B'way Update: Here Lies Love and Hamlet

Jose Llana and Ruthie Ann Miles in
the Off-Broadway production of 
Here Lies Love.

The new year has barely begun, but there are already theatrical plans for summer 2023. Here Lies Love, the immersive disco musical based on the career of the infamous Imelda Marcos and the rise of the People Power Revolution of the Philippines, will make its Broadway debut and the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park series at the Delacorte will present yet another production of Hamlet, this time set in a post-COVID contemporary America.

Here Lies Love, featuring a sung-through score by pop icons David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, will begin previews at the Broadway Theater on June 17 and open on July 20. The theater will be reconfigured into a dance floor for the show's environmental design. The original production opened at the Public Theater in 2013 and won five Lucille Lortel Awards and three Drama Desk Awards. The show has had subsequent stagings in London and Seattle. Original director Alex Timbers (Tony winner for Moulin Rouge) returns to the production.

Drama Desks and Obies

Nominee Laila Robbins (Sorry) and DD winner Richard Kind
(The Big Knife) at the Drama Desk After-Party

This time of year in the New York theater is crazy with the amount of prizes handed out. The week started with a one-two punch of award shows--the Drama Desks on Sunday May 19 and the Obies on Monday May 20. For the last few years, the two have been scheduled this close together and are amazingly different. The DDs honors on, Off- and Off-Off-Broadway and while fairly eclectic in their nominations, the winners tend to be pretty conventional. The Village Voice Obies, which celebrate everything non-Broadway, are anything but conventional. They don't even have categories, just citations for excellence, and they tend to go to the unusual. The DDs are formal with many attendees in tuxes (including me) and gowns while the Obiegoers are pretty casual and usually raucous. Last year, Linda Lavin had to pause in her acceptance speech for The Lyons to get the crowd to settle down. This year, the usually uncorseted Obies were restrained because just a few days earlier the Voice announced that Michael Feingold, its chief theater critic and chairman of the Obie committee, was being laid off. It was an emotional evening as the audience gave Feingold a standing ovation and winner after winner paid tribute to him.