2008 Tony Award nominations The nominees for the 2007-08 Tony Awards were announced this morning. Here are the ones for musicals: BEST MUSICAL: Cry-Baby In the Heights Passing Strange Xanadu BEST REVIVAL OF A MUSICAL: Grease Gypsy South Pacific Sunday in the Park With George BEST PERFORMANCE BY A LEADING ACTOR IN A MUSICAL: Daniel Evans, Sunday in the Park With George Lin-Manuel Miranda, In the Heights Stew, Passing Strange Paulo Szot, South Pacific Tom Wopat, A Catered Affair BEST PERFORMANCE BY A LEADING ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL: Kerry Butler, Xanadu Patti LuPone, Gypsy Kelli O'Hara, South Pacific Faith Prince, A Catered Affair Jenna Russell, Sunday in the Park With George BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEATURED ACTOR IN A MUSICAL: Daniel Breaker, Passing Strange Danny Burstein, South Pacific Robin De Jesús, In The Heights Christopher Fitzgerald, Young Frankenstein Boyd Gaines, Gypsy BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEATURED ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL: de'Adre Aziza, Passing Strange Laura Benanti, Gypsy Andrea Martin, Young Frankenstein Olga Merediz, In The Heights Loretta Ables Sayre, South Pacific BEST DIRECTION OF A MUSICAL: Sam Buntrock, Sunday in the Park with George Thomas Kail, In The Heights Arthur Laurents, Gypsy Bartlett Sher, South Pacific BEST CHOREOGRAPHY: Rob Ashford, Cry-Baby Andy Blankenbuehler, In The Heights Christopher Gattelli, South Pacific Dan Knechtges, Xanadu BEST ORIGINAL SCORE: Cry-Baby: music & lyrics by David Javerbaum & Adam Schlesinger In The Heights: music & lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda The Little Mermaid: music by Alan Menken / lyrics by Howard Ashman & Glenn Slater Passing Strange: music by Stew & Heidi Rodewald / lyrics by Stew BEST ORCHESTRATIONS: Jason Carr, Sunday in the Park with George Alex Lacamoire & Bill Sherman, In the Heights Stew & Heidi Rodewald, Passing Strange Jonathan Tunick, A Catered Affair BEST BOOK OF A MUSICAL: Douglas Carter Beane, Xanadu Quiara Alegria Hudes, In the Heights Mark O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan, Cry-Baby Stew, Passing Strange BEST SCENIC DESIGN OF A MUSICAL: David Farley & Timothy Bird, Sunday in the Park with George Anna Louizos, In the Heights Robin Wagner, Young Frankenstein Michael Yeargan, South Pacific BEST COSTUME DESIGN OF A MUSICAL: David Farley, Sunday in the Park with George Martin Pakledinaz, Gypsy Paul Tazewell, In the Heights Catherine Zuber, South Pacific BEST LIGHTING DESIGN OF A MUSICAL: Ken Billington, Sunday in the Park with George Howell Binkley, In the Heights Donald Holder, South Pacific Natasha Katz, The Little Mermaid BEST SOUND DESIGN OF A MUSICAL: Acme Sound Partners, In the Heights Sebastian Frost, Sunday in the Park with George Scott Lehrer, South Pacific Dan Moses Schreier, Gypsy SPECIAL AWARDS, LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT: Stephen Sondheim (composer / lyricist) Robert Russell Bennett (orchestrator; 1894-1981) Total number of nominations for musicals: 13- In The Heights 11- South Pacific 9- Sunday in the Park with George 7- Gypsy, Passing Strange 4- Cry-Baby, Xanadu 3- A Catered Affair, Young Frankenstein 2- The Little Mermaid 1- Grease (Glory Days, which closed after its opening night performance, was ruled ineligible for any nominations.) The Tony Awards will be held at Radio City Music Hall and will be broadcast by CBS at 8 PM on Sunday, June 15.
Just saw the 25th anniversary tour or Les Miserables at the Kennedy Center. Biggest change: the rotating turntable is gone. And I'd spent the past 5 years telling the kids how great it was. But no matter, the set uses backdrops inspired by Victor Hugo's streetscapes. The way they move, the set is alive, almost. Best performance: Javert's suicide. I'll remember the staging for years. Weirdest touch: Marius sings Empty Chairs at Empty Tables in the street. So much for "from the table in the corner...: Overall: The singers had powerful voices, but overall, the musicality was very jarring. Either they spoke too many lines or they were screeching at the top of their lungs. Still great fun, but it didn't leave me breathless.
