Matt Timminini (0:01)

Welcome to TODAY on Broadway for Friday, March 28, 2025. I'm Broadway Radio's Matt Timminini. I'm coming to you on my own because Grace was working the red carpet for the Broadway opening of the Picture of Dorian Gray. And so she's off doing all of her fancy social media influencer stuff. And I'm here going to run you through all of the news, including those reviews for the Picture of Dorian Gray. And as we have been anticipating and telling you, they were wonderful. They are incredibly good. Sarah Snook is now one of the front runners best actress in a play category. And Picture of Dorian Gray is going to be in contention for the entire awards season and it should be very fun. We will get into those in just a minute, but I'm heading to New York tomorrow. I will be there for nine days of shows. So if you want to make sure that you are following along with everything that I am seeing and talking about during this awards season, most of them are Broadway. There are a couple off Broadway shows that I am sneaking in that will be major contenders and ones that I'll certainly be talking about. And in fact, one of them is already being rumored for a Broadway transfer. Make sure that you head over to patreon@patreon.com broadwayradio or broadwayradio.com patreon. I will be updating you with travelogue episodes talking about everything that I am seeing when I'm in New York for my first of two trips this spring. I'll be back the first week of May to catch everything opening later in April. But those travelogue episodes are at the mezzanine tier and above. So make sure that when you go over, you subscribe there. All right, let's dive into all of the reviews for the Picture of Dorian Gray. As we've talked about before, this show is now open at the Music Box Theater. It is currently slated to run through June 15, but I imagine that it will ext as long as Sarah Snook wants to continue to do it. The show is adapted and directed by Kip Williams. It was Originally done in 2020 by the Sydney Theater Company. At that point, Aaron Jean Norville played all of the different roles that are depicted in this show on Broadway. As I mentioned, Sarah Snook is playing that part. This has already been picked up for a film adaptation by Cate Blanchett's production company. Cate Blanchett used to be the artistic director at the Sydney Theater Company. She was the co artistic director along with Kip Williams Kip Williams, obviously the one creating and running this show, but in addition to Sarah Snook, there is a list of five different camera operators who are included in the cast list for this show. There is a major video component to this production and I am so wildly excited to see this show that I'm going to be seeing sometime next week. I think on maybe next Saturday or something, but cannot wait to see it, especially after hearing all of these reviews if you are unfamiliar with what the Picture of Dorian Gray is about, this is a story that was originally penned by the great Oscar Wilde. It was done first as an episodic magazine story, then it was turned into a novel as of recording time. Review aggregator site Did They like it? Has collected 15 reviews. Nine are positive, four are mixed, and two are actually negative. So maybe I oversold how much the critics loved it, but I think the ones that did love it loved it a lot, and I've not heard anything bad about it from people who have actually seen the show either. But let's start with Jesse Green of the New York Times, who was mixed in talking about the three main characters in the show, Dorian Gray, his kind of mentor in this decadent lifestyle, Henry Wotton, and the person that paints the eponymous portrait, Basil Hallward. Jesse Green says Snoop's virtuosity is such that all three, whether live or recorded or both at once, are convincing and compelling, at least in the first of the play's two hours. Powers the other major character, Sybil Vane in actress Dorian adores but drops cold is less fortunate, at one point reduced to a big head of curls sticking out of the floor of a miniature stage, offering her purely for laughs despite her cruel demise. The play seems to flatter the wanton in each of us. Laughter is a strange thing to aim for in Dorian Gray, a story told in deep earnest, even if utterly unconcerned with morality. Art, and this is in quotes is not meant to instruct or to influence action in any way, wilde wrote to a young fan of the story. He is interested instead in the seriousness of sensation, no matter that it leads Dorian, over the course of 18 or so years, into a sinkhole of sex, drugs and murder without ever popping a wrinkle. His portrait is another story. Then he goes on to, like, spoil one of the moments. And it's not a huge spoil. It's probably something you can figure out. But like, I just don't understand why reviews are wanting to reveal some of the stagecraft of the show. It's a little bothersome, as I often find many of Jesse Green's reviews are bothersome, but nonetheless he wraps up his review by saying, by the time Dorian makes his final descent into madness, there is no real acting to be done anyway. There is only enunciating, as paragraphs of narrative are diverted into rushing mouthfuls of unintelligible high speed monologue. Still, what I missed most in this Dorian Gray was not wild. I find the stories he originally wrote it brilliant, but so mannered that you can only sip it slowly, like absinthe. The novel is more conventional. What I missed was eye contact. The audience and actors are like disputants kept in different rooms, forbidden to see