Broadway

NEW YORK — The slow, lingering demise of "Smash" has felt more like a punch to the gut to the folks on Broadway. The TV series about the making of a big stage musical came with a flurry of attention and some big names: Steven Spielberg, Debra Messing and Anjelica Huston. It was going to be a valentine to Broadway. Sometimes, though, love letters get sent back. After a first season with a healthy-sized audience averaging 7.7 million viewers, it returned this year to such dismal ratings it was...

NEW YORK — Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts has tapped as its new leader a Broadway producer who has helped mount such hits as the Tony Award-winning revival of "Hair" and "Equus" with Daniel Radcliffe. Jed Bernstein, a former advertising executive who led the trade group Broadway League from 1995-2006, was named Wednesday as president Reynold Levy's successor. Under Levy's tenure, the 16-acre center underwent a $1.2 billion physical transformation and its programming was expanded to include a...

NEW YORK These days, the Great White Way is looking a lot more off-white. Onstage at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, "In the Heights" provides an explosion of salsa, merengue and hip-hop -- an homage to life lived north of the theater district, where brown and black folks take the A train and get off at 181st Street. There are break dancers breaking, rappers rapping and Lin-Manuel Miranda, the star/creator/2008 Tony nominee, serving it up in Spanglish: Here I go! So dope! ¡Y tú lo sabes!

NEW YORK — A revival of Terence Rattigan's play "The Winslow Boy" starring Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Roger Rees is heading to Broadway next season. The Roundabout Theatre Company said Wednesday the play joins its previously announced shows Donald Margulies' "Dinner With Friends" and Tom Stoppard's "The Real Thing. " All three will be either at the Roundabout's American Airlines Theatre or Laura Pels Theatre during the 2013-14 season. "The Winslow Boy" is about father...

Pernell Roberts, 81, a strapping actor who was an original cast member of the long-running TV western "Bonanza" and the star of the medical drama "Trapper John, M.D.," died of cancer Jan. 24 at his home in Malibu, Calif. Mr. Roberts was a Broadway and film veteran before joining the cast of "Bonanza" in 1959. Until abruptly quitting the NBC series in 1965, he played the thoughtful, sensitive Adam Cartwright, one of three sons of a clan whose deeds on and around the Ponderosa ranch delighted audiences and made the series...

It wasn't supposed to end like this. Certainly not after the warm reception "Brighton Beach Memoirs" received from many of the New York critics a week ago, a response that seemed to augur if not a boffo commercial run, then at least a fairly healthy one. But in an episode that could surely be added to a textbook of extinct Broadway assumptions, the Neil Simon revival abruptly closed at the Nederlander Theatre on Sunday night, a victim of...

NEW YORK — The opening Thursday night of Jez Butterworth's remarkable "Jerusalem" solidifies what looks to be the most competitive Tony race for best play in years. Joining such other potential nominees as " War Horse ," "Good People" and "The [Expletive] With the Hat," Broadway can boast for what feels like the first time in a long time a packed stable of satisfyingly original American and British plays — each a bona fide possibility as the trophy winner. How gratifying it is that "new" — not "revival" —...

Signature Theatre's "Glory Days," the coming-of-age musical set on a football field, is moving to Broadway next month. Staged by Signature Artistic Director Eric Schaeffer, the four-man show will play at the Circle in the Square Theatre, which specializes in intimately scaled musicals. "Glory Days" begins previews April 22 and opens May 6. Until recently, Circle in the Square hosted the Tony-winning "25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. " Adriana Douzos of theatrical press agency Boneau/Bryan-Brown Inc. said that other than...

NEW YORK -- DreamWorks Theatricals producer Bill Damaschke says "Shrek the Musical" will close Jan. 3 on Broadway after a year-long, 441-performance run. The expensive musical has seen its grosses dwindle; last week the show filled less than 60 percent of the seats. -- Associated Press

In Washington for the first time, Broadway Across America, a producing organization that programs the Hippodrome in Baltimore, has announced a subscription series for the Warner Theatre . The irreverent puppet-and-people musical "Avenue Q," with music and lyrics by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx and book by Jeff Whitty, will run Feb. 10-15, 2009 . Actor Chazz Palminteri will tell his "A Bronx Tale" Feb. 24-March 8,...

NEW YORK — The thrilling Broadway revival of "Pippin" will be taking its magic on the road. Producers of the Tony Award-nominated show said Wednesday that a national tour will kick off in September 2014 at the Buell Theatre in Denver. No other cities were immediately announced. "Pippin," which heads into the Tony Awards with 10 nominations, will join the revival of "Rodgers + Hammerstein's Cinderella" on the road in 2014. The updated fairy tale has nine nominations, including...

NEW YORK — The slow, lingering demise of "Smash" has felt more like a punch to the gut to the folks on Broadway. The TV series about the making of a big stage musical came with a flurry of attention and some big names: Steven Spielberg, Debra Messing and Anjelica Huston. It was going to be a valentine to Broadway. Sometimes, though, love letters get sent back. After a first season with a healthy-sized audience averaging 7.7 million viewers, it returned this year to such...

NEW YORK — There are apparently a few more Sundays left in Billy Crystal. The star of "City Slickers" and "When Harry Met Sally" said Tuesday he will reprise his funny and poignant one-man autobiographical show "700 Sundays" on Broadway for a 9-week stand this fall. "700 Sundays" was a Broadway success during the 2004-2005 season, playing to sold-out houses and winning a Tony Award for special theatrical experience. Crystal took it on the road, both in America and...

NEW YORK — The Beatles are coming back to Broadway. Two years after a Fab Four cover band arrived on the Great White Way, the London hit "Let It Be" plans to arrive this summer with new guys playing John, Paul, George and Ringo. Producers said Wednesday "Let It Be" will feature 40 songs including "Twist and Shout," ‘'She Loves You" ‘'Yesterday," ‘'Hey Jude," ‘'Come Together" and "Let It Be. " In 2011, "Rain: A Tribute to the Beatles on Broadway"...

NEW YORK — The cast members of the Tony Award-nominated "Matilda" are arguably all stars. This week, they chatted with a man closer to the actual cosmic ones. About three dozen cast members — including many children — packed a small room near Times Square on Tuesday to speak to an astronaut aboard the International Space Station via a 30-minute live satellite hookup provided by NASA. The questions came rolling in from eager Broadway youngsters holding...

NEW YORK — A Tony-nominated play that offered a controversial take on the Virgin Mary reflecting on her life held its final performance on Sunday (May 5), closing after only two weeks as poor ticket sales never matched high expectations. Now the question is: Why? Shows fold on Broadway all the time, of course, and as The New York Times noted, just 25 percent of them ever show a profit. But was there something about "The Testament of Mary" that doomed it to failure? After all, biblically...

NEW YORK, Oct. 19 -- Liza Minnelli will return to Broadway in December for the first time in nearly a decade in a two-week engagement of "Liza's at the Palace. " Minnelli, 62, will play the legendary vaudeville house Dec. 3-14, producer John Scher announced Sunday. She will be accompanied by pianist and musical supervisor Billy Stritch, a 12-piece orchestra and four dancer-singers. The show will feature some of Minnelli's best-known songs, particularly numbers such as "Cabaret," "Maybe This Time" and "New York, New York," all...

NEW YORK — Sutton Foster, the musical theater dynamo with the long legs and cheery smile, has won Tony Awards playing indomitable leading ladies in "Thoroughly Modern Millie" (2002) and " Anything Goes " (2011). She originated roles in such big-ticket musicals as " Shrek " and " Young Frankenstein . " For the past 10 years, who has been center stage on Broadway more than Sutton Foster? "I don't know," Foster says with a meek whimper, "but I'm really tired. " She's kidding, but only partly.

NEW YORK — Cinderella wasn't sure where her prince was. She could hear her stepmother, but they couldn't see each other. And her fairy godmother? Waiting in a hallway in jeans. Such was the scene one day in March when the cast and orchestra of the lush Broadway musical "Rodgers + Hammerstein's Cinderella" were packed into a Times Square recording studio in a one-day bid to record their cast album. The 29-member cast — the lead singers in one studio and the ensemble in another —...

NEW YORK — Tony Award nominations often mean a big bump at the box office, but not this year so far. "Kinky Boots," ‘'Matilda: The Musical," ‘'Pippin" and "Rodgers + Hammerstein's Cinderella" — the four shows that got the most nominations Tuesday — either lost money or saw only small increases, according to data released Monday from The Broadway League. "Matilda" made $4,785 less than the previous week's haul of $1,107,815, while "Cinderella" dropped $91,345...