Updated 2013-14 Broadway/Off-B'way Schedule

Laurie Metcalf will star in
Bruce Norris's new play Domesticated.

Here's an expanded look at the 2013-14 New York theater season including Broadway and Off-Broadway. Most exciting on the Off-Bway horizon: the musical based on Little Miss Sunshine; Jeff Goldblum and Laurie Metcalf in Bruce Norris's new play Domesticated; and Mr. Burns, a weird play from Anne Washburn about a post-apocalyptic future with no electricity where people re-enacted episodes from The Simpsons for entertainment. I read the script for the American Theater Critics Association's New Play Award last year and I can hardly wait to see how it looks staged. This list is by no means complete. I'll add updates as we go along.   

July 14--Luis Bravo's Forever Tango (Walter Kerr)
July 24--Let It Be (St. James)
Aug. 4--First Date (Longacre)

Aug. 8—The Great Society (Clurman Theatre)
Aug. 15--Soul Doctor (Circle In the Square)

Sept. 12—The Old Friends (Signature Theatre Company)

Sept. 12—Fetch Clay, Make Man (NYTW)

Sept. 15--Mr. Burns, a Post-Electronic Play (Playwrights Horizons)
Sept. 19--Romeo and Juliet (Richard Rodgers)
Sept. 26--The Glass Menagerie (Booth)
Oct. 5--Big Fish (Neil Simon)
Oct. 10--A Night with Janis Joplin (Lyceum)
Oct. 20--A Time to Kill (Golden)
Oct. 24--The Snow Geese (Samuel Friedman)
Nov. 3--Betrayal (Barrymore)
Nov. 3--After Midnight (Brooks Atkinson)

Nov. 4—Domesticated (Mitzi Newhouse/Lincoln Center)
Nov. 10--Twelfth Night/Richard III (Belasco)

Nov. 12—The Patron Saint of Sea Monsters (PH/Peter Sharp)
Nov. 17--The Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder (Walter Kerr)

Nov. 18—Small Engine Repair (Lortel/MCC)
Nov. 21--Macbeth (Vivian Beaumont)

Nov. 21—The Commons of Pensacola (MTC/City Center Stage I)
Nov. 24--Waiting for Godot/No Man's Land (Cort)
Mid-Nov.--Little Miss Sunshine (Second Stage)
TBA--The Winslow Boy (American Airlines)

Dec. 8 or 9—The Curious Case of the Watson Intelligence (Playwrights Horizons)
Jan. 16--Machinal (American Airlines)
Jan. 23--Outside Mullingar (Samuel Friedman)
Mid-Feb.--The Bridges of Madison County (Gerald Schoenfeld)

March 2—Stage Kiss (Playwrights Horizons)

March 18—Tales from Red Vienna (MTC/City Center Stage I)
March 23--Les Miserables (Imperial)
March 27--If/Then (Richard Rodgers)
April 11--Bullets Over Broadway (St. James)
April 17--Act One (Vivian Beaumont)

April 21—Your Mother’s Copy of the Kuma Sutra (PH/Peter Sharp)

May 5—The City of Conversation (Mitzi Newhouse/Lincoln Center)
Spring--The Real Thing (American Airlines)
Spring--Houdini (Theatre TBA)
Spring--Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Theater TBA)
Spring--Rocky (Winter Garden)
Spring--Holler If Ya Hear Me (Theater TBA)

June 9—Fly By Night (Playwrights Horizons)

June 17—When We Were Young and Unafraid (MTC/City Center Stage I)
Maybes for Broadway--All the Way, Disgraced, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Revisionist

Tivoli: A Short Story

We had found Tivoli the night before, searching for someplace to eat dinner before the opera in the next town to the south in the Hudson Valley area. The performance of the rarely-performed Oresteia by Taneyev was at a college campus as part of an arts festival (here's my review), but there were no nearby restaurants. So our weekend guest who was seeing the opera with us found a number of culinary choices on his Smartphone. We drove for maybe 20 minutes on Route 9G before the turnoff to the tiny town which contained a cluster of city-style eateries including the Japanese one we finally settled on, an avant-garde theater company, and a used-book store in what looked like a broken down old house.  

Project Runway 12: Episode 2: Not Again!

Sandro needs to just shut up!

My first reaction after this week's Project Runway was No! No! NOOOO! Just check my Facebook and Twitter. OK, I can see that neither the Eco-Terror Timothy or Nasty Sandro deserved to be eliminated. Their looks were both passable. But once again, the judges aufed the wrong designer. A perfectly acceptable contestant who let go in favor of a head case.

The challenge was pretty routine--make an outfit to show off expensive jewelry. Most of the workroom shots were basically Sandro acting like a bitch. First he can't remember anybody's name. Alexander is Red Hair, Jeremy is Irish Guy (even though he's English). Then he gets into a screaming match with Ken--I don't even know over what. Justin is so lucky, he can turn off his hearing aid to shut them out. To top it off, Sandro can't figure out how to work a steamer and actually pulls a production techie into the set demanding instruction. The stunned techie just stammers "I have no idea" and scurries back behind the scenes. That's gotta be a first where the "real" world of the production crew spills into the "unreal" world of the reality show. (Just like in this Off-Broadway musical I saw last week Nobody Loves You at Second Stage, but that's another story.)

