The Week: Most Recent Arts & Life:

2012 Tony nominations: The 8 biggest snubs and surprises

The Week — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:50:00 -0500

The 2012 Tony Awards nominations were announced Tuesday morning, feting the best productions and performances on Broadway from the past year. The big winner is the new musical Once, adapted from a 2006 indie film about the fleeting romance between a pair of musicians in Dublin, and scoring a leading 11 nominations, including for Best Musical. Also racking up major nods: The Phillip Seymour Hoffman-led revival of Death of a Salesman, the smash new stage adaptation of the Disney musical Newsies, and stars like James Earl Jones, Cynthia Nixon, and Andrew Garfield. (See all the nominees here.) A closer...

The Phantom of the Opera's record-setting run: By the numbers

The Week — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 11:45:00 -0600

Most Broadway productions are lucky to run for a year. On Saturday, The Phantom of the Opera celebrated its 10,000th Broadway performance, setting a record as the longest-running show ever on the Great White Way. Not only that, the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical is still among Broadway's top earners. Here, a look at its blockbuster run, by the numbers:

10,000
Record number of performances clocked by the Broadway production of The Phantom of the Opera. It opened in New York on Jan. 26, 1988.

24
Years Phantom has been on Broadway

7,485
Performances delivered by the cast of Cats, the second longest-running...

The Notebook and 5 other films bizarrely slated to become Broadway musicals

The Week — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:24:00 -0600

There's no shortage of musicals based on films currently playing on Broadway — Sister Act, Mary Poppins, The Lion King, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, and, most famously, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. More are due in 2012, including Ghost and Newsies. It's no surprise, then, that producers are mining the world of cinema for yet more possibilities. But not every project being developed seems like a natural choice. Here's a look at six recently announced movie-inspired musicals that, on the surface, seem like odd fits for the rialto:

The Notebook
The Notebook quickly achieved classic...

Spider-Man's surprise Broadway success: By the numbers

The Week — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 13:26:00 -0600

There may really be no such thing as bad publicity. Despite a litany of negative headlines, damning reviews, late-night ridicule, and a rocky financial start, Broadway's Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark just set a new box office record. The maligned musical's big haul comes just in time for the one-year anniversary of the show's first performance, a disastrous preview on Nov. 28, 2010. It's an unlikely milestone for the musical, which seemed destined to go down as one of the biggest Broadway flops of all time. Here's a look at the surprise success, by the numbers:

$2.07 million
Spider-Man...

Lauren Ambrose in Funny Girl: Can she pull it off?

The Week — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 12:54:00 -0500

The video: Hello, gorgeous! This week, Lauren Ambrose — best known for portraying moody, flame-haired artist Claire on HBO's funeral-parlor drama Six Feet Under — was tapped to play the lead in next year's Broadway-bound revival of Funny Girl, the 1964 musical about the life and career of comedienne Fanny Brice. It's the iconic musical theatre role that launched Barbra Streisand's career, and one that many assumed would go to Glee's Lea Michele, who tore through the show's grand-standing number, "Don't Rain on My Parade," on the Fox show and at the Tony Awards. Can Ambrose fill...

Did Shakespeare smoke pot?

The Week — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 14:25:00 -0500

"To dig, or not to dig? That's the latest question," says Alec Liu at Fox News. Paleontologists from South Africa have filed a formal request to exhume the remains of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) from his burial site in Stratford-upon-Avon. By examining the Bard's corpse, the group hopes to find clues to the kind of life Shakespeare led, and, among other things, confirm or deny the rumor that he avidly smoked marijuana. How will this all go down? Here, a brief guide:

How will they examine his body?
Team leader, anthropologist Francis Thackeray, claims he'll employ "incredible techniques" that...

The Book of Mormon's record-breaking success: By the numbers

The Week — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 13:48:00 -0500

It's been a blockbuster week for the Broadway smash hit, The Book of Mormon, an irreverent tale of two well-intentioned, fish-out-of-water Mormon missionaries in Uganda, written and produced by the creators of the nothing-is-sacred cartoon South Park. The musical won nine Tony Awards on Sunday, its cast album skyrocketed to number three on the Billboard charts, and its top premium ticket price just eclipsed the record set by The Producers in 2001. Here, a brief guide to Mormon's success, by the numbers:

$487.25
Price of a premium ticket to Book of Mormon bought less than 48 hours before...

Broadway's revamped Spider-Man: Still a 'bloated' mess?

The Week — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 12:36:00 -0500

After a record-breaking 183 preview performances and a string of cast injuries, Broadway's favorite punchline, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, finally opened officially Tuesday. When critics famously ridiculed the $75 million musical during February previews, ranking it "among the worst" productions of all time, producers shuttered the show for three weeks of creative retooling before recommencing previews. Maligned director Julie Taymor has been replaced, U2's Bono and the Edge have written new songs, and the plot has been significantly reworked. Have the changes paid off? (Watch a PBS...

