CNN To Broadcast Good Night and Good Luck

Glenn Fleshler and George Clooney in
Good Night, and Good Luck.
Credit: Emilio Madrid

CNN will broadcast live the penultimate performance of Good Night and Good Luck, George Clooney and Grant Heslov's play based on their screenplay, from the Winter Garden Theater on June 7 at 7pm (the night before the Tony Awards.) The press release states this is first time a play will be broadcast live from a Broadway theater. I seem to recall PBS airing a transmission of The Man Who Came to Dinner from the American Airlines Theater (now the Todd Haimes), but maybe that was a recording. There also have been telecasts of She Loves Me on PBS, South Pacific, The Light in the Piazza and Contact on Live from Lincoln Center (I think these were recordings also, but I'm not sure). In 1982, NBC presented a series of live broadcasts of plays but not from Broadway. These included Tom Selleck in Mister Roberts and Pearl Bailey in Member of the Wedding. In recent years there have been live productions of musicals such as Grease, The Wiz, Peter Pan, The Sound of Music and Hairspray, but those were in TV studios, sometimes with live audiences. There was also a live broadcast of Show Girl starring Carol Channing on Canadian pay TV in 1961.

The telecast will include a pre-show coverage outside the theater and a post-show special discussing the perilous state of world journalism. 

Nicole Scherzinger, Happy Ending, Oh Mary! Win Drama League Awards

The Drama League Awards were presented on Fri. May 16 at the Ziegfeld Ballroom in a ceremony hosted by NY-1 News theater reporter Frank DiLella.

Nicole Scherzinger of Sunset Blvd.
won the Distinguished 
Performance Drama League Award for 2025.

Nicole Scherzinger won the Distinguished Performance Award for her work in Sunset Boulevard; the well-respected honor can only be won once during the career of an actor. Maybe Happy Ending took home the Award for Outstanding Production of a Musical, and Oh, Mary! won for Outstanding Production of a Play. (Maybe Happy Ending has won the Outer Critics and the New York Drama Critics Circle Awards for Best Musical and is the  favorite the Best Musical Tony.) For the first time in 25 years, in any category, Eureka Day and Vanya tied for the honor of Outstanding Revival of a Play, and Outstanding Revival of a Musical was awarded to Sunset Boulevard. In the directing categories, Sam Pinkleton took home the Outstanding Direction of a Play award for Oh, Mary! and Michael Arden took home Outstanding Direction of a Musical for Maybe Happy Ending. 

The competitive awards were presented by previous Distinguished Performance Award Winners Annaleigh Ashford, Norbert Leo Butz, Danny Burstein, Audra McDonald, and Sutton Foster. Previous honoree for the Founders Award for Excellence in Directing, Schele Williams, presented the  Outstanding Direction of a Play & Musical Awards.

Tony Award winner and star of this season’s Old Friends, Bernadette Peters, presented both the Award for Distinguished Achievement in Musical Theater to her co-star, Tony and Olivier Award winner Lea Salonga, and The Gratitude Award to acclaimed theater, television and film producers Robert Greenblatt and Neil Meron, represented on Broadway this season with Smash; Tony Award winner Sam Gold (Romeo + Juliet) presented the Founders Award for Excellence in Directing to Tony and Drama League nominee Whitney White (The Last Five Years, Liberation); and Michael Cruz Kayne (Sorry For Your Loss) presented the Contribution to the Theater Award to Kate Navin and Audible Theater.
 

Book Review: Norwegian Wood

(Bought at Barnes and Noble with a gift card): I think I have to be in the right mood to read a Haruki Murakami novel. This one was different from the others I've read. There are no mystical elements such as talking monkeys or fish falling from the sky or giant frogs saving Tokyo. It's basically a love story of a young student in the 1960s caught between two women, one has mental health issues and the other is quirky, free-spirited and independent. He loves both of them and can't decide which to settle on. This was the novel that established Murakami as a top author in Japan. I prefer his more esoteric works like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles or Kafka on the Shore. They give you more to think about and to try and figure out. This was a perfectly charming book but it didn't strike me as compelling. I liked the portrait of Reiko, the older woman who is the roommate and fellow mental patient with Naoko, the girl with psychological problems. 