Project Runway 12: Episode 1: Eco-Terror

It's the very first episode of Project Runway's 12th season and already the judges have f**ked up. They eliminated the wrong person. They elected to keep a goofball who definitely deserved to go because he made the stupidest dress. He was spared for the sole reason that he will cause drama in future segments. That person is Timothy, a pretentious flake obsessed by "sustainable" fashion with minimum carbon impact so the unicorns will not be endangered. (Earth to Timothy: Unicorns are mythical.) That means no makeup or hairstyling for the model and she goes barefoot. But that doesn't mean Timothy himself can't look fabulous by stealing the girl's high heels and wearing them. It just gets crazier. His dress was an awful raggedly thing that looked like a melted cheese sandwich with too much brown mustard. Not only that, he had a whole insane backstory with choreography for the garment--something about World War II and origami and Hiroshima victims--pointless as well as offensive. If you have to explain the dress, forget it.

More New Broadway Plays Possible

Update to yesterday's Broadway update:

Bryan Cranston

In yesterday's NY Times, Patrick Healy puts a more positive spin on the new play situation for the 2013-14 Broadway season than I did. In addition to original works The Snow Geese and Outside Mullingar, he points out two adaptations of books--Act One and A Time to Kill--will be coming to Broadway. You could count those as new plays, so that makes four. Healy also writes that a few new plays are being eyed by producers for possible Broadway production, all by Pulitzer Prize winners. These include Disgraced, the Pulitzer winner for 2012 from Ayad Akhtar; Domesticated by Bruce Norris (Clybourne Park); and All the Way, a study of LBJ's struggle to pass Civil Right legislation by Robert Schekkan (The Kentucky Cycle). I've read the script of All the Way when I served as part of the New Play Committee for the American Theater Critics Association. It's a fascinating piece and it would make a rarity for Broadway--a large-cast new play. It will be produced at American Repertory Theatre this fall with Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad, so his TV chops might help a New York transfer. There's another LBJ play playing Off-Broadway this August called The Great Society which also hoped to make it to Broadway, but the producer told the Times in a separate story by Healy he would wait for the reviews. Other possibilities include a Broadway transfer of the National Theatre of Great Britain production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which was broadcast to cinemas around the world, and Jesse Eisenberg's The Revisionist which starred himself and Vanessa Redgrave when it played Off-Broadway last season. So here's an updated Broadway list including maybes:

Broadway Updates

Debra Messing will make her Broadway
debut in a new play by John Patrick Shanley

Broadway updates: Brian F. O'Bryne (Doubt, Frozen) and Debra Messing (Will & Grace) will co-star in Outside Mullingar, a new play from John Patrick Shanley, produced by MTC at the Friedman (At last another new play to join the only other one announced for the season so far--The Snow Geese, also from MTC).

Bullets Over Broadway and If/Then have definite dates and theaters (See below). If/Then will take over the Richard Rodgers when Romeo and Juliet finishes its limited run.

A Night with Janis Joplin, a regional hit, will play the Lyceum.

Here's an updated list of the opening so far:

July 14--Luis Bravo's Forever Tango (Walter Kerr)
July 24--Let It Be (St. James)
Aug. 4--First Date (Longacre)
Aug. 15--Soul Doctor (Circle In the Square)
Sept. 19--Romeo and Juliet (Richard Rodgers)
Sept. 26--The Glass Menagerie (Booth)
Oct. 5--Big Fish (Neil Simon)
Oct. 10--A Night with Janis Joplin (Lyceum)
Oct. 20--A Time to Kill (Golden)
Oct. 24--The Snow Geese (Samuel Friedman)
Nov. 3--Betrayal (Barrymore)
Nov. 3--After Midnight (Brooks Atkinson)
Nov. 10--Twelfth Night/Richard III (Belasco)
Nov. 17--The Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder (Walter Kerr)
Nov. 21--Macbeth (Vivian Beaumont)
Nov. 24--Waiting for Godot/No Man's Land (Cort)
TBA--The Winslow Boy (American Airlines)
Jan. 16--Machinal (American Airlines)
Jan. 23--Outside Mullingar (Samuel Friedman)
Mid-Feb.--The Bridges of Madison County (Gerald Shoenfeld)
March 23--Les Miserables (Imperial)
March 27--If/Then (Richard Rodgers)
April 11--Bullets Over Broadway (St. James)
April 17--Act One (Vivian Beaumont)
Spring--The Real Thing (American Airlines)
Spring--Houdini (Theatre TBA)
Spring--Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Theater TBA)
Spring--Rocky (Winter Garden)
Spring--Holler If Ya Hear Me (Theater TBA)

Tony Committee Grows to 46, Declared a Separate Country

A meeting of the 2013-14 Tony Nominating Committee

There are so many people on the 2013-14 Tony Nominating Committee, they have been declared a new country and are filing for membership in the United Nations. This time of year, during the summer doldrums, the Broadway League usually quietly announces the new members of the committee that decides who gets nominated for the Main Stem's biggest honor. But this year, the big story was the huge number of them. It shouldn't come as a surprise, the electorate has been steadily increasing while the number of Tony voters--those who chose the winners--has been decreasing.