We are happy to welcome guest celebrity blogger playwright Theresa Rebeck, a Pulitzer Prize finalist whose plays include Broadway’s Mauritius and Off-Broadway’s Omnium Gatherum (co-written with Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros), Bad Dates, Spike Heels, The Understudy, Loose Knit, The Butterfly Collection, The Water’s Edge, The Scene, Our House and more. Rebeck, whose play The Novelist will be presented at the Dorset Theatre Festival in August, will blog for Playbill.com all week; her fourth entry follows.
All things Novelist are heating up. The theatrical publishers Smith and Kraus have a new program called Plays In Production, and they publish beautiful little one-off paperbacks of a play script, which you can buy in the lobby. (It’s just like what they do in London, with new plays.) So they’re going to do one for The Novelist and the Dorset Theater Festival. This means I have to finish rewrites and write a preface and come up with a decent photograph for the front cover and clever copy for the back. And then I go back to New York for rehearsals next week, and then we move the whole production up here.
Up-and-coming performers will be featured in a charity-cabaret series, beginning with the show “Broadway Off’Leash” Sept. 13 at 9:30 PM at the Duplex.
Future benefit concerts will occur one Monday a month. The second in the series has been scheduled for Oct. 25 at 9:30 PM.
Proceeds from the “Off’Leash” event will benefit Abandoned Angels Cocker Rescue, an animal rescue charity located in Queens, NY.
John Forslund, the executive producer of JDProductions, which will present the evening, will perform Broadway favorites at “Off’Leash,” along with Alex Agard, Ann Bonner, Lana Grube, Lexie Galante, Mollie Kelly, Quinto Ott, Peyton West, Kennen Butler, Sarah Cumings, Sean Elias, Kaitlin Heath, Tyler Bellmon and Tyler Kane. A special Broadway guest performer will be announced shortly.
The Duplex is located at 61 Christopher Street. Tickets are $10 with a two-drink minimum. To make reservations visit theduplex.com.
The complete pilot episode of Emmy winner and Tony and Oscar nominee Laura Linney’s upcoming series, “The Big C,” is now available for (online) viewing.
Linney (Time Stands Still, Sight Unseen, The Crucible, “John Adams,” “The Savages”) plays a suburban housewife and teacher who is coping with terminal cancer. Bill Condon (“Dreamgirls,” “Chicago”) directs the pilot episode, which also features stage and screen vet Oliver Platt (Guys and Dolls, Shining City, “Huff”) as Linney’s husband and Oscar nominee Gabourey Sidibe (“Precious”) as a student in Linney’s class.
Cynthia Nixon and Liam Neeson are among the guest stars set for future episodes of the series.
“The Big C” officially premieres Aug. 16 at 10:30 PM ET on Showtime. To catch the pilot beforehand, look below:
Stage and screen star Susan Lucci will soon add author to her list of accomplishments. According to the Associated Press, the soap queen and sometime Broadway and cabaret leading lady will release her memoirs next year through It Books, an imprint of Harper Collins.
Lucci is best known for playing Erica Kane on the long-running ABC soap opera “All My Children.” She received a Daytime Emmy Award (out of a total of 21 nominations) for her work on the soap. She was a replacement Annie Oakley in the 1999 Broadway revival of Annie Get Your Gun and has appeared at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency and in several benefit performances for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.
Tony Award nominee Jennifer Damiano (Next to Normal), Michael Esper (American Idiot) and Kyle Riabko (Hair) discussed issues of responsibility, as brought up in their respective shows and their own lives, in recent video interviews as part of Liberty Mutual’s Responsibility Project.
Damiano discusses the challenge of connecting both to her character in performance and to an audience afterwards. Esper relates how his own personal experiences have informed how he portrays his character’s choices. Riabko discusses the hippie protests that are central to Hair and what can be learned from them today.
The Radio City Rockettes will expand their annual "Christmas in August" event nationwide this year. The event, which will take place Aug. 12 and celebrates the dancers’ annual holiday season tour, will allow fans across the country (and on the Internet) to participate in a nationwide kick-line.
In addition, you can join in a virtual kick-line at radiocitychristmas.com. If one million kicks are generated at both the live events and online, the Garden of Dreams Foundation will bring disadvantaged children and their families from across America to see the show at Radio City.