Book Review: Patience

(Borrowed from NYPL on 40th St., 3rd floor graphic novel section): Amazing read. Daniel Clowes' dazzling sci-fi thriller reads like a movie. I have loved all of his work including Wilson, Ghost World, Ice Haven, and Caricature. An economically oppressed couple is expecting a baby. Suddenly the husband comes home to find his wife killed in an apparent botched break-in. He spends the rest of his life trying to bring her back as we travel into a bizarre future. The panels spring right off the page, sometimes blurring over the edges to suggest the weird psychedelic trip the husband takes through time and his own consciousness. The portraits of working-class despair and random cruelty are heartbreaking. The title is ironic as Patience tries to piece together the jumbled mess her obsessed hubbie creates in his misguided efforts to save her.

B'way/Off-B'way Update: MTC and Public Theater Seasons

David Lindsay-Abaire
Credit: Tricia Baron

Manhattan Theater Club and The Public Theater have announced all or part of their 2025-26 New York theater season schedules.  MTC will present two plays by Pulitzer Prize-winning authors while the Public will deliver a plethora of world premieres. MTC will premiere The Balusters by David Lindsay-Abaire (Dinner with Friends, Rabbit Hole, Good People) at Broadway's Samuel J. Friedman Theater in the spring of 2026. 

"Manhattan Theatre Club has been my artistic home since I was a baby-playwright, so of course I’m thrilled to be back with The Balusters, my newest play about well-intentioned people behaving really badly,” commented David Lindsay-Abaire. “The only thing more exciting than having a new show on Broadway? Having it helmed by the brilliant director Kenny Leon. After twenty-five years of plays with MTC, I’ve never looked forward to sharing a story with an audience more than I am with The Balusters." The play focuses on a small residential community which is thrown into turmoil when a newcomer suggests installing a stop sign at the corner of the neighborhood's prettiest block.

Off-B'way Reviews: The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse; All Nighter

Patrick Nathan Falk, Milly Shapiro, and
Luke Islam in The Last Bimbo of the
Apocalypse.
Credit: Monique Carboni

The impact of our celebrity-obsessed digital culture is explored in the intimate and funny new musical The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse from The New Group at the Signature Theater Center. The book by Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley sharply satirizes the  click-crazy ecosphere which values appearance and flash over substance. The energetic rock score by Breslin (music and lyrics) and Foley (additional music and lyrics) captures the empty ache experienced by many Gen Z-ers seeking meaning through their devices. The show could have been as shallow as the situation it purports to parody, but the authors have captured the sweet innocence of an alienated youth, isolated by COVID and unable to recover in-person social skills. “I’ll take a picture on my phone/And post it so I’m not alone,” is one of the more haunting lyrics. “I don’t wanna do anything/And I want to be rewarded for it” is another which captures the desperate state of disconnection dominating our world.

Milly Shapiro and Keri Rene Fuller in
The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse.
Credit: Monique Carboni

The plot centers on an infamous picture of media sensations Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and Paris Hilton which ran in the New York Post in 2006 with the caption “The Three Bimbos of the Apocalypse.” Breslin and Foley imagine there was a fourth “Bimbo” in the pic in the form of a barely visible wrist. An Internet sleuth calling herself “Brainworm” (a heartbreaking Milly Shapiro) is determined to find the identity of the missing girl. By searching for this elusive possible pop-culture icon, she hopes to find her own identity and possibly venture into real life. (She has not left her room in four years.) She is joined by a pair of gay male YouTubers identified as Bookworm and Earworm, one of whom is closeted (funny and flamboyant Patrick Nathan Falk and Luke Islam). 

Their search leads to Coco (dynamic Keri Rene Fuller), the wrist in the photo and a wannabe singer who vanished after her one attempt at topping the charts failed. Along the way, the trio encounters Coco’s religious-fanatic mother (fiery Sara Gettelfinger) and an unidentified friend (quirky Natalie Walker) who holds the key to the mystery. 

Director Rory Pelsue cleverly stages this journey through cyberspace as if the characters were all in physical proximity though they are mostly communicating through their screens. Amit Chandrashaker’s spectral lighting, some of which is through cell-phone illumination, aides in the illusion. Cole McCarty designed the kicky costumes spanning the last two decades of hipster fashion. Pelsue also balances the comic, satiric elements with compassion for the disillusioned Internet addicts. The cast, especially Shapiro, portrays them as broken loners rather than as eccentric goofballs obsessed with trivia. These are more than comic Bimbos, they’re human beings.

