B'way Update: London Death of a Salesman to Transfer

Wendell Pierce and Sharon D. Clarke 
in Death of a Salesman.
Credit: Brinkhoff Mogenburg

Willy Loman will soon be returning to Broadway for the sixth time. A 2019 London production of Arthur Miller's great American play Death of a Salesman with a mostly black cast will be opening on Broadway during the 2022-23 season. Wendell Pierce (The Wire, Serious Money, The Piano Lesson) and Sharon D. Clarke (Caroline, or Change, Doctor Who) will repeat their roles as Willy and Linda. Pierce was nominated for an Olivier Award and Clarke won for this production when it transferred from the Young Vic to the West End. Clarke recently made her Broadway debut in a well-received revival of Caroline, or Change and is a front runner for this season's Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical. She is well-known to sci-fi fans for her recurring role as Grace who was killed by a nasty alien and made occasional re-appearances from the dead on Season 11 and 12 of Doctor Who.

Tony winner Andre de Shields (Hadestown) joins the cast as Willy's brother Ben and Khris Davis (Judas and the Black Messiah) will play the Lomans' wayward son Biff. Dates and a theater are to be announced. Miranda Cromwell will direct this NYC production after co-directing the London staging with Marianne Elliott (Angels in America). Together they won the Olivier Award for Best Direction. 

B'way Update: Cost of Living; Tony and DD Noms Delayed; DD-OCC Mash-Up

Greg Mozgala and Jolly Abraham in
Cost of Living.
Credit: Joan Marcus

Manhattan Theater Club will produce Martyna Majok's Pulitzer Prize-winning Cost of Living on Broadway at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater this fall (no specified date). The play, which debuted at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 2016 and had its NYC premiere at MTC's Off-Broadway space in 2017, deals with four characters facing challenges ranging from physical disability to unemployment. Greg Mozgala, who has cerebral palsy and Katy Sullivan who was born a bilateral transfemoral amputee and is missing both legs, will recreate their roles from the 2017 production. Jo Bonney, the original director, will also return for the Broadway version.

MTC has also announced three productions for its 2022-23 Off-Broadway season but with no specific dates announced. Jeff Augustin's Where the Mountain Meets the Sea which will play MTC's City Center Stage I in the fall, focuses on the son of a Haitian immigrant who recreates his dad's Miami-to-California trek in reverse. Summer, 1976 by Pulitzer Prize winner David Auburn (Proof), about the unlikely relationship between independent artist Diana and young housewife Alice, will play at City Center's Stage II. In the spring of 2023, Qui Nguyen's Poor Yella Rednecks, will open at City Center Stage I. A sequel to Vietgone, the play follows a family of Vietnamese immigrants settling in Arkansas.

Robert Morse, Star of How to Succeed and Mad Men, Dies at 90

Robert Morse in
How to Succeed in Business
Without Really Trying

Yesterday, I reported on the new version of Some Like It Hot coming to Broadway. Robert Morse, one of the stars of a previous musical edition of the classic film comedy called Sugar, just passed away at 90. Morse is best known for his star-making role in both the film and Broadway versions of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. He won a Tony for playing the boyishly charming, gap-toothed but ruthless schemer J. Pierrepont Finch. Succeed ran for over 1,400 performances, and won seven Tonys as well as the Pulitzer Prize, a rarity for a comic musical. Morse won his second Tony for playing another impish character, Truman Capote in the solo play Tru. He made a late-career triumph in the TV series Mad Men as Bertram Cooper, one of the senior partners at the ad agency which provided the focus for the satirical show. He was nominated for five Emmys and won a SAG Ensemble Award for the series in 2010. His last Broadway performance was in an all-star revival of The Front Page in 2016.

Morse made his Broadway debut as the eager Barnaby opposite in Ruth Gordon in Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker which served as the basis for Hello, Dolly. He later reprised the role in the film version with Shirley Booth. He continued to make positive impressions in Say, Darling and Take Me Along before starring in How to Succeed. He later played another eager young man in So Long, 174th Street, a musical based on Carl Reiner's memoir of his days as an aspiring actor.

B'way Update: Some Like It Hot to Heat Up the Shubert

Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon and
Tony Curtis in the original
Some Like It Hot.
Credit: United Artists

Some Like It Hot, a new musical version of Billy Wilder's 1960 film classic about two musicians who don drag to escape the mob, will be coming to Broadway this winter. Previews begin Nov. 1 at the Shubert Theater prior to an opening of Dec. 11. The book will be Matthew Lopez (The Inheritance) and Amber Ruffin (The Amber Ruffin Show) with music by Marc Shaiman and lyrics by Shaiman and Scott Wittman (Hairspray). Tony winner Casey Nicholaw (The Book of Mormon, Something Rotten) directs and choreographs. The cast will be headed by Tony winner Christian Borle (Something Rotten) and J. Harrison Ghee (Mrs. Doutfire) as the cross-dressers and Adrianna Hicks in the Marilyn Monroe role of Sugar, the alluring star feature of the all-female orchestra the boys join. Also in the cast will be Kevin Del Aguila as Osgood, NaTasha Yvette Williams as Sweet Sue, Adam Heller as Mulligan and Mark Lotito as Spats. 

The original film starred Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Monroe and is regarded as one of the classic comedies of the tail-end of Hollywood's Golden Age. The American Film Institute voted it "the Funniest American Movie of All Time."

A previous musical incarnation called Sugar opened in 1972, starred Robert Morse, Tony Roberts, and Elaine Joyce and featured a book by Peter Stone, music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Bob Merrill. It ran for 505 performances. A revival tour was renamed Some Like It Hot and featured Curtis as Osgood.

Drama Desk Dates Announced

The 2021-22 New York theater season is in the home stretch and the awards calendar is filling up. The dates for the Drama Desk Awards have just been added to the mix, after a hiatus of two years. The last DDs were presented remotely via NY1-News in June of 2020, after a delay due to coverage of the death of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests. Since all New York theaters were closed due to the COVID pandemic, the awards were suspended in 2021. Now they are back.

The cut-off for Drama Desk Award eligibility is May 1 and the nominations will be announced on May 2 (one day before the Tony nominations come out and one day after the Lortels are presented). It has not been announced if the nominations will be given out by press release or if there will be a press conference as has been the case prior to 2020. Voting for the awards ends at midnight June 6. The date and location of the ceremony has yet to be announced. The Tony Awards are June 12.

The Drama Desks are the only major New York theater awards to include on and Off-Broadway in all of its multiple categories. The nominations are chosen by a seven-member nominating committee consisting of Martha Wade Steketee (Chair; freelance, UrbanExcavations.com) Peter Filichia (Broadway Radio), Kenji Fujishima (freelance: Theatermania), Juan Michael Porter II (TheBody.com; freelance: TDF Stages, Did They Like It?, New York Theatre Guide), Ayanna Prescod (freelance: Variety, New York Theatre Guide, Today Tix), Zachary Stewart (TheaterMania), and Diep Tran (freelance: Backstage, American Theatre, Broadway News, New York Theater Guide). The awards are voted on by the 110 active members of the Drama Desk, a New York-based organization of theater critics, reporters, journalists and publishers.

Reconstructing the Carol Burnett Show, Part 24: The Elusive Ethel Merman Episode

Season 2:

March 3, 1969: Tim Conway, Ethel Merman

This one has been difficult to pin down but I finally watched the whole thing on Channel 21 reruns. The MeTV/ShoutFactory/Amazon chopped-up version only featured the infamous dentist sketch with Tim cracking up Harvey as a rookie tooth doctor shooting himself up with Novocain and the scene with Carol as Ethel Merman's understudy scheming to get her out of the way so she can go on for the closing performance of Fanny Get Your Gun. The latter was based on Merman's reputation of never missing a performance during her many Broadway shows. There is a YouTube video of Carol and Ethel singing a Broadway medley and I seem to recall the sketch about a murder mystery being part of the promotion package to market DVDs of the show. But this complete episode does not appear on any of the DVD collections so it was exciting to see it pop up on Channel 21's program schedule.

B'way Update: New Stoppard Play; Kinky Boots Off-B'way; COVID Woes

Ed Stoppard (the author's son), Alexis Zegerman,
Faye Castelow and Adrian Scarborough in
Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt. 
Photograph: Marc Brenner

What a coincidence. Just as I finish reading Hermione Lee's comprehensive, 700-plus page biography of Tom Stoppard, an announcement by Twitter arrives that his latest play, Leopoldstadt will be arriving on Broadway at a future, unspecified date. The tweet was sent by the production. Auditions for the New York company will take place later this month. The play concerning a Jewish-Catholic family in Vienna over several decades, opened in London in 2020 but closed after a brief run due to the COVID pandemic. A production was set for Toronto earlier this year but was cancelled due to ongoing COVID restrictions. The production reunites Stoppard, director Patrick Marber and producer Sonia Friedman who collaborated on Travesties in 2017.