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Today on Broadway: Monday, Nov. 25, 2024
00:15:45
Who Is Joining Idina in ‘Redwood’?, Caroline Bowman Gets ‘Sunset’ Premiere, CBS Won’t Air Thanksgiving Parade and Broadway Performances Since 2016, “Today on Broadway” has been the first and only daily podcast recapping the top theatre headlines every ...
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- [00:02]
Matt Tammini
Welcome to Today on Broadway for Monday, November 25, 2024. I'm Broadway Radio's Matt Tammini and I'm.
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Grace Aki
Tell Me on a Sunday Podcast.
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Matt Tammini
Grace Aki, As I mentioned last week, we are going to be taking a few days off from Today on Broadway in celebration of Thanksgiving. But we will have a Today on Broadway tomorrow. Don't know how much news there is going to be on Monday, but we will see and adjust accordingly. But then we will have a special interview that I did last week with Mandy Gonzalez that'll air on Wednesday. Then on Thursday, Grace, you and I are going to talk about some theater things that we are especially thankful for on this Thanksgiving holiday. And then Friday, a week after its release, now that everyone's had a chance to see it, especially maybe you were holding off and going to you could see it with family and friends on Thanksgiving. But we will dive into our thoughts on the Wicked movie. Grace, you have seen it twice, I have seen it twice and we'll be talking about that on Friday. So lots going on in the feeds over the weekend. Well, hopefully you all are doing some celebrating. But Grace, let's start with some news that has been a little weird because I guess the upcoming Broadway musical Redwood announced its principal cat, announced its entire Cats. It's a small show on social media but never put out a press release. I never got a press release. I never saw it on Playbill, never saw it on Broadway World. But there is an article about it from Broadway News so I want to dive into that. It was announced that when Redwood begins performances on January 24th at the Nederlander Theater, it will obviously star Idina Menzel. We already knew that, but she will be joined by three of the cast members who did the show with her at the La Jolla Playhouse earlier this year and one new person added to the main cast. She will be joined by Tony nominee DeAndre Aziza, Michael park and Zachary Noah Peiser. All three of those originated these roles at La Jolla and they will be joined on Broadway by Kalea Wilcox. She replaces Nkechi Obama Lekwe who did the show out in California. They also announced the standbys for all of the roles. Led by a recently married Jessica Phillips who will stand by for Idina Menzel. The show follows, I guess, a true life story of a woman named Jesse who is facing a life altering event that drives her to try to escape into the vast redwoods of Northern California. It was conceived by Adina and Tina Landau who is also directing the show. It features a Book by Landau and music by Kate Diaz. And Diaz and Landau wrote the lyrics together, obviously. Grace, It's a good time for anybody connected to Wicked. So we've got the Adina part there. But we know that you are a big fan of Zacharino Appizer, so having him back on Broadway is good for many, many people.
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Grace Aki
Yeah, I'm genuinely interested in what this shows has in store. Like it's one of the few shows that are coming into the season that I am not involved in at all. Did not see an out of town try out. Like I'm going in. So, so, so, so green to it. So I'm excited about it and I like this cast a lot. I know that they are there at the Nederlander Theater. I've seen the, you know, the key art a few times, but that's all I have. That's all I know. Just like the bullet points that you said there. I had some friends that went and saw it out of town, but I was not one of those people. So I'm really excited. I'm hoping they maybe release a song or something just to like get, get, you know, some excitement going because I think that it'll be really cool once we all start to kind of like learn more about it.
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Matt Tammini
Yeah, it's, it's interesting because very rarely do we see a show on Broadway with five people or four people in the cast. Five people in the cast. Obviously we have maybe happy ending on Broadway right now with four. But it is increasingly difficult to get shows on Broadway that don't have a big cast so that audiences feel like there's a reason to spend money. So I'm really interested in this. And of course, Idina Menzel being back at the Nederlander Theater where Rent originally played on Broadway is something pretty special as well. All right, let's dive into what is happening on Broadway this week. Of course there is, you know, not nearly as much this week as there has been in previous weeks, but that doesn't mean there is nothing. Let's start on Monday tonight where we have our latest Broadway show beginning performances. And that is over at the Samuel J. Friedman, where the Manhattan Theater Club's Broadway premiere of Eureka Day, a new play written by Jonathan Spector and directed by Anna Dee Shapiro, will begin performances. It is currently scheduled to open on December 16th and then close on January 19th. This show has a really fun and interesting cast. It features Amber Gray, Jessica Hecht, Bill Irwin, Thomas Middlejich and Chelsea Yakura Kurtz. Interestingly enough, I just want to Throw this out there. And this is only tangential to this. Originally in the role that Chelsea Yakura Kurtz is playing was Chloe Zhao. She had to depart this production. And Sam Richardson was originally announced to be a part of all in on Broadway. He had to depart that production. He was the one who was replaced by Nick Kroll. I don't know if those two things are connected, but they did star on an Apple TV show that I loved called the After Party that was canceled after two seasons. Who knows, maybe they've both been called in for a season three and they're going to do it again and that's going to start filming in January. I don't know. But I'm just throwing that out there and kind of crossing my fingers for that. But this show, Eureka Day is like a day school and it has to do with people trying to navigate the ins and outs of vaccine mandates at a child's school. So interesting thing to have right now when certain people are taking over the Health and Human Services Department for the United States. But with a cast like this, Grace, especially Amber Gray and Bill Irwin and Jessica Hecht, like, I am really open to anything that those three actors do on stage.