The cast of All Nighter.
Credit: Evan Zimmerman

In another Off-Broadway show about young people coping with a difficult world, Natalie Margolin’s All-Nighter insightfully dissects a quintet of female college seniors as they pull their final nocturnal study session and embark on becoming adults. Each is riddled with anxiety and insecurities as they down copious amounts of Adderall, energy drinks, white wine, and humus to maintain the stamina to complete their last assignments. A ghost is blamed for unusual happenings in their shared house as the night drags on and uncomfortable truths are revealed. 

Margolin is a promising playwright, creating believable characters and skillfully building a riveting story arc employing interesting details and building suspense through careful clues. Jaki Bradley’s well-paced direction includes hilariously fast-motion action to denote the passage of time and Isa Briones, Kathryn Gallagher, Alyah Chanelle Scott and understudy Tessa Albertson deliver complex portraits of young women in conflict with themselves and each other. As Wilma, the outspoken outsider of the group, Julia Lester crashes into the action like a hurricane. Wilma longs to be noticed, and more importantly, accepted. Lester fullfils this objective with spectacular character choices, endowing each gesture and action with subtext. Even munching on a bag of potato chips or aggressively opening a collapsible stool so she can join the study table reveals tons about Wilma and her needs. It’s a fascinating performance in an excellent ensemble.

  

The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse: May 13—June 1. The New Group at the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theater/Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St., NYC. Running time: 95 mins. with no intermission. thenewgroup.org.

All Nighter: March 9—May 18. Newman Mills Theater/Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space, 511 W. 52nd St., NYC (this is not a production of MCC Theater). Running time: 90 mins. with no intermission. allnighterplay.com.

Happy Ending and Proctor Win OCC Awards

John Proctor Is the Villain
was named Outstanding Broadway Play
by the Outer Critics Circle.
Credit: Julieta Cervantes

Maybe Happy Ending and John Proctor Is the Villain were named Outstanding Broadway Musical and Broadway Play by the Outer Critics Circle, the official organization of writers on New York theatre for out-of-town, national, and digital news publications, honoring the 2024-2025 Broadway and Off-Broadway season. Happy Ending won a total of four awards also including Outstanding Director of a Musical, Book and Score. The awards will be presented on May 22 at Lincoln Center's Library for for the Performing Arts. Presenters will include Natalie Venetia Belcon (Buena Vista Social Club), Victoria Clark (Kimberly Akimbo), Andrew Durand (Dead Outlaw), Steve Guttenberg (It Takes Two), and Thom Sesma (Dead Outlaw).

Liberation by Bess Wohl was named Outstanding Off-Broadway Play and Drag: The Musical Outstanding Off-Broadway Musical. Laura Donnelly of The Hills of California, Francis Jue of Yellow Face, won for Outstanding Broadway Performances (Lead and Featured) for Broadway Plays. Surprisingly Jasmine Amy Rogers of BOOP! The Musical defeated favorites Audra McDonald of Gypsy and Nicole Scherzinger of Sunset Blvd. for Outstanding Lead Performance in a Broadway Musical. Jak Malone who delivers the moving "Dear Bill" in Operation Mincemeat won for Outstanding Broadway Featured Musical performance. The OCC performance categories are gender-free but separate Broadway and Off-Broadway. OB winners include Adam Driver of Hold On to Me Darling, Nick Adams in Drag: The Musical, Michael Rishawn in Table 17 and Andre De Shields of Cats: The Jellicle Ball.

The Outer Critics Circle is an esteemed association with members affiliated with more than ninety newspapers, magazines, broadcast stations, and online news organizations, in America and abroad. Led by its current President David Gordon, the OCC Board of Directors and Nominating Committee also includes Vice President Richard Ridge, Recording Secretary Joseph Cervelli, Corresponding Secretary Patrick Hoffman, Treasurer David Roberts, Cynthia Allen, Harry Haun, Dan Rubins, Janice Simpson and Doug Strassler. Simon Saltzman is President Emeritus & Board Member (Non-nominating) and Stanley L. Cohen serves as Financial Consultant & Board Member (Non-nominating). Lauren Yarger serves as the Outer Critics Circle Awards ceremony executive producer.

A complete list of the winners follows: