Spider-Man, Broadway's Favorite Money-Pit

from NPR:

Taking a page from the comics, producers of Broadway's "Spider-Man" musical are hoping their battered hero can somehow return from the dead.

"Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark," Broadway's most expensive and audacious show, emerges from a three-week hiatus Thursday night with what the creative team and producers say is a cleaner story, tighter music and more love story.

The $70 million musical with music by U2's Bono and The Edge reopens with most of the cast intact but without the visionary Julie Taymor as director. Reeve Carney, who plays Peter Parker, said the changes have been reinvigorating.

"There's an energy in the company because of having a clear direction, knowing where we're headed and knowing that it's going to be to a greater place," said Carney. The new script, he says, "jumps off the page at you."

Playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, director Philip William McKinley and choreographer Chase Brock cleaned up a story that had wandered into darker and mythological themes, while Bono and The Edge reworked the songs. More flying stunts were added and the romance between Peter Parker and Mary Jane returned to center stage.

The original show began previews in November and soon went bad. Performances were canceled and stunts went awry, leaving actors trapped hanging over the audience. There were five major accidents to cast members, including one to lead actress Natalie Mendoza, who left the show after suffering a concussion.

The worst accident happened to actor Christopher Tierney, who suffered a fractured skull, a fractured shoulder blade, four broken ribs and three broken vertebrae on Dec. 20 when he tumbled in front of a shocked preview audience after a safety harness failed. In April, only four months after the fall, he returned to the show and is expected to again execute the main Spider-Man aerial stunts on Thursday.

I'm glad they decided to go from "trying too hard to be meaningful" to "trying too hard to sell tickets."

Oprah Demands More Attention

Oprah in the title role of "King Kong," holding a small blonde woman in her right hand

from Huffington Post:

Brace yourselves, New York: Oprah is coming to Broadway.

In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Oprah said that she has every intention of acting in a Boradway play once her talk show ends.

"I have a stack of plays in my bag right now that I am reading," she said. "And just this past weekend, I was in New York meeting with producers. We were just talking about what would be the best route to take. But yes, this is really going to happen." She said that an ensemble show would be the best route for her to take.

Of course, Oprah will have to fit a Broadway play into her already busy schedule. On Monday, she admitted that OWN, the network she created, "is not where I want it to be," and said she would be devoting much more of her time to ensuring its success.

Oprah is also not a Broadway—or acting—novice. She was intimately involved in bringing the musical adaptation of "The Color Purple" to the stage, and has acted in movies for nearly 30 years. She is also set to star in an HBO movie, "Ruined."

In her interview with the Tribune, Oprah seemed dead set on making sure she got to Broadway. (And really, what producer would turn her down?)

"This next phase of my life should be pure delight," she said.

For you, perhaps.  For us, it'll be like, AAAAAAAAH, AAAAAAH, SAVE US, SAVE US, RUN FOR YOUR LIVES, and then Jack Black goes "Twas beauty killed the beast" aaaaaand curtain

Spider-Man Different, But The Same

from NYT:

Bathed in green light, Patrick Page took center stage at the Foxwoods Theater on Broadway and hissed his lines with the sinister glee of a villain back from the dead.

Which he is. Playing the Green Goblin in the musical extravaganza “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” Mr. Page saw his character killed off in Act I during all 145 preview performances of Julie Taymor’s version of the show this winter. Yet there was the Goblin alive and well in Act II at Friday’s rehearsal of “Spider-Man,” cracking wise in a new scene lampooning telephone voice mail.

Resurrected at the urging of focus groups that the producers convened, the Goblin and his patter are among the signs that “Spider-Man” has largely abandoned Ms. Taymor’s Wagnerian ambitions and high-concept artistry, going for a comic-book sensibility instead. The musical is aiming to capture “the 8-to-88-year-old market,” in the words of Philip William McKinley, who is now overseeing the show’s direction, as the producers seek a strategy to make good on their record-setting investment of $70 million.