Photos and videos of various kicks may be shared with Radio City online from now through Aug. 30. You can submit through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or by texting KICKNY to 46737.
The live kick-lines Aug. 12 will take place in front of Radio City Music Hall and in seven other cities where the tour will stop. The kick-line in front of Radio City will take place at 1:30 PM ET. Kick lines will also take place in Los Angeles (Santa Monica Pier, 11 AM PT), Colorado Springs (World Arena, 12 PM MT), Salt Lake City (Gateway Mall, 12 PM MT), Phoenix (Scottsdale Fashion Square, 11 AM PT), Wichita (INTRUST Bank Area, 1 PM CT), San Diego (Fashion Valley Mall, 11 am PT), and Fresno (Save Mart Center, 11 AM PT).
For more information, visit radiocitychristmas.com.
We are happy to welcome guest celebrity blogger playwright Theresa Rebeck, a Pulitzer Prize finalist whose plays include Broadway’s Mauritius and Off-Broadway’s Omnium Gatherum (co-written with Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros), Bad Dates, Spike Heels, The Understudy, Loose Knit, The Butterfly Collection, The Water’s Edge, The Scene, Our House and more. Rebeck, whose play The Novelist will be presented at the Dorset Theatre Festival in August, will blog for Playbill.com all week; her third entry follows.
My second novel came out about two months ago. It’s called “Twelve Rooms With A View,” and it’s really quite good, very funny and about something all New Yorkers care about: real estate. It’s about other things too. I recommend it highly.
Writing that second novel almost killed me. My lit agent warned me that it would. The fact is—this is a fact that I really didn’t know until it fell on my head—nobody really knows how to write novels. The first one you write on arrogance and adrenaline. Then it gets published and does well and you think, “Excellent, time to do it again!” And it is at that moment when you realize that you had no idea, really, about how to do it in the first place and it’s virtually inexplicable, frankly, how the first one happened. Seriously, sometimes I go back and look at pages from my first novel and think, “Wow, that’s pretty good, who wrote this?” Even though I know very well it was me.
So the second novel is an exercise in sheer terror. I have a lot of friends who are staring down the barrel of their second novel, and I have to say I’m really glad my pushy agent kept telling me to just finish it and get it over with. Now I’m on to my third, which is more pleasant. I have that Malcolm Gladwell book lying around my house, and supposedly it explains that if you do something for 10,000 hours you get really good at it. I am hoping to get good at writing novels.
The question of who will replace Simon Cowell as lead judge on “American Idol” next season has become ripe for speculation, especially since a near-closed deal to have the show’s former producer, Nigel Lythgoe, return to revamp the show could mean that the remaining judges’ jobs are also in jeopardy.
Representatives for Tony Award-winning songwriter Elton John and Justin Timberlake have both denied reports that the pop stars will take Cowell’s place to judge the vocal competition. According to the Hollywood Reporter, a list of potential replacement judges includes Tony Award nominee Harry Connick, Jr. and fellow singer-actor Chris Isaak.
Rocker Bret Michaels has publicly lobbied for the position, and even Donald Trump is reported to have expressed interest.
The Reporter also lists pop singer and one-time Chicago star Usher as one of Lythgoe’s choices for the prime seat, along with recently displaced co-judge Paula Abdul.
Randy Jackson, Ellen DeGeneres and Kara DioGuardi are the three judges who currently remain on the hit reality series.
“American Idol”’s tenth season will begin in January on Fox.
Tony and Academy Award winning actor Kevin Kline visited “The Colbert Report” July 27, ostensibly to promote his upcoming film “The Extra Man.” But the interview soon works into a friendly competition, first in the art of enunciating, and then in the effort of acting Shakespeare with only facial expressions and a grunt. No “crutch of words and iambic pentameter” for these guys.
The competition begins around the 3:35 mark. To enjoy it, and the rest of the interview, look below:
A new commercial featuring upcoming In the Heights star and “American Idol” winner Jordin Sparks has been released. Sparks is seen singing “When You’re Home” from the 2008 Tony winner for Best Musical; she will begin playing troubled golden girl Nina Rosario Aug. 19.
Sparks will make her Broaway debut with Heights. Her albums include “Jordin Sparks” (which features the hit singles “Tattoo,” “One Step at a Time” and “No Air”) and “Battlefield.”
In the Heights is currently playing at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. To see video of Sparks, look below:
