Reviewing the Drama: Broadway, Off-Broadway, Ballet, Movies, and TV Reviews

Casting News Following last week's announcement of the ART production of Jagged Little Pill , inspired by the Alanis Morissette album, this week we learned Tony winner Idina Menzel ( Rent , Wicked , If/Then ) will lead an upcoming industry reading of the musical. As noted in the Broadway.com report, though, Menzel is not likely to appear in the ART production since she is already slated to star in Joshua Harmon's Skintight , which runs at the same time as the ART Jagged Little Pill production. Joe Tippett ( Familiar ) will join the company of Waitress beginning with the June 13 performance. He'll take on the role of Earl, the titular waitress's abusive husband. (Will Swenson plays the role through June 11.) Tippett's first performance will also mark the first performance of Betsy Wolfe in the title role. Playbill has more. Additional casting has been announced for Steven Speilberg's The Papers , a telling of the Pentagon Papers. Sarah Paulson (...

Tony Awards Lots of Tony Awards news. In a long-overdue decision, the Tony Awards Administration Committee  has decided to reinstate the Best Sound Design categories , which had been eliminated after the 2013-2014 season. The categories, as well as a new voting process for that and the Best Orchestrations category, will be effective starting with the upcoming 2017-2018 season. Broadway.com has more. Tony Award nominations for this season will be announced May 2.   Baayork Lee , a member of the original A Chorus Line company, will receive the honorary Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award in recognition of her humanitarian work. Playbill has more.   James Earl Jones ( You Can't Take It With You ) will receive the 2017 Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre . Broadway.com has more. Additionally, the final round of eligibility rulings were announced. Unless noted below, eligibility is consistent with opening night credits. That means that actors billed a...

Coming Up The Barrow Street Theatre will be turned into a working pie shop this winter for an off-Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd , the Stephen Sondheim–Hugh Wheeler musical . Performances will begin February 14, 2017, with opening night set for March 1. The production comes via London, where the show was performed in Britain's oldest continuously operating pie shop. Broadway.com has more. A new comedy series is coming to Netflix. Created by Nick Stoller ( Forgetting Sarah Marshall ) and Francesca Delbanco , the series, Friends from College , focuses on (you guessed it) a group of people who've been friends since college (Harvard, to be specific). The cast includes Keegan-Michael Key ( Key and Peele ), Cobie Smulder ( How I Met Your Mother ), Annie Parisse ( The Layover , Vinyl ), Nat Faxon ( The Descendants ), Fred Savage , and Jae Suh Park . The series will shoot in New York this fall. Variety has more. Restless Creature , the Wendy Whelan documentary , will d...

The New Year is almost here so in lieu of a Week in Review, please enjoy this Year in Review. The Bridges of Madison County Score —Music is better than words, which is what made this show work and why I feel I can't fully express, with mere words, how good the score is. Head to Sh-K-Boom to purchase a copy. You'll thank me. I feel like crying when Kelli O'Hara starts singing "To Build a Home," the opening number. I ache when Whitney Bashor goes full Joni Mitchell in "Another Life." I absolutely swoon anytime Steven Pasquale sings, especially a love song, like "Falling into You." And if you don't completely melt from the one-two punch of the final two numbers, "It All Fades Away" and "Always Better," then you have no feeling. It's a magnificent, unabashedly emotional score from Tony winner Jason Robert Brown ( The Last Five Years ), a treasure of modern musical theatre. Freestyle Love Supreme —The frees...

(Scroll down to hear the latest tune off of Sonic Highways .) Cast Album Alerts Two musicals opened on Broadway in October, and this week, each show's cast recorded their respective cast albums. The incredible company of The Last Ship , led by Michael Esper , took to the recording studio, creating the original Broadway cast recording. Broadway.com was on hand to capture the record session , and, later in the week, reported that the album will be released on December 16. (It is now available for pre-order from Amazon . Scroll down for even more The Last Ship goodies.) The recording will feature a bonus track of Sting "covering" the beautiful ballad, "What Say You, Meg?' In another recording studio, the company of the On the Town revival recorded their cast album, which will likely be released in January 2015. Broadway.com has more about the On the Town recording. Thanksgiving Day Parade Performances For me, Thanksgiving just isn't the same...

What a delight to get to be one of the few to witness Wendy Whelan 's farewell performance. She's as fine a dancer as we're likely to see in our lifetime, and, beyond that, she's a wonderful role model for dancers of all ages and stages of their careers. A generous performer and a patient teacher, Whelan is the paragon of the prima ballerina. She came into the company at the start of a new era for New York City Ballet. George Balanchine passed away while Whelan was an apprentice, and she never got to study directly with the founding choreographer. She came of age at NYCB as Peter Martins was finding his voice as Ballet Master in Chief, and as he attempted to make NYCB a living Company, not a museum. While Whelan danced Balanchine beautifully and created roles in Robbins ballets, she came to prominence when she hooked up with emerging choreographers Christopher Wheeldon and Alexei Ratmansky . Whelan originated roles in almost all of Wheeldon's NYCB ballets (i...