Re: 50th Annual Grammy Awards nominations The nominations for the 2011 Grammy Awards have been announced. Here are the ones for Best Musical Theater album: Anything Goes Cole Porter; Broadway Revival Cast; Ghostlight Records. The Book of Mormon Robert Lopez, Trey Parker & Matt Stone; Original Broadway Revival Cast; Ghostlight Records. How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying Frank Loesser; Broadway Revival Cast; Universal/Decca Broadway. The Grammys will be held on Feb. 12, 2012. Obviously this will be a slam dunk for Mormon. And only three nominees? Missing in action: --Knickerbocker Holiday (Ghostlight): Done in concert at Lincoln Center and historically important as the first major recording of this 1938 Kurt Weill score. It would have been better being recorded in a studio instead of in performance where it gets somewhat marred by audience reactions and applause. Still, it fills a major void in Weill's Broadway canon and should have received recognition with a nomination. Now if someone would get around to a complete One Touch of Venus so we could have a solid recording of all Weill's American musicals. --Strike Up the Band (PS Classics): Studio cast of George Gershwin's 1930 Broadway revision of this show after it had previously crashed and burned out-of-town in 1927. That one was given a nice studio job in 1991, but it took until this year to finally get a release of the 1930 version. It's fine and was worthy of a nomination as well. --Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark (Mercury/Interscope): While this show was all over the news because of its myriad problems, the cast album was released with little fanfare. Basically just a curiosity, but I was wondering if it would somehow snag a nomination thanks to the involvement of Bono and The Edge. Other possiblities were: Catch Me If You Can (Ghostlight); Maury Yeston's Death Takes a Holiday (PS Classics); and the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice expansion of The Wizard of Oz (Really Useful/Decca).
Re: 50th Annual Grammy Awards nominations Oops... forgot about Love Life, a 1948 show Kurt Weill did with Alan Jay Lerner. That one is even more seriously in need of a recording. At least with Venus, we can enjoy the truncated Mary Martin original cast album. Love Life however ran during one of the notorious recording bans of that era and no tracks from it were produced at all. Although most songs from the show did receive the dubious Ben Bagley treatment on his Painted Smiles label many years ago.
I finally had the chance to see this new show last night at the Winspear Opera House in Dallas. I agree with everything you said above. I thought the sewer backdrops were fantastic. I also think that Javert's Soliloquy was by far the highlight of the new staging. Very well done. For me the worst part of the new staging is that we don't have access to the other side of the barricade... which didn't support the deaths of Eponine or Gavroche. Regardless, there were some spectacular voices last night including J. Mark McVey as Valjean, Andrew Varela as Javert, and especially Chasten Harmon as Eponine. This show was an excellent way to ring in the New Year.
I was amazed to drop by this board to see this thread still active. I'm even more impressed at how prescient my Green Day/Tonys comment was!
That Green Day actually did end up playing the Tony Awards and "American Idiot"'s win of two statues. Who woulda thunk it?
Fair enough - although I don't think they really transformed broadway - maybe brought in a few green day fans briefly but not sure it otherwise had that big of an impact.
In November, I finally got around to seeing my first musical, Wicked. I saw the 1st National Tour 3 times during their stop in Cincinnati. I know the show has been around for nearly a decade now and I am incredibly late to the party, but I absolutely LOVED it! The story, the costumes, the music, the sets...all spectacular. Loved the cast (Mamie Parris is a phenomenal Elphaba, and Katie Rose Clarke is second only to Cheno...though Kyle Dean Massey is a talented but boring Fiyero). Can't wait until the 2nd NT comes to Dayton later this year Going to see Billy Elliot here in a couple weeks. Can't wait for that.
Re: 50th Annual Grammy Awards nominations Well, there's exciting news about this... Melissa Errico, Brent Barrett, Victoria Clark, Judy Kaye, Ron Raines Record Complete 'One Touch of Venus' - Playbill Can't wait! Weill was one of the only Broadway composers to actually write out full orchestrations for his shows. Gershwin occasionally wrote orchestrations for a few numbers in his shows -- he did Porgy and Bess entirely, in fact. Leonard Bernstein also contributed some orchestrations to his shows.
Why? I like musicals, I accept the notion that people can break into song, either to the apparent indifference of their fellow cast members, or even more unbelievably, in complete choreography with them. I started narrowly on Rodgers and Hammerstein, but over the years have come to appreciate a greater variety of composers. I love movies/plays that I wouldn't otherwise consider musicals but happen to have a song or two in them. And Les Miserables is clearly head and shoulders better than any other musical I've ever seen. The scope of the play is greater than anything else musical theater usually deals with, it is perhaps the most successful, nuanced adaptation of a major literary work on either the stage or screen, and we're not even hearing it in it's original language.