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Grace Aki
Jessica Hecht is just so damn good. I'll see her in anything. I'll see her in anything.
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Matt Tammini
Also happening tonight, on Monday night over the Classic Stage Company, we do have the first preview performance of their new production of the Merchant of Venice. It is obviously written by William Shakespeare, but adapted and directed by Igor Goliak. In the cast we have Richard Topple playing Shylock, Alexandra Silber as Portia and T.R. knight as Antonio. Also featured will be Gus Burney, Tess Goldwyn, Jose Espinoza, and more. Many of the people in this cast had previously done our class at Classic Stage Company, which is also directed by Goliak. So a lot of them are basically just setting up a residency and a repertory theater over at Classic Stage this fall. Then tomorrow night on Tuesday, we have two holiday shows that will begin performances off Broadway. The first is the latest edition of the Dead, 1904 over at the Irish Repertory Theater. This season's production features Kate Baldwin and Christopher Envar along with Mary Beth Peele and more. The other one is down at the Merchant's House Museum. They are doing a production of A Christmas Carol which is very, it's a very unique production of this show. It also involves a Christmas reception with Mr. Dickens himself, apparently. So if you want more information about that, this is a very cool production. Doing it at a period appropriate museum in New York City, I think is very fun and interesting. Sticking Off Broadway On Wednesday, the Off Broadway premiere of Philip Ridley's play Tender Napalm will happen at Theater Lab. It stars Ben Ehlers and Victoria Pedretti and is directed by Rory McGregor. It is a very short run, just going from November 27th through December 15th. Also on Wednesday night, a show is closing, I guess ahead of the holiday weekend as the New York Theater Workshop will wrap up its run of We Live in Cairo. Then on Thursday, we obviously have the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, but we do have some news about that which is kind of interesting. In years past, Greece, you'll remember, like, obviously we had the main broadcast on NBC, but then they also had a secondary broadcast on CBS that often featured performances from Broadway shows in the theaters themselves. Usually the NBC version had the performances of like this year's shows or shows that haven't opened since last year's parade. And then like CBS had previous years, that is not going to be the case this year because CBS has opted not to run Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade at all this year. So that means we are losing opportunity to see Broadway shows on the parade, which is really disappointing. I'm sure that this is a money issue and CBS decided it was too expensive to do that when NBC is already doing it. But I don't know about you, Grace, but I'm like, I'm sad that we don't get those extra opportunities for shows that generally aren't in the spotlight a year into their runs to have an opportunity to perform on television.
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Grace Aki
Yeah, this is pretty shocking from my standpoint. I don't know, you know, what negotiations, et cetera. But, you know, I think we're similarly going to be facing a problem like this next summer with the Tony Awards. Like, I really do. I think that these things aren't making money and people have to figure out whatever the next phase of this is and maybe hopefully with the Wicked movie, frankly, that there will be a new surge of excitement around audiences across the world to be interested in this. That's not just Wicked, but I agree with you. It's. It's kind of wild and it's kind of sad.
