This is the song that made me fall in love with Eric Michael Krop forever. It’s “Bless the Lord” from Godspell, and Krop was singing the shit out of it last Sunday night at 54 Below in Shoshana Feinstein’s Not at This Performance concert.
After telling the audience a sweet story about the time Lindsay Mendez pulled a prank in which she convinced him he’d have to go on in her Godspell track, Krop lit the damn room on fire with “Bless the Lord.” Now I kind of want to listen to him sing every minute of every day forever. Seriously. Seriously. It’s hard for video to approximate the exact state of insanity happening in the audience while Krop was belting his cute little face off, but you’ve got to watch it anyway. Good luck keeping your jaw from hitting the table. I was screaming my lungs out in that audience.
Which was, admittedly, unexpected. Typically, I fall into the camp of folks who regard the sight of an understudy slip in their Playbill as a Sign of Impending Theatrical Doom. A concert full of performances by understudies? I was skeptical about how, exactly, that would work. But holy shit did it work. In fact, it ended up being a badass platform for sneaking a peek at the next generation of Broadway stars.
Besides, ain’t no one on earth mad about the chance to see Jay Johnson perform tunes from Catch Me If You Can. In fact, Jay–who is about to star in Hands on a Hardbody this spring–is the person who inspired us to see this concert in the first place. And we would be remiss if we didn’t share videos of his performances, too. Because he’s just as cute as Eric Michael Krop, and he sings real damn good, too. Plus, look at that suit!
You guys, there’s a play about roller derby. We saw it last week at the Atlantic Theater Company and it was pretty great. Herewith, please find a short list of stuff that kind of rocked our socks about The Jammer…
1. Cute boy.
Hey Patch Darragh, who plays lead guy Jack Lovington, where have you been all our lives? You’re super cute. Also, your name is Patch. Do you sing? Would you like to be in a musical?
2. Roller derby.
Roller derby is a sport about hitting people in the face while on roller skates. There should be ten plays about this and four musicals. Two of them should be rock operas* and at least one should be through-sung and at least one should star Johnny Gallagher. You don’t see people on actual roller skates in The Jammer, but it doesn’t matter. This is theater. The theater of roller derby.
3. Vintage styling.
This is a play about a dude, and the lead female character is off her rocker, so you won’t be continuously swooning over a blooming bouquet of pretty vintage frocks or anything. You’ll have to wait for Far From Heaven for that. But we will always see the charm in primary color overload, checked shirts, and characters named Beth Nutterman and Lenny Ringle.
4. Foul-mouthed leading lady.
Some of the things that come out of derby queen Lindy Batello’s mouth even made us blush. Not an easy thing to do. Played with over-the-top, just-released-from-Bellevue gusto by Jeanine Serrallis, the character is both sweet and batshit. Our favorite combination.
5. Local charm.
The show is largely set in and around New York City and concerns working class characters who kind of sound like Jack Kelly twenty years after the strike after he moved to the burbs and had a couple of kids. It’s cute. And funny.
6. Brevity.
Hey, The Jammer. Thanks for not making me sit through a three-hour play that could have only been 90 minutes long without an intermission. Thanks for making this play actually 90 minutes long without an intermission. It left us more time to hang out after and talk about the play.
7. Commitment to ideas bigger than just roller derby and cute boys.
It’s not ultra-complicated stuff, but The Jammer is about a guy who yearns to see the world and does so by joining a roller derby team. Which frankly sounds like a great idea and we might try it. (There are seven local roller derby teams and organizations listed in the program. Do not test us.) But really it’s about the loss of American innocence in the 1950s. But really really, it’s just a silly, charming little comedy about some swell characters who you want to hug all at the same time. Well, in the case of Jack, we maybe also want to make out a little bit…
*Starlight Express is not a rock opera and is not about roller derby. But it is awesome.
But it’s January and there’s nothing else going on, so let’s take two seconds and talk about Barbra Streisand, all right? Specifically, let’s talk about Barbra Streisand in one of my favorite videos on all of YouTube, and that video is right here:
This is theater-relevant for many reasons, but the most basic two are as follows:
1. Barbra Streisand started out her career as a Broadway actor like Jeremy Jordan was once a Broadway actor and like Patrick Wilson and Jonathan Groff were once Broadway actors. I’m not making an apples to apples to apples to apples comparison here in terms of talent or sanity, but in terms of the functional profession, it’s basically the same thing.