each other fully. The theater is in that sense empty. She and we might as well not be there. Adam Feldman of Time out in New York was positive, giving the show four out of five stars, saying quote and as in Sunset, these trappings transcend gimmickry because they are contiguous with and find new ways to mirror the central themes of the material when it violates the borders between art and experience. That's true to Wilde's point. Shayna Russell, writing for Entertainment Weekly, was also positive, saying, despite the show's ruminations revolving around Dorian's ego, there is no vanity in his performance. Where Snook sweats, sneers and dashes across style stage, the bold production is as cinematic as it is theatrical and a perfect showcase for his shining star. Juan A. Ramirez was mixed writing for theatrely, saying Williams Senna style quickly grows distancing and repetitive. Too often Snoop herself is out of view, available only by video. A few times she even leaves the stage entirely, leaving us alone with her pre recorded selves. These choices suck the liveness out of the event. That distance is further heightened by the video work's distractingly high frame rate video. The quality is so unsettlingly crisp to the point of wanting to grab the remote and turn off motion smoothing. The motion smoothing thing. That's an issue that I hope everybody of whatever generation talks to their parents and children about, because we gotta fix that epidemic. Christian Lewis was negative writing for Variety, saying despite some fancy camera work and close ups, this production only goes skin deep. Wilde himself was an aficionado of artifice, which makes the irony here all the more painful since this production cannot find any depth in its surfaces. Chris Jones of New York Daily News was positive, saying, Snoop's performance in Kip Williams self penned production is powerful in every way, an exquisitely crafted melange of determination, drive and cheekiness. On the night I saw the show, she did not drop so much as a syllable. And yet there was nothing automaton about her work, which was just as well, given all the scenes that surrounded her. She's brilliant, alive and fun all at once. And again, I feel like over the past week or two, I've been praising Johnny Oleksinski and the New York Post more often than I would like. But I'm going to wrap up with his review of the show because he said, but what the worthwhile play offers, and I know there are many who poo poo screens on stage as a rule, is the childlike wonderment of not understanding the logistics of what you're looking at. The first hour is marked by odd and confused. How did they do that? How did she do that? This is something that I think we miss out on so much in life. I think it is also in theater, and I've talked about this before, especially coming out of the election in 2016, that like my brain chemistry, I think changed from really looking at everything from a clinical and critical manner to just wanting to enjoy and appreciate things that are special and are fun. And I think that wonderment that Johnny is talking about is so important in theater, especially because sure, we can see cool things on screens with like CGI and animation and all of that, but when you can see something that truly takes your breath away and blows your mind on stage, that is what I'm looking for. Sometimes that's in a performance, sometimes that's in a, in a song and, and the incredible notes that somebody is singing. But oftentimes it is from incredible stagecraft, whether it is like this or sunset with video or just fun smart tricks of the stage, you know, the magic tricks from Cursed Child or just some like really awesome set changes, whether that's from something like appropriate or even Mary Jane from last season. So, you know, I think that that idea of wonderment and embracing wonderment and not having to look at everything with a clinical, critical and cynical eye is very important. And I'm glad that he mentioned that. And I hope that more people approach whatever they're doing in life, but especially their jobs as critics, with that in mind. Alright, after those reviews, let's dive into the news of the day. And we're going to start with some pretty big stars doing some very small shows off Broadway. You'll remember that we recently talked about the new theatrical partnership between Sonja Friedman and Hugh Jackman called 2gether. Well, yesterday we found out the first set of shows that that company will be presenting off Broadway. It'll be Actually, two shows that'll be running in rep. They will take place at Audible's Medellin Theater and they both will be recorded for a later release on the Audible audio subscription streaming service. The first show will happen from April 28 through June 18. Again, these two shows are running in rep. Both of them will be directed by Ian Rickson. That first show will be the New York premiere of Hannah Moskovich's play Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Class and it is a two hander and will star Ella Beatty and Hugh Jackman. The second show will be Jen Silverman's new adaptation of August Strindberg's Creditors. This one will star three people, including some fairly big names as well. It will feature Liev Schreiber, Maggie Siff and Justin Smith. This one will also run through June 18, but a little bit shorter of a run will begin performances on May 10th. There will be more information about what days each show is going to actually be performing. Coming very soon, but very exciting. They had talked about when they announced this theater company