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Matt Tammini
One thing to keep in mind is, yes, CBS and the Tony Awards have a contract and it was just recently renewed, so I don't remember exactly how long. But CBS is going through an ownership change and anytime you have an ownership change, you have to kind of assume that there will be some sort of deviation from strategies. So I don't know what that means for the Tony Awards outside of if they do break the contract or maybe when the contract is over. But Scott Ellison, who is, who runs Skydance Studios, which is like the studio that is behind the Mission Impossible movies, the Top Gun movies, he is now going to be the owner of CBS and its parent company, Paramount Global. So it'll be interesting to see what exactly that looks like moving forward. All right. On Friday, another off Broadway show begins performances. This one happens from the Barrow Group. It is a new play written by John Yearley called Triptych and is directed by Eric Piper. Then on Sunday, we have three shows closing, all of them off Broadway. First one over at Signature Theater, we have Bad Creole by Dominique Moriso. Then over the Public Theater, the final New York run of the Elevator Repair Services Gatsby will wrap up its run. You can sit down and watch all of the Great Gatsby be read and performed to you in an eight hour performance. And then a new musical from the Bedlam Theater Company that I really, really enjoy. This one's called Music City. I haven't seen it, but I really enjoy everything from Bedlam. So if you want to check that out, we will have information in the show notes. All right. In my conversation with Mandy Gonzalez last week, Grace, I mentioned the fact that I don't think Caroline Bowman has gone on for Norma Desmond just yet, but I was hoping she'd get the chance before she left to do Smash. Now we know when that will happen because last week it was announced some additional dates that Nicole Scherzinger will be out of the show. Many of them will be filled in from Manny Gonzalez. But Caroline also has her first performance and that will happen on January 12th. So don't know if she'll have opportunities to do it beyond that. So if you want to see Caroline Bowman in this role over at the St. James Theater, you need to be in the house on January 12th.
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Grace Aki
Yeah, I'm very excited about this. Didn't know if this would even happen at all. So if this is remotely interesting to you and if you have the ability to see her, why would you not? You need to make your way over there. Because I will be sat and if I am not sitting because everyone has purchased a ticket, I will be standing. So I'm very, very excited to see and hear her be in this role. She's phenomenal. I don't know a time when she's not. She's an incredible actor. I know everybody, like goes crazy for her voice because they should. Because what the instrument that she has is like bizarre and amazing, but she's a phenomenal actor. Like, I really respect the hell out of her and I genuinely cannot wait to see her in this part. I think she's drastically young for that role, but I also think she's gonna be phenomenal. Like, I think actually it's gonna be great. So who cares?
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Matt Tammini
Join Me when this was announced, I was like, oh, I'm thinking I'm gonna have to come in at some point in January or February because I will have to see English when it opens on Broadway, even though they have not yet announced a cast, which is wild to me. But it starts previews on January 3rd and opens on January 23rd. So I guess, oh man, if she was going on the 22nd, I could probably make that work to also be there in time to see English. So I'm not sure I'm gonna make it, but I will. I'm sure somebody will have a slime tutorial that they could share. So we will see about that. All right. And then last week we talked about the fact that they were going to do a staged reading with an orchestra of Sinatra the Musical on Thursday up at the Apollo Theater. The production was directed as it was in its world premiere at the Birmingham Rep in the UK last year by Kathleen Marshall and featured Matt Doyle, Anavia Fane, and more. Now, Tina Sinatra, the daughter of Frank Sinatra, has said she believes that this needs to be on Broadway and she's doing everything she can to make sure that happened, which is not a surprise. We all knew that that is where this is at least aimed. Whether or not it gets there, we will have to wait and see. But we also do have highlights from that reading if you want to check that out in the show notes. I can't imagine this making it to Broadway this season, Grace, just because there's not a lot of houses open. But as we talked about last week, the timing of this kind of sudden staged industry invite only reading is curious. So we will have to wait and see what happens there. And then finally for a feel good recommendation we are heading over to the Stephen Sondheim Theater because we talked about the fact that NSync's JC Chase would be hosting a singalong performance of Ann Juliet and after the show he sung along. He and the cast did a performance of Tearing Up My Heart. So if you want to check that out in the show notes, you definitely should. People my age into the general NSYNC age demographic will probably love this one quite a bit.
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Grace Aki
Grace yeah, the videos I saw out of that night were crazy. And the fact that on Gypsy first preview and Wicked kind of early release and had a sing along that night and the theater was absolutely like, people were tearing the roof off the place. Like, kudos to that. Like, that just, just speaks volumes of how amazing and how much people love these sing alongs, especially at angelia. But also J.C. like, who is just a class act but also like so talented. And I watched all the videos, obviously, and they were very good.
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Matt Tammini
All right, everybody, that's all we have for today. Thanks for listening to Today on Broadway. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at Broadway Radio. And you can follow me on Instagram @ww Matt Grace, where can people find you?
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Grace Aki
You can find me at Grace Hockey.
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Matt Tammini
All right, everybody, have a wonderful Monday and we'll be back to talk to you tomorrow.