Last night, The Hollywood Reporter put up a story with good news and bad news for Broadway buffs. The good news? After multiple failed attempts, it looks like Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Broadway classic fairy tale musical Into The Woods is getting another chance at becoming a movie—with a book by Lapine and additional music and lyrics by Sondheim! The bad news? The director who is pushing for the movie is Rob Marshall, the man who brought us the tone-deaf stage-to-screen musical adaptations Chicago and Nine. Ugh. Is this the last midnight? more ›

Once upon a time Broadway was (really!) the source of major radio hits. Similarly, once upon a time politicians campaigned with actual campaign songs with personalized lyrics rather than just using an existing song. And, tipped off by Stephen Sondheim's second book of annotated lyrics (Look, I Made A Hat) we've got our hands on a mashup of those two historical facts that is going to blow the minds of a certain subset of Broadway geeks and NYC history nerds. Ladies and gentleman, we present you "With Lindsay It's Coming Up Roses," a mayoral campaign song for John Lindsay performed by no less than Ethel freaking Merman! They don't make 'em like this anymore, kids: more ›

Last week at Lincoln Center the phones rang, the doors chimed and in came a star-studded Company staged reading whose cast was headlined by Neil Patrick Harris as the bachelor Bobby, whose examinations of marriage center the Stephen Sondheim classic. And it wasn't just Harris up there, stage and screen bold-faced names like Patti LuPone, Stephen Colbert, Christina Hendricks, Martha Plimpton, Anika Noni Rose and Jon Cryer were hoofing it too. The show ran for only four sold-out (and not cheap!) performances, but fret not poor theater fans. If you still desperately want to see Hendricks in her skivvies deciding to go to Barcelona or not (or a topless NPH trying to keep her in town), LuPone toasting the "Ladies Who Lunch," or Colbert and Plimpton as a mock-karate-fighting couple, you've got nothing to worry about. All four productions of the show were filmed and will now be combined into one concert film coming to theaters June 15. more ›

Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim was celebrating his 80th birthday during last night's gala performance of Sondheim On Sondheim, a new musical by the Roundabout Theatre Company. To top off the celebration, Roundabout had a little surprise for the birthday boy: During the curtain call, it was announced that Henry Miller's Theatre on West 43rd Street will be renamed the Stephen Sondheim Theatre in July. It's a rare honor, and artistic director Todd Haimes was thrilled he was able to keep it a secret, telling NY1, "Nobody knew, including Stephen Sondheim, that the theater was going to be named after him. We managed, for once in this world, we kept it a secret. And I think he was really, really surprised, as was everybody in the audience." more ›

The Village Voice OBIE awards are always a raucous affair; a sort of debauched downtown theater raspberry to counter the Tonys' mainstream proceedings. And because the OBIEs call attention to risk-taking, less-famous artists who succeed despite severely limited budgets, they're arguably much more vital to the theater world—at least, the part of that world that consistently pushes the envelope. Last night's bacchanal—the 54th—at Webster Hall was even more festive than years' past because after the awards (see below) were handed out, the club was taken over by a risque, gender-bending after-party hosted by Michael Musto. Pole dancing, body painting and short shorts were wall-to-wall. more ›

It’s fitting that the elegant revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical Sunday in the Park with George – currently at Studio 54 following an acclaimed London run – brings the latest advances in animation and digital projection to the stage. After all, the show takes as inspiration Georges Seurat and his 19th century masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which was itself informed by cutting-edge theories on color and optics, particularly the discovery that two juxtaposed colors could suggest a new color when seen from a distance. Hence Seurat’s famous depiction of a lazy French Sunday using innumerable colored dots, the style that came to be called pointillism. more ›

On Wednesday night Tim Burton gave the Film Society of Lincoln Center a 17-minute taste of Sweeney Todd, his film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s macabre musical. The 1979 Broadway hit was inspired by Victorian folklore about a crazed London barber who slits his customers’ throats and, in some versions of the story, colludes with his lover to bake the corpses into meat pies – which become wildly successful! (Ah, the culinary possibilities before rogue... more ›

A look at some noteworthy television this week: more ›

Broadway star Michael Cerveris (Hedwig, Sweeney Todd, 21 Jump Street) has joined the already exciting cast of King Lear, which opens next month. He’ll be squaring off in the role of Kent across from Kevin Kline’s hotly anticipated Lear. But according to Isaac Butler’s Parabasis, the production’s real star is “genius-level Shakespearean actor” Philip Goodwin in the role of the Fool. But that’s not all! The Public Theater is giving a young upstart named Stephen Sondheim his big break by enlisting him to compose the music. (Tickets go on sale at the Public Theater’s box office this Sunday.) more ›

The Times today reports on some funny numbers running around the theater district. Here's what we understood of it: In 1998 legit theater, which like the Apple Computers of yore is always somewhat "beleaguered", was having some trouble getting patrons in the door to watch anything that a theater snob might call "passable." Money was desperately needed to kick things into gear. So the city struck a deal with a group called The Broadway Initiative, led by Gothamist-idol Stephen Sondheim, to provide more money not only for theater owners but for the theater community as well. The deal was simple: 25 theaters in the theater district (that'd be between 40th and 57th Streets and 6th and 8th Avenues) were given permission to sell their unused air-rights to any property also located in the district (instead of only to the usual rules which only allow air rights to be sold to neighboring plots). In exchange for this lenience anyone who bought up one of these theater's air rights would have to pay an extra $10 per square foot on top of the regular price. That extra money was to be then given to a new Theater Subdistrict Council which would spend 20 percent of it on monitoring theater conditions and the rest on bringing poorer city residents to the Great White Way. Sounds like a good, simple, idea, no? more ›

We first became aware of Mario Cantone's stage gifts after seeing him in the Roundabout’s revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins and in Manhattan Theatre Club’s The Violet Hours. Gothamist had also loved him as Charlotte’s acid-tongued wedding planner Anthony Marentino on Sex & The City. His new one-man Broadway show is aptly called Laugh Whore, and Cantone delivers a riotous evening of of comedy and music. more ›

Rodgers & Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim�.and The Ramones? more ›

As we enjoy these last dog days of summer, savvy New Yorkers know that it's not too early to think about ordering tickets for some of the cool shows arriving on the fall theater scene, just around the corner. more ›

David Edelstein of Slate feels there should be more Seabiscuit in Seabscuit. Roger Ebert liked, but not loved, it. Jami Bernard of the Daily News thinks the movie "get it right." more ›