that they're going to be doing star studded shows in very intimate ways. The Middleline theater isn't like what I would consider an intimate theater. I mean it's not huge or cavernous or anything. It's not like the Park Avenue Armory. But I was thinking they were talking more about like 100 seat theaters, not like full legit off Broadway theater companies. But it'll be interesting to see maybe if they do limit the capacity and keep it fairly small, maybe they rearrange how this setting will be and where the stage will be. But it'll be interesting to see what these are like. It's going to be incredibly wild to figure out how they're going to get people into these shows because they did talk about them wanting to be accessible to as many different people as possible. So I'm interested to see if they're going to do some sort of lottery or rush or something like that to make sure that there are people who are not those who can just plop down 5$600 for tickets to check out these shows with megastars that will certainly be hot tickets to get coming up, I mean just starting next month. Speaking of off Broadway shows, the Public Theater has been working with the acclaimed avant garde playwright Carol Churchill for over four decades now and they just announced yesterday that they are extending a new quartet of her shows before it even begins performances. The set of shows Glass Kill, what if, If Only and IMP are scheduled to begin performances on April 3rd. They were originally only going to run through May 4th, but they have extended one extra week and are now currently slated to close on May 11th. These shows are four new works that have never been done together and they are described as a kaleidoscope of stories. They all either made their world premieres in 2019 or in 2021, so still fairly new show, so that is exciting for the public Theater audience. There are some names that you will probably recognize in the cast list, including John Ellison Conley and of course the great Tony winner Deirdre O'Connell. Sticking off Broadway we'd previously told you about a new musical called BO that is being written by Douglas Lyons and Ethan D? Pac Char. It was conceived and written by Lyons and the music is by Pak Char along with Lyons and it features a cast of eight actor musicians and they tell the story of Ace Baker, a young queer man whose life is forever changed when he discovers that his deceased grandfather is actually not so deceased. They announced yesterday who is going to be playing that central character of Ace and it is Matt Rodin. You can currently see him Off Broadway in the new Adam Gwan world premiere musical all the World's A Stage from Keen Company. He also played Jamie in the Company national tour in what's Fantastic. I Saw him. The show is going to begin performances on June 6th and is currently slated to run through July 27th. Out of the Box Theatrics is producing this show at 154 Christopher Street. The theater formerly known as the New Ohio Theater. Out of the Box is doing the show with the storyline project from one type of exciting performance to another. Yesterday, Broadway Cares Equity Fights AIDS announced that they are going to be doing a new annual concert that is going to join the other things that are part of their annual repertoire of things like the Red Bucket Follies, Broadway Backwards, Broadway Bears, the Flea Market and Grand Auction. All of those things. This new one is called Broadway Dream Roles and it's going to kick off on April 28 at the Al Hirschfeld Theater and it is going to include a mix of Broadway favorites and rising stars who are going to do some sort of role that they have never been able to do, what they've always wanted to. Each of these individual performances are going to have some sort of story attached to it, whether it's like something they got down into final callbacks for or didn't get or something that they never actually told anybody that they wanted. But this is giving the opportunity to explore it. So performers and special guests and all that stuff will be announced in the coming weeks. But these types of concerts which are done all over the place at 54 Below and Green Room and all of those things are always wildly fun. So looking forward to seeing what this is all about. Speaking of special one night only events, yesterday some of the incredible performers that are going to be a part of the Renaissance Gala to reopen the Laurie Beachman Theater were announced. The concert is going to take place on April 14. Some of the names of the people that will be involved are Andre DeShields, Lillias White, Matt Doyle, Lauren Patton, Chip Zion, Milo Manheim, Elizabeth Gillies, Christine Petty, Joe Iconis, Jelani Remy and more other folks will be announced as the dates approach approach. Benjamin Ruhalla is going to music direct the show and it should be an absolutely incredible night over at Laurie Beachman and so excited to have that venue back up and running. All right, I have two recommendations for you. First, Hadestown just keeps teasing us. They keep putting out these new little clips of their new cast members, but they're so short. They like get me excited but I want more. Yesterday they put out just like less than a 30 second video of Haley Kilgore doing Wait for Me Too. I've already got tickets to go back to Hadestown in May to see her alongside Carlos Valdez, who I saw a couple months ago when I tried to see Haley for the first time. But they are now joined by Daniel Breaker and Merle Dandridge, which is just making me so excited to have the opportunity to check it out soon.