Results tagged “heddagabler”

Michael Cerveris burst onto Broadway in 1993 with his breakout performance in The Who's Tommy, and in the years since his name has become synonymous with musical theater, thanks to starring roles in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Sweeney Todd, Assassins and, most recently, Road Show (the latter three all Stephen Sondheim joints). But as the Tony-winning actor told us during our chat last week, he never intended to specialize in musicals, and is glad to once again appear in a play that doesn't require him to worry so much about his vocal cords.

It was announced today that the upcoming Broadway revival of Guys and Dolls will star Gilmore Girls actress Lauren Graham! She'll be making her Broadway debut as Miss Adelaide, the fiancée of Nathan Detroit, to be played by Oliver Platt. The Frank Loesser musical originally debuted in 1950; it'll be back in February. In other Broadway casting news, Michael Cerveris and the Off Broadway favorite Paul Sparks have joined the cast of Christopher Shinn's "new interpretation" of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler at the Roundabout in January. Mary-Louise Parker will play the title role, with Cerveris as her boring husband and Sparks as his academic rival. Also, the less boldface casting was just announced for the anticipated revival of West Side Story in February.

Filmmaker Ethan Coen has left his big brother behind and written three short plays all by himself. Called Almost an Evening, the triptych will be produced by the Atlantic Theater Company with a terrific cast that includes Elizabeth Marvel, who was riveting in Ivo van Hove’s unforgettable revival of Hedda Gabler, and Academy Award winner F. Murray Abraham. The plays “unsuccessfully tackle important questions. In Waiting, someone waits somewhere for quite some time. In Four...

The set for director Ivo van Hove’s sensational but frustrating production of Molière's The Misanthrope tingles with exquisite cleanliness – though not for long. As the play beings, we gaze into a sleek shiny box that’s nondescript but not devoid of style: it seems just a few minimalist furnishings away from a feature in the Times’s Home & Garden section. The VIPs who chatter, prevaricate and flatter their way through the room are the curdled cream of contemporary cosmopolitan society; dressed in requisite black with blithely bare feet, they keep one eye and ear perpetually trained on their laptops, Blackberrys, iMacs and cellphones. It’s refreshing to see these pervasive mannerisms of the elite wired world so lucidly skewered onstage, where one can’t really be important unless one is seen chatting with somebody somewhere else.

It’s almost April, do you know where your Broadway mega-shows are? Cate Blanchett and Hedda Gabler got things off to a smash start, and the rest of the big guns are revving up: Tarzan, Lestat , Julia Roberts in Three Days of Rain, Ali MacGraw and Julianna Margulies in Festen…and more. We’ll spare you (and ourselves) the wallet strain and the eye-rolling – there are plenty of worthy littler shows crying out to be seen.

We noted in yesterday’s roundup of theatre in 2005 that at least in our optimistic eyes, last year had plenty of great shows. If anywhere like the same number of impressive plays and musicals appear in ‘06, it’d be hard to complain. But nonetheless, we do have a small wish list.