Neil Patrick Harris' 'amazing' Tony wrap-up rap

The Week — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 14:57:00 -0500

The video: With Anne Hathaway and James Franco's awkward, bipolar Oscar-hosting gig still painfully burned in our collective memory, Neil Patrick Harris provided a welcome contrast at Sunday night's Tony Awards. The second-time Tony host drew near-universal raves — for his opening number, his duet with Hugh Jackman, and the two-minute rap with which he closed the show, summarizing its highlights. (Watch the video below.) In the Heights' Lin-Manuel Miranda and Tommy Kail wrote the rap together in the venue's basement, and were thrilled with Harris' performance, his first time rapping...

Is 'The Book of Mormon' a Broadway musical 'miracle'?

The Week — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 18:28:00 -0500

Last week, The Book of Mormon, the Broadway musical from South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, opened to surprising critical plaudits. By setting dark topics like religious hypocrisy, AIDS, and genocide in Africa to cheery melodies, it "achieves something like a miracle," says Ben Brantley in The New York Times. Is the show really so great — or just offensive, juvenile humor set to show tunes?

The musical is wimpy and sloppy: The Book of Mormon is "slick and smutty," as well as "flabby, amateurish, and very, very safe," says Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal. Mocking Mormons...

'Spider-Man' musical: Worst Broadway show ever?

The Week — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 15:34:00 -0600

Critics have finally weighed in on Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the disaster-prone $65 million superhero musical — and the results aren't pretty. The New York Times' esteemed reviewer Ben Brantley was just one of many critics to give Julie Taymor's show an emphatic thumbs down. Only Glenn Beck has offered an unqualified good review. Theater critics ordinarily don't review a show until opening night — but decided to contravene their own rule in dismay at the show's seemingly endless run of preview performances (It officially opens on March 15). Here's what they had to say:

Broadway...

Glenn Beck endorses... Broadway's 'Spider-Man'

The Week — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 14:48:00 -0600

The video: Though the opening of Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark has been pushed back, for a fifth time, to March 15, the troubled, accident-prone Broadway musical boasts at least one influential fan: Conservative icon Glenn Beck. On Thursday's edition of his radio show, the polarizing host boisterously defended the $65 million show, comparing it favorably to the smash hit Wicked, and urging Americans to "give a kidney," if necessary, to secure a ticket. Once Spider-Man opens, Beck warned, "you will not be able to get tickets" for a year. He blamed snobbery for the show's poor press, affecting...

Stage: Giant

The Week — Thu, 21 May 2009 10:18:02 -0500

Signature Max Theater
Arlington, Va.
(703) 573-7328

***

“Giant is two hours worth of elegant song spread over four hours of rangy storytelling,” said Peter Marks in The Washington Post. At its best, the “sprawling” new musical based on Edna Ferber’s epic 1952 tale of love and oil on a Texas ranch “plays like a latter-day Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.” Librettist Sybille Pearson’s “potent” book guides us movingly through the love triangle of headstrong rancher Bick Benedict, his socialite wife, Leslie, and “predatory ranch hand&rdquo...

Exhibit of the week: The Generational: Younger Than Jesus

The Week — Thu, 21 May 2009 10:08:03 -0500

New Museum
New York
Through June 14

From a show featuring work by young artists, you might expect brash experimentation and a bold rejection of accepted norms, said Katya Kazakina in Bloomberg.com. But “there’s not much rebellion” in the New Museum’s exhibition of artists ages 33 and under. The 50 tech-savvy artists represented here share a marked disinterest in critiquing the status quo or inventing new forms, preferring instead to “remix vast quantities of visual information from all kinds of sources to construct their own reality.” Though the show features...

Exhibit of the week: Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe

The Week — Thu, 14 May 2009 09:03:08 -0500

Museum of Contemporary Art
Chicago
Through June 21

“We prefer our prophets to be noble,” said Blair Kamin in the Chicago Tribune, but Buckminster Fuller “was a bit of a kook.” The architect and futurist who devised and popularized the geodesic dome was also a prescient environmentalist, “seeing the world as a single ecological entity with limited resources” and designing projects with an eye toward “obtaining maximum impact from minimal materials.” This exhibition dedicated to the “nutty uncle” of American architecture was originally shown...

Stage: Waiting for Godot (London)

The Week — Thu, 14 May 2009 01:53:54 -0500

Theatre Royal Haymarket
London
011-44-845-481-1870

***

Two lions of the British stage and screen are currently playing Samuel Beckett’s tramps on London’s West End, said Quentin Letts in the London Daily Mail. Sir Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart star in Sean Mathias’ “sometimes inventive, often entertaining” take on Beckett’s masterwork. Though this production is bound to be remembered as “the famous McKellen-Stewart Godot,” Mathias takes steps to distinguish his own vision. Notably, he’s taken “one of 20th-century theater’s oddest...