2. Oscar Hammerstein wrote the lyrics to this song. It was written for a 1928 musical called The New Moon, which wasn’t even really a musical, because musicals weren’t even really musicals yet. They were like fetus musicals.
But what I love about Barbra in this video is not just her singing (Hail Mary…) or her dress (I want one…) or that sparkly brooch pinned to it (I want three…). What I love about Barbra in this video and in the whole of the swinging sixties — two-time Tony-losing Barbra — is not how she sings or looks, but how she is. How her aw-shucks-y, fidget-y, nose-to-the-heavens-so-God-can-see-what-he-created thing feels both so affected and so totally real. Like she kind of knows she’s basically the best thing since sliced bread but she’s terrified — terrified — that she might not be. But she’s terrified only intermittently — like, once every six seconds. And then it goes away and she’s radiant like the sun and moon and stars. I could not love this more if she broke through the screen and kissed me. Watch. Enjoy. And delete that MP3 of Lea Michele singing “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” please for the love of God.
When Broadway actors do cabaret — or “concerts” as the kids call them — so many things can, and often do, go wrong. “Rock” arrangements of showtunes abound. Medleys are hastily patched together. Vibrato gets in all the wrong places. I get that Broadway actors are looking for their breaks everywhere, but on most nights, that A&R guy from Arista isn’t lurking in the booth at Joe’s Pub, and there’s never a real need to aggressively underline the subtext in an Adele song. In that sense, Broadway-to-cabaret crossover can be pretty rough.
Except when Norbert Leo Butz does it, of course. This shouldn’t be surprising, considering that he’s good at everything and that he’s both mature and tasteful — things that start to feel like genuine anomalies a scant year after we all sat through Ghost: the Musical. His brilliant, spot-on cabaret album, which is called Memory & Mayhem, captures his series of solo performances at 54 Below, although you’d never know it from the collection of farmhouse-chic black-and-whites that cram the liner notes. This is only a small quibble — along with the fact that there are a grand total of nine words on the album cover that are presented in no fewer than five fonts — and any egregious lapses in sanity basically end there.
We must confess at this point that we actually saw Norbert’s show at 54 Below, and it was great — emotional, expertly calibrated, and carefully assembled. And while this album can’t successfully recreate the experience, for example, of witnessing Norbert wearing his really excellent jeans, this album comes pretty close.
But back to those songs for a second. There’s ample crossover between the theater world and the pop realm, with tunes from Van Morrison and Alicia Keys, David Yazbek and Jason Robert Brown, but all of it feels of a piece. Maybe it’s Norbert’s country/crooner/old-soul-ish delivery that can find the commonality between them, and maybe its the stories that string them together. Much of the show’s between-song banter has been preserved here. His rumbly version of “Georgia on My Mind” stands on its own, for sure, without the pre-song setup about his new baby. But would it be as sweet without it? Probably not. Other highlights include the shouldn’t-work-but-does mashup of “Great Big Stuff” from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels with “Sixteen Tons” and a cover of Lucinda Williams’s “Can’t Let Go.” If you couldn’t be there — or you were and want to relive — this recording isn’t quite the jeans, but it’s pretty close.
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Speaking of Norbert Leo Butz — and we always are — he recently made a guest appearance with David Yazbek at the 92nd Street Y downtown in the first of a series of Monday night shows that David is doing. The next one is on February 4 and his guest will be Patti LuPone, so clearly there will be some crazy songery happening that night and you need to be there.