After a three-week performance hiatus to accommodate a creative overhaul, at a cost of $5 million, “Spider-Man” is set to resume previews on Thursday with what its producers said they hoped would be a lighter, circuslike spirit. Five flying sequences have been added to the previous two dozen. The roles of Aunt May, Uncle Ben and Mary Jane Watson — cherished characters from Spider-Man lore — have been expanded. The musical’s composers, Bono and the Edge of U2, have added a few new songs and rewritten several others.

Bono and Edge, in their first news media interview about “Spider-Man” since performances began in November, said on Monday that they loved much about Ms. Taymor’s version but felt it relied on spectacle rather than on story. Theater critics savaged that show in February, and Bono and Edge said that all of the original collaborators — not simply Ms. Taymor, who was fired in March — shared responsibility. But for “Spider-Man” to succeed, they said, it needed to stir people emotionally.

If all you need is to stir people emotionally, you can make it the story of a man getting dropped from the cable system and breaking his arm, and his ambition to continue being Spider-Man.  Meta, but effective.

Rest In Peace, Arthur Laurents

from Los Angeles:

Arthur Laurents, who died Thursday as an exceptionally young nonagenarian, was one musical theater writer who was impossible to overlook. Dismiss him — and how could you dismiss the man who wrote the books for "West Side Story" and "Gypsy"? — and you'd have your head handed to you, no matter if you were a lowly reviewer or a formidable diva.

Feisty, irascible, sharp-tongued and fearless, he had a reputation in the theater as someone who was always spoiling for a fight. Age hadn't mellowed him. Even in his late 80s and early 90s, when he was busy directing revivals of his classics on Broadway, he was still settling scores with a few choice quips.

As the news of his death spread Thursday evening, theater people were trading stories about the "holy terror" that was Laurents. Harvey Fierstein reminded his Twitter following of a joke he made on the occasion of Laurents' 85th birthday that his legendary colleague (who won a Tony for directing "La Cage aux Folles," for which Fierstein wrote the book) was "living proof that the good die young." At the intermission of "War Horse" at Lincoln Center, friends were speculating whether Barbra Streisand would at last get to star in a new film version of "Gypsy" now that Laurents was no longer around to block it from happening.

This might sound like sacrilege, but the truth is these comments were made by people who revere Laurents and wouldn't dream of questioning his hallowed place in the Broadway firmament. But Laurents was not just a great theater artist — he was also a great theatrical character. His bitchiness enlivened the Rialto, his feuds fed the tabloid columnists and his gossip kept the after-show drinks crowd at Sardi's, Joe Allen and Angus McIndoe tittering over a second martini. He didn't just kiss and tell in his memoir "Original Story By"; he indicted anyone who discriminated against him as a gay man or double-crossed him in showbiz.

Somebody set fire to some papers

This is actually nothing to do with Broadway theater but here you go.

from Seattle:

Seattle police were documenting the evidence at Broadway and Thomas early Thursday morning at the scene of another suspicious small fire in the city. On the sidewalk near a set of newspaper boxes outside Julia's, another stack of free weeklies up in flames.

Early Wednesday morning, somebody torched a newspaper box in the U District.

Meanwhile on Capitol Hill on Tuesday night, CHS reported on a small fire set to flyers on the north side of the Sun Electric building at 11th and Pine. SPD said they were not yet investigating the E Pine fire as an arson.

In Thursday's Broadway incident, it appeared that the fire had been set to papers inside the Stranger's box. The kiosk at Broadway and Thomas is across the street from the area where buildings were recently demolished for the 230 Broadway project and the frequently targeted Broadway Chase bank.

Damage was minimal and there were no reported injuries in any of the fire incidents.

Call the FBI, this guy is a criminal mastermind

"Lombardi" to close on Broadway

 from New York:

“Lombardi,” the Broadway play that tried to draw men to the theater with a story about the legendary Green Bay Packers coach, will close on May 22 after a total of 30 preview performances and 244 regular performances, the producers announced on Tuesday night.

Previously scheduled to run through June 19, “Lombardi” is leaving the field after receiving only one 2011 Tony Award nomination, announced Tuesday morning, for best featured actress in a play for Judith Light, who plays the coach’s wife, Marie. The production grossed $155,898 for its eight performances through Sunday, just 21 percent of the maximum possible and the lowest dollar total earned by a Broadway show last week.

Despite mixed reviews from critics in October, “Lombardi” survived through the relatively fallow winter months on Broadway as the only brand-new drama of the fall 2010 season to keep running.

The producers, who included the National Football League, had hoped to capitalize on the Packers’ victory in the Super Bowl in February. The play was praised by game commentators, and the actor Dan Lauria, who plays Lombardi, made an appearance in character in a taped segment during the Fox Sports coverage of the game.

A spokesman for the show did not immediately reply on Wednesday to an email asking if the show would earn back its capitalization, believed to be in the $2 million range, before closing. Few Broadway plays turn a profit.

Some of the “Lombardi” producers are now working to bring another new sports-oriented play to Broadway in 2012: “Magic/Bird,” based on the lives of basketball players Magic Johnson and Larry Bird.

Lombardi was my favorite Broadway play since "Francona," a musical about a bald little man who spits constantly.

"The Book of Mormon" leads Tony noms

 Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of "The Book of Mormon"

 from LA:

"The Book of Mormon," the equal-opportunity-offending Broadway musical from the creators of "South Park," led the Tony Award nominations Tuesday with 14 nods. The musical "The Scottsboro Boys," which closed earlier this season, received 12 nominations, and the revival of "Anything Goes" had nine.

The nominees for best play included "Good People," "The Mother... With the Hat," "Jerusalem" and "War Horse."

This year's acting nominees include Al Pacino in Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice," Edie Falco in "The House of Blue Leaves," Frances McDormand in "Good People," Mark Rylance in "Jerusalem," Ellen Barkin in "The Normal Heart" and Vanessa Redgrave in "Driving Miss Daisy."

The awards, organized by the American Theatre Wing and the Broadway League, honor Broadway productions during the 2010-11 season. This year's ceremony will take place June 12 at the Beacon Theatre in New York. The show will be broadcast live on CBS, with a delay for the West Coast.

"The Book of Mormon," at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre, is the creation of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the duo behind the popular animated series "South Park." The musical comedy, which was co-created by Robert Lopez, tells the story of Mormon missionaries who travel to Africa.
The show's 14 nominations fell just shy of the record 15 nominations earned by "The Producers" in 2001 and "Billy Elliot" in 2009.

"War Horse," adapted by Nick Stafford from the book by Michael Morpurgo, was first produced at the National Theatre in London before moving to the West End. The play, which uses life-size puppets to represent the equine characters, will come to the Ahmanson Theatre in 2012. A film version directed by Steven Spielberg is scheduled to open in December.

The year's most talked-about show, "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark," was ineligible for awards consideration this season because its opening date has been delayed until June 14.

Broadway At The Movies

from Philly:

This weekend through Tuesday, Broadway's current Tony-winning best musical - Memphis - is playing in about 530 cinemas throughout America, including 10 screens here, and it's not some Hollywood version. It's the actual show, taped in high definition with six cameras over a series of performances from the Shubert Theatre stage, where it's in its 670th performance Sunday.

Taking a cue from screened sporting events, concerts, and mostly from the unbridled success of New York's Metropolitan Opera Company - a weekend fixture at many movie theaters - live theater itself is going to the movies.

It has obvious benefits for consumers - even Philadelphians, a 90-minute ride away from real-life, reach-out-and-touch-it Broadway: Memphis at the movies will cost you $20, one-fourth the average Broadway ticket, and you don't have to go far to see it. For movie-house operators, on-screen theater means even more new content to put audiences into downtime seats and bring in additional revenue.

For show producers who depend on real bodies at a single venue when the curtain rises, film-house exposure is just that - a branding device and a potential for international audiences, plus another revenue stream. Although arrangements vary, exhibitors and producers often split cinema box-office receipts 50-50, and theater artists are paid extra by the producers.

Live theater wouldn't be taking this route if it weren't for the Metropolitan Opera, whose nine cinema simulcasts last season sold 2.4 million tickets, grossed $48 million, and put a net profit of $8 million into the opera company's coffers.

 Coming soon: movies at the Broadway!