Welcome to today’s edition of ShentonSTAGE Daily.
I return to the UK overnight tonight, after a 12 night stay here that was (supposed to) coincide with the end of the 2022/23 Broadway season — the cut-off for shows to open for eligibility for this year’s Tony Awards is this Thursday (April 27), so I imagined that everything will be up and running by now with the usual final rush of openings this week.
And it has indeed been the case, with PRIMA FACIE opening officially last night (pictured above), GOOD NIGHT, OSCAR tonight, SUMMER, 1976 tomorrow and NEW YORK, NEW YORK on Wednesday. And over the weekend, I caught press performances of the last three of them. (I’ll review them in my regular The Week in Review(s) column here, which I will publish this week on Thursday. I’d seen PRIMA FACIE in London, of course, and decided not to see it again).
But in a last minute surprise move, it wasn’t until April 4 that Lorraine Hansberry’s THE SIGN IN SIDNEY BURSTEIN’S WINDOW was announced to transfer from BAM to the James Earl Jones Theatre, where it was recently seen in a production starring Oscar Issaac and Rachel Brosnahan; it doesn’t begin performances until tomorrow, and has been officially cited to open on Thursday (though press are not being re-invited to review it yet), so the ‘opening’ is only for Tony eligibility purposes.
So I will have to try to see that one when I’m back in town in late June. But over the last twelve nights, I have managed to see 11 new shows in the current Broadway season, plus a return visit to another, plus three cabaret shows at 54 Below, one gala benefit that I wrote about on Friday, and also, for good measure (though not for good sense!) my first-ever visit to the longest-ever running play in New York theatre history, PERFECT CRIME.
There will have been 37 Broadway openings across this current season, of which I missed just six, apart from SIDNEY BRUSTEIN which I will still be able to see in June; there were eight transfers from the West End across the year, including mostly re-cast stagings of & JULIET and BAD CINDERELLA, and the plays THE KITE RUNNER, DEATH OF A SALESMAN, LEOPOLDSTADT and LIFE OF PI, though key players from some of them reprised their roles on Broadway, including the towering Sharon D Clark and Wendell Pierce in SALESMAN and Hiran Abeysekera in LIFE OF PI.
A PERFECT CRIME…. AGAINST AUDIENCES
Last Sunday, THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA played its final performance at Broadway’s Majestic Theatre, closing after 13,981 performances.
And two nights later, last Tuesday, PERFECT CRIME celebrated its 36th anniversary at its 9th Off-Broadway home, the Theater Center on Broadway and 50th Street, which I finally saw for myself last night, amongst a very sparsely attended audience — there were just 14 of us there (no wonder the show’s resident press agent, whose office is based on the same building, said the show was not available to review, so I bought a discount ticket via one of the many available offers)!
It turns out that the perfect crime of PERFECT CRIME is being committed against audiences who find themselves enduring this befuddling and contrary play — one with so many twists, turns and dead-ends that we’re given a crib sheet after to make sense of plot turns that we have likely missed! (In the interval, a man at the front turned around and asked the rest of us if anyone knew what was actually going on; by the end of the show, I fear he was none the wiser).
Say what you like, though, there’s no doubting the singular achievement of its leading actor Catherine Russell — who has performed all but 4 of its more than 14,000 performances across the last 36 years! (She even has a Hirschfeld caricature on display in the foyer, pictured above) She is also the show’s general manager and manages the theatre complex it is housed in!
SHOWS AHEAD IN LONDON, SELECTED REGIONAL THEATRES AND ON BROADWAY
My regularly updated feature on shows in London, selected regional theatres and on Broadway is here: https://shentonstage.com/theatre-openings-from-w-c-april-24/
See you here on Thursday
I will be back on Thursday. If you can’t wait that long, I may also be found on Twitter (for the moment) here: https://twitter.com/ShentonStage/ (though not as regularly on weekends)