But let’s talk for a minute about the first show, wherein we got to hear David and his killer band play the overture to The Full Monty, among other things. Taking the music out of the orchestra pit (and removing it from a context wherein the thought of Patrick Wilson naked basically obliterated all rational thought) gives it new life. Onstage at the Y, it sounded like a jazz tune or a kind of baby pop opus. Other gems: David’s song “Sandy Koufax,” which asks, “Is it good for baseball? Is it good for the Jews?” — sung, of course, in David’s endearing non-singer singing voice — and Norbert Leo Butz doing the finale from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Here’s some charming video of that, and some crappy, but also hopefully charming photos. It must also be mentioned that this song contains basically our favorite David Yazbek lyric of all human times, which you’ll hear around 1:12. And Norbert is wearing a hat that he actually wore when he played Freddy in Scoundrels. That’s not like… what Norbert just happened to be wearing at the gig. Anyway, here you go:
FG Productions Announce Final Casting for Broadway’s 2012-13 Season, Pippin Tumbles into Role of Fangirl Favorite
New York, New York – 16 January 2012 – Fangirl Alliance Productions, LCC (the FGs) has announced that casting for the 2012-13 Broadway season has finally been completed—and not a moment too soon—with Diane Paulus’ production of Pippin filling the role of Obvious Fangirl Favorite when it begins performances March 23rd at the Music Box Theater.
Pippin’s casting marks the culmination of a grueling—and frankly, often boring-as-fuck—search, which began on the eve of Newsies opening in March of 2012 and spanned nearly ten months. In that time many shows were rumored to be up for the role, from a long-speculated, FGs’ wet-dream production of Regina Spektor’s Beauty—frequently imagined to star John Gallagher Jr.—to the Stark Sands vehicle Kinky Boots and Cinderella, featuring Santino Fontana. Toward the end of the year Aaron Tveit’s mere presence in the big screen adaptation of Les Miserables distracted the FGs from the search almost entirely. But, with Diner’s early January departure from the 2012-13 season roster, panic set in over the dwindling number of cute boys belting on Broadway and the search heated up once again.
According to the casting call posted last March, the FGs sought a musical starring a “handsome, non-threatening, slightly confused young man in need of affection,” an “ordinary, but beautiful, but ordinary [female] love interest… [with] a dash of gumption” and/or a “fierce, take-charge, modern [female lead] who can sang.” Additional roles required included “Handsome Chorus Boy” and “Comic Relief.” The casting call also detailed the need for a minimum of “three catchy songs that can be belted with friends while waiting in a ticket rush line,” a “sweet, earnest love song you can imagine dancing to at your wedding,” and one scene wherein “either the Cute Boy or Handsome Chorus Boy are shirtless, preferably both.”
While Pippin was a late entrant in the race, upon close inspection its casting as Obvious Fangirl Favorite feels, well, obvious. Starring the handsome but lost Pippin, a prince searching for an extraordinary life—a journey lead by the fierce-as-fuck female Lead Player—who ultimately finds fulfillment with his ordinary, girl-next-door true love Catherine, Pippin’s primary roles easily hit all the right notes.
Meanwhile, with up-and-comer (and BRIT with a devilishly cute accent) Matthew James Thomas in the role of Pippin, Paulus’ production gives the FGs someone totally new to swoon over and cyber-stalk until their fingertips go numb. As the Lead Player, established Broadway star and Tony/Olivier Nominee Patina Miller belts her damn face off in no uncertain terms. Plus, this production features a particularly attractive and fit chorus full of very bendy, likely fun-in-the-sack dancers and acrobats—the handsomest of all, a British circus boy named Orion Griffiths, is basically shirtless at all times—and the perfect comic relief in the form of Broadway’s beloved, two-time Tony Winner Andrea Martin. This shit is basically FG catnip.
After having auditioned this production of Pippin at the A.R.T. in Boston, where their hearts swelled to the point of exploding with joy, the FGs knew they’d finally found their show. One noted that the production—particularly in big numbers like “Morning Glow” and “Extraordinary”—was so exciting and joyful that she was unable to keep still in her seat. Another told us that she almost tripped over her own two-feet when, after a post-show talkback, handsome circus boy Orion Griffiths smiled at her.
With Pippin staking its corner of the sky at the Music Box Theater on March 23rd ahead of an April 25th opening, the FGs finally feel as though the season can begin. They’ve shifted focus from casting to strategizing for the potential ticket rush/lotto system and stalking bootlegs online so they can erase the memories of a particularly lackluster fall and prepare for a truly extraordinary spring.
