will take on the role of Dolly Levi in a revival of Hello, Dolly! that will open next year. Midler’s staging will mark the first time in more than half a century that the show has graced the Great White Way. Film producer Scott Rudin is backing the production, which will be under the direction of four-time Tony winner Jerry Zaks. The entertainer was last on Broadway in 2013, as the star of I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat with Sue Mengers. Previews for the new Hello, Dolly! are set to begin in March 2017 for an official curtain later late the following month. Photo: Zimbio.com.
Emmy nominee Jesse Tyler Ferguson just got greedy. The actor is set to go back to Broadway Fully Committed. Meaning he will headline a one-man play directed by Jason Moore (Pitch Perfect, Avenue Q) by that title, playing 40 characters himself. Previews for Fully Committed will kick off next April 2 for an April 26 opening. The show will run as a limited engagement, given JTF’s schedule with TV’s Modern Family. Photo: Variety.com.
So Joshua Jackson may be having an Affair on Showtime, but he’s still thinking fringe. Ish. J2 is headed Off-Broadway, to co-star in Smart People, a play by a Lydia R. Diamond about how race plays into our lives and the lives of four Harvard grads set on the eve of the 2008 presidential election. Mahershala Ali (The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2, Netflix’s House of Cards) and Tessa Thompson (Creed, Dear White People) also board. Smart People is set to begin previews this winter, on Jan. 26, for a Feb. 11 opening. Photo: IMDb.com.
Lupita Nyong’o is going full Broadway. The Academy Award winner and Star Wars: The Force Awakens star is set to take on the Great White Way for the very first time now that her New York Public Theater hit, the Danai Gurira-written Eclipsed, is making the transition to Broadway in February. Nyong’o stars in the drama not only as one of many women suffering through the Liberian civil war – a war that was ended by women – but The Girl who disrupts the status quo in the production, which is now at the New York Public Theater until Nov. 8. Right on. This could put the actress on an EGOT path. Photo: UsMagazine.com.
One a stage actor, always a stage actor. At least that seems to be case for one Zachary Quinto. The Star Trek star – last seen in a Broadway revival of The Glass Menagerie last season – is going Off-Broadway for his next turn. Quinto is set to headline a limited engagement of Noah Haidle’s Smokefall, a magical realism-meets-manic vaudeville proposition about a family that is quite like no other. Smokefall will begin previews next February for a Feb. 22 opening.. Photo: Zimbio.com.
The late Adrienne Shelly’s Waitress is going to take New York in 2016. Indeed, a musical adaptation of the Keri Russell-starring 2007 film will open on Broadway next spring. Grammy nominee Sara Bareilles has written a number of original songs for the production, which will feature Tony winner Jessie Mueller (Beautiful: The Carole King Musical) in the role of Jenna, a waitress in a cheery Southern diner who doesn’t exactly jump for joy when she discovers that she’s pregnant with her abusive, annoying, and needy husband’s baby. She sees an out, though, in a pie-baking contest, since she’s an accomplished baker. The drama comes from whether she’ll take her chance and run with it. This sounds like it could be cute and good. Wouldn’t mind catching the show (previews are set for March, FYI). Photo: Fandango.com.
The last time A Streetcar Named Desire had a star-studded staging of note (in Connecticut), Joe Manganiello was riding the production. And when the show hits New York again in 2016, it will have Gillian Anderson at the helm. Yes, the X-Files actress will star in an Off-Broadway Young Vic production of the classic Tennessee Williams play opposite Ben Foster next spring. The show – which netted Anderson an Olivier Award nomination after its summer 2014 run – will be performed from April 23 to May 22. Get your tickets now! Photo: EW.com.
So this is why – to the chagrin of many – neither Kristin Chenoweth nor Alan Cumming was on hand for the 2015 Tony Award nominations this morning.... They’re hosting the big show! Indeed, it was Bruce Willis and Mary Louise Parker who announced who is up for what this June, and who confirmed that the stars of Broadway’s On the Twentieth Century and Cabaret will lord over theater’s biggest night. So there you have it. Now, as to which plays and musicals and talent were singled out.... An American in Paris and Fun Home are, apparently, the ones to beat, with 12 nods apiece. They’ll face off against Something Rotten! and The Visit in the Best Musical category. Meanwhile, for Best Play, the nominees are The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Disgraced, Hand to God, and Wolf Hall Parts One & Two. On the acting front, the cast of The Elephant Man (itself up for Best Revival of a Play) – Bradley Cooper, Alessandro Nivola, and Patricia Clarkson – is up for Tonys in their respective leading and featured categories. Helen Mirren earned a nod for her work as Queen Elizabeth II in The Audience, and both Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan were singled out for Skylight, as were Ken Watanabe and Kelli O’Hara for The King and I.
Click here for a complete list of nominees, and be sure to tune in and watch the Tonys on June 7, on CBS.
Get ready for the big time, Ana Villafañe and Josh Segarra. Who? What? Why? Villafañe and Segarra are the two newcomers who have earned the starring roles of Grammy winners Gloria and Emilio Estefan on Broadway’s upcoming On Your Feet!, a show inspired by the Estefans’ decades-long love and the music they made famous that, in turn, made them famous all around the world. Previews for the musical are set to kick off on Oct. 5 for a Nov. 5 opening after a summer run in Chicago. Photo: BroadwayWorld.com.
Gunning for a seventh Tony much, Audra McDonald? Get ready, people, because the Meryl Streep of the Great White Way is getting ready. To star, that is, in Shuffle Along, Or, The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed, a new production chronicling the backstage happenings of the 1921 musical Shuffle Along. McDonald will play 1920s star Lottie Gee, one of the original leads in Shuffle Along, which is widely considered a breakthrough show for black performers and writers on Broadway. huffle Along, Or, The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed is scheduled to begin previews next spring for an April 21, 2016 opening.
Looks like the men of Sin City will be taking over Broadway this year. Earlier this week came the news that Clive Owen will be popping his Great White Way cherry this fall, and now comes word that Bruce Willis will be making his New York Stage debut in a limited-engagement staging of Misery, also this fall. Misery. You know, the one about the novelist who gets kidnapped by his Number One Fan.... They ought to get Kathleen Turner to play the Kathy Bates to Willis’ James Caan. Think about it. Alas, it seems Obie Award winner Elizabeth Marvel (Netflix’s House of Cards) will be taking on the role. Photo: Deadline.com.
And to celebrate its 50th anniversary, New York City’s Roundabout Theatre Company is luring Clive Owen to Broadway. The actor will arrive on the Great White Way for his debut in the revival of Harold Pinter’s Old Times. Owen will play a man who meets and becomes close to one of his wife’s friends. Preview for Old Times will kick off on Sept. 17 for an Oct. 15 opening. Photo: Zimbio.com.