It always strikes me that there's a fervor behind their love of this show which I don't find when someone mentions one of the classics as a favorite. It's like a cult or something. (Of shows from the Golden Age, I've found the Gypsy adherents are the most fanatical.) I'm the last person around here you have to convince to love musicals. I fully accept whatever is going on in them. I've never understood why people have a problem with that. And it doesn't get any better than Rodgers & Hammerstein. Well, the original French Les Misérables was about half as long as the English-language version. Cameron Mackintosh was the one who conceived turning it into a grand epic with overwhelming sweep. He's the one who decided to stage the whole novel! I'm not knocking its success. It's certainly one of the best of the so-called Pop Operas. I'm not one who is too enamoured of sung-through works, which I guess is the issue here. Simply, they tend to rely on incessant musical repetition, numerous and fragmented reprises, and needlessly sung passages that would work better and move the play along swifter as dialogue. Just a difference in taste. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the next post...
Les Miz Stage Star Colm Wilkinson Will Play Vital Role in Musical's Film Version - Playbill As this article states, Colm Wilkinson made a recording of Phantom of the Opera from the Toronto production in 1991. He's quite good and so is the album. It's a nice companion piece to the original. It was engineered differently and hasn't got the over-synthesized "wall of sound" style of Michael Crawford's Phantom. Wilkinson was also a fine Che Guevara on the 1976 Evita concept album, where he was billed as C.T. Wilkinson.
OMG, Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe. I'm going to be sick.... Hmm, I heard the French version of Les Miserables first, my folks had ordered the English, but the wrong edition in the mail. I can read a little French, so I was reading the words, listening to the music, and it seemed like two hours to me. I'll have to track down the French language version again... I understand the distaste, perhaps, for the sung-through libretto, and while it is a matter of taste, I can understand why some might like it in this case. See, I'm tone-deaf and musically illiterate, though I love music. Listening to Les Mis, and "catching" the musical reprises is like an giant in-joke for those of us who are ignorant. I loved catching the notes of Javert's theme repeated throughout Confrontation, Stars, Fall and even into One Day More. And then there's the whole snobbishness of opera.... I'd love to love opera, but it is purposely inaccessible to us unwashed masses. Subtitled opera is just silly, and besides, I want to sing along in my head with the music. Les Mis feels more operatic than a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical and the lack of non-musical downtime, I think, makes for a more impressive performance experience. I'm still sick at the thought of Jackman playing Valjean....
Betty Buckley tears a second one in Randy Jackson. Beautiful! Randy Jackson’s Twitter War with Broadway! - N.Y. Post
Re: 50th Annual Grammy Awards nominations As expected, The Book of Mormon has been announced as the winner on the Grammys website. They never give this award on the air.
Article on Stephen Sondheim in which he hints about a new show. Very exciting news. In New York We're Starved of Plays, Says Stephen Sondheim - London Evening Standard Playbill reports: The Evening Standard piece also gets into the rumor of a movie version of Into the Woods. I really wish he wouldn't squander much time on such a project. He's not getting any younger and why waste the energy on that when he could produce something new for the stage. Into the Woods happens to be one of Sondheim's weakest scores. Besides, there's a perfectly acceptable DVD of the original Broadway production if anyone is interested in watching it.
Too true... Though there is nothing funnier than Agony... [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFgMowOwek0&feature=fvwrel"]Into the Woods - "Agony" - YouTube[/ame]
Is it possible that ideas for musicals can get any worse!? Exploit a piece of lowbrow crap and add a score written by a some pop band that doesn't have a clue about legit musical theatre. 'Animal House' Musical to Bring Toga Party to Broadway - L.A. Times Anyone who still appreciates literacy and sophistication in songwriting would be advised to watch the PBS special airing this month about Oscar Hammerstein II. He wrote with geniuses like Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers. Ever hear of them? It's on WNET in New York tonight at 8. There was a time theatre music was written by adults, not addle-brained rockers.
It's worse than the "collect a bunch of pop hits from a generation ago and make just enough plot to string them together" model?
Additional casting news for the Les Miserables pic... Sacha Baron Cohen Confirmed for 'Les Miz' Film - Playbill
Some upcoming CD releases... --Sweeney Todd (First Night); 2012 London revival of 1979 Stephen Sondheim show, release on April 10. --Bonnie and Clyde (Broadway); recent flop from Frank Wildhorn, release on April 24. --The Good Old Bad Old Days (Kritzerland); first CD release of Anthony Newley's 1972 London flop, limited edition, release on May 1. --Newsies (Ghostlight); new stage version of 1992 Walt Disney movie, release on May 15. --Porgy and Bess (PS Classics); current Broadway overhaul of Gershwin's 1935 opera, 2-disc, release on May 22. --Sweet Little Devil (PS Classics); studio cast recreation of 1924 George Gershwin show with original orchestrations, release on May 22. --Merrily We Roll Along (PS Classics); recent Encores concert production of 1981 Stephen Sondheim show, 2-disc, release on June 19.