In the control room at Kilgore studios the Sierra Nevada has given way to Bud Light and between moments of quiet awe, listening to songs for Drew Gasparini’s new compilation I Could Use A Drink roar to life, there is an almost constant stream of insults and dick jokes.
“This is the bro-iest musical theater recording session I’ve ever witnessed,” John Kilgore says, surveying the room loaded with boys–producer Daniel Benge, photographer Scott Brownlee, actors Tim Ehrlich, Gabe Violett and Blake Daniel, and of course composer Drew Gasparini. He’s the reason everyone is there, after all.
They’ve been there for hours, as the empty beer bottles indicate. Stars like Jeremy Jordan, Kacie Sheik, Nick Blaemire and Andrew Kober have come and gone. Jenn Damiano, Justin Guarini, F Michael Haynie and Alex Brightman will make appearances later. Hours more will be spent in that small room, laughing and singing. And we were there to document the whole thing. Because who doesn’t want to know what goes on behind the scenes when Broadway’s future stars make a record, right?
Below, is a sort-of scrapbook of the making of I Could Use A Drink, replete with pics, observations, and the occasional direct quote–those were too good to leave out.
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18 November 2012
Behold the most important clothing item of this session: Drew Gasparini’s fake glasses, which he claims to wear because they make him look smart. They’re “fashion glasses,” to be precise. Not unlike fashion jeans, as opposed to work jeans. Or safety glasses. We think Drew looks smart even without glasses, but let’s be real. Glasses never, ever hurt anything.
This is Charlie Rosen, Musical Genius and General Cute Person. You likely know him as the bass player from Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, or the other musician guy from One Man, Two Guvnors. During this recording session, he will a lot of walking around, conducting, pressing buttons, and telling people what to do and sing.
The guy on the left is Daniel. He’s a producer of the theater. He’s also Australian, which means he has an amazing accent. By all accounts, his glasses are real, and totally made of bamboo.
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Kacie Sheik and Eric Michael Krop record a song called “Michigan.” In case you’re wondering — and we know you are — Kacie was wearing an amazing drape-y cardigan and Eric Michael Krop was looking a) hot and b) like Robin Thicke, two things that always go together. “Michigan” is one of only two songs on the album that stands alone, and isn’t part of a musical.
Drew on “Michigan”: This song is about trying to date my best friend. And every time I bought a ticket to go see her, I’d get a new show in NYC and I couldn’t go. And I wrote this song to be angst-y and Dashboard Confessional-y.
When they ask Kacie to come back into the control room, she demurs. “I don’t like to listen,” she says.
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This is mostly what we do–sit/stand around and watch, talk a lot, listen some more. Often with an adult beverage in hand, in accordance with the theme of this recording, obviously.
Between takes, Charlie chats with us about how he does a totally niche thing in the Broadway ecosystem — He’s an onstage musician. So he can play some badass bass in your show’s band, but he also got his Equity card as an actor.
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Check out Broadway’s Nick Blaemire, late of Godspell and Dogfight, recording the song “Bring Me Down” with Evita’s lovely Rachel Potter.
This is the handsome and genuinely sort of romantic profile of the exceptionally talented Blake Daniel. He hung out while Nick and Rachel were recording.
Things Drew shouted while Rachel and Nick were recording: “ERECTION!” “Boner parade!” Needless to say, he was pleased with how things were turning out.
Drew wrote “Bring Me Down” for a show he did with composer Scott Alan. Except the show happened to be that same night. Drew started writing at 5:00 pm. The show was at 8:00.
Nick Blaemire gives all of this a hearty thumbs up.
There was, by the way, an extensive conversation about whether or not it was acceptable to have alcohol appear in these pictures. As you can see, once we resolved that it was okay — the album title being about booze and all — Nick was right on board.
Rachel taking a first listen. Blaemire dug Charlie’s arrangement. His comment: The strings, Rosen!
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This is the part where we should tell you — with a distinct note of personal regret — that Jeremy Jordan recorded a song for this album and we weren’t there to witness it. We could have attended the session except we were in London seeing The Bodyguard. Tragic in nine different ways, that.
Gabe Violett, Blake Daniel and Tim Ehrlich getting ready to record the song “Valley High.” At some point during this session, Charlie Rosen will conduct the singers with a paintbrush.
Running through it at the piano while John sets up the mics…
We asked Drew how this song came about, and he explained that he got the idea for it while he was on the toilet. For realz. He was reading a magazine article about the anniversary of the Columbine shootings. At the time, he was working on his serial killer musical Make Me Bad, and studying up on the motivations of killers.
The night ends at a bar, toasting three successful songs. Fun fact: Drew has an obscure tattoo. That’s not a squid. It’s an Italian horn — a symbol of luck and protection.
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10 December 2012
Wicked’s F Michael Haynie had finished recording before we arrived, but hung around til the bitter end. We dig the porkpie hat.
This is Justin Guarini laying down his track, called “Good Stuff.” It’s hot. Like, so hot that as he prepared to start recording, Drew shouted “cover your vagina!” at us. You know, so we wouldn’t get spontaneously pregnant.
Between takes, Justin can only hear us speaking if someone presses a button, like Charlie here. This is probably a good thing, because it gets a little ridiculous when there’s too much access to him. Case in point? At one point Alex Brightman calls out “Who are you?!” Justin’s perfectly dry response? “Clay Aiken.”
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Drew was super excited to record with Jenn Damiano, on whom he has a secret crush (which is clearly no longer a secret).
When he’s not sitting pensively at the board, Charlie conducts this session with the neck of a bass guitar.
Jenn is obviously better dressed than anyone else in the room.
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Alex Brightman, straight chillin’ before it’s his turn to record. Remember his sweatshirt, it will be important in a second.
Brightman, singing with gusto, completely sweatshirtless. At this point he’s probably lost his shoes, too. Why, you ask? Because, whether on a bet or just a whim, Brightman had made the decision to strip record. Every mistake or screwy take meant he had to lose an item of clothing.
By the last take of the night, Drew was begging us to use this as the final line of our article: “Alex Brightman clothes himself, picks up his shoes, and exits.”
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Of course, with gems like these, there was no way we could use that as our last line. Clearly everyone needs to see snaps of Andrew Kober having his nose picked by friends, right?
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After recording wraps, we’re hanging out in the Kilgore kitchenette when someone asks Michael Kimmel — one of Drew’s collaborators, who stopped by to say hi — about the tiny cuts on his fingers and knuckles. They’re from shredding potatoes for Chanukah latkes, he says. Then someone asks if he’s Jewish. “No, I’m Irish,” he informs us, before everyone laughs about the Irishman being left to handle the potatoes.
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Nope. We don’t know what Brightman is doing here, either.
The last recording session in NYC is a wrap, so clearly, it’s time for a group shot. Insanity ensues.
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The night ends at… two or three am? When you’re using red pool chalk like war paint on the producer’s face, it’s time to go home.
Ok, ladies and gents, here are… the gents. Or, our favorites, anyway. As you’re about to see 2012 was a lovely year in theater. Here’s hoping the outlook for 2013 is every bit as warm.
1. Steve Kazee
Oh, Kazoozle, the man who made us swoon all year long with his snug henleys and trim vests and ability to feel and express (!) a kazillion emotions, both on stage and in real life. Playing a guitar and speaking with an Irish accent in Once only served to make us swoon harder for this strapping Kentucky import with a fun-to-pronounce last name.
2. Bobby Cannavale
Only Bobby Cannavale could make a character as slippery and disingenuous as Ricky Roma seem… well… hot. In between being horrified and basically creeped out by the characters shenanigans, we watched Glengarry Glen Ross with the general thought that Bobby could tear our clothes off any time he likes. In short, hand the man a Tony Award.
3. Cheyenne Jackson
The best moment of the entire fall season thus far — hands down — was when Cheyenne Jackson, as porn star Mandrew in The Performers, stood up, and just before he said his line, blithely tightened his ponytail. Only the most perfect man alive could imbue such a dumbass gesture with so much dopey charm. It hurt nothing that he was barechested, tattooed, and wearing leopard at the time. If The Performers proved anything it all, it resoundingly showed that Cheyenne Jackson has still got it — and that… and that… — for miles.
4. Norbert Leo Butz
He’s Broadway’s DILF of the decade. Proof? Nothing — not even Dead Accounts — could put a damper on Norbert’s sexy, haywire charm. Plus, his 54 Below gig was legit one of the best Broadway-ish cabarets we’ve ever seen — ever. Other, younger leading men might be prettier and shinier, but none of them have Nobert’s smarts, or his glittery humor. Or hell, his killer pipes. For young Broadway bucks who are afraid to turn 30, we suggest that they watch Norbert and take careful, careful notes.
5. Seth Numrich
Need yourself a boy with a barely-concealed sensitive soul? Seth Numrich is your guy. His tough, wounded turn as the Golden Boy himself, anchors him solidly as a for realz actor — and a bona fide cutie. But all the War Horse fangirls knew that already.
6. Will Chase
Broadway’s consummate leading man had a busy year. He joined Laura Osnes in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s completely demented musical Pipe Dream at Encores! He shagged Debra Messing’s character (ahem) on Smash. And he played the most dastardly of bad guys in Drood — complete with twisty mustache. Go figure, it took this latest development to make us fall madly in love. Maybe we like our men dangerous. Or maybe the glee that Will brought to this role was just totally infectious. No matter the reason, we’re happy to be on the Will Chase bandwagon — even if we’re a little late.
7. Joshua Henry
Can we talk for a minute about Joshua Henry, though? How he keeps showing up in these smallish roles and making us lose our minds? Much was made of Audra McDonald singing about ten bars of “Summertime” in Porgy and Bess, but it was the Joshua Henry version, early in the show, that made us swoon. Also, it’s really hard to argue with those biceps.
8. Richard Fleeshman
With abs of steel and curly hair we’re just dying to run our fingers through, Ghost star and British import Richard Fleeshman totally stole our hearts this year. And while we didn’t get to hear his sexy accent on stage, just knowing it existed made him a million times hotter in our minds. We’re sad we couldn’t keep him around longer, but hold out hope New York can sort out a way to get him back. Soon.
9. Derek Klena
Though he’s probably half our age, we’re totally digging Derek Klena, who we saw off-Broadway twice this year, once as a sensitive jock in Carrie and once as a sensitive Marine in Dogfight. His resemblance to Zac Efron is what caught our eye first, but his sweet performances and lovely voice are what kept us coming back for more. We hope Broadway gets their hands on this hunk ASAP.
10. David Furr
Two seconds after David Furr stepped onto the Delacorte stage in As You Like It this summer — before he’d even turned to face the audience fully or spoken a single word — we were elbowing each other and sighing like school girls. That’s how fast we fell for David Furr. And while anyone who can rock a weird-length, slightly greasy wig like that deserves our respect, Furr’s speaking voice/mastery of Shakespearean verse/piercing pair of baby blue eyes will keep us swooning for life.
11. Dan Stevens
As fans of period dress and smart boys, we’ve long held a candle for Downton Abbey star Dan Stevens and this year, we finally got to see him on the Broadway stage in The Heiress, where his general handsome dashing-ness kept us from hating the show completely. We love his British accent, gentle blue eyes, and total literature nerdery (he is the Editor at Large for online literary quarterly The Junket and sat on the judging panel for the 2012 Man Booker Prize for Fiction) so much that we’re wondering if it’s possible to clone him.
12. Will Swenson
While he’ll always be Berger in our heart of hearts, this year Will Swenson rocked his way right back into our lives as henley wearing bar/club owner Tom in Murder Ballad. We love him forever for being tall and strong and masculine, with the most amazing dark locks and beautiful light eyes.
We couldn’t let the year come to a close without sharing a list of our our favorite badass females on the Broadway stage this past year. Hots, style, talent and beautiful hair — among other things — all factored into our selection process, but needless to say we’re pretty obsessed with the following twelve lovely ladies…
1. Betsy Wolfe
Ms. Wolfe has been a busy lady this year, between playing Beth in Merrily at Encores!, and Rosa Budd in Drood at The Roundabout, she also managed to star in 35MM in the spring and score the coveted role of Cathy in next year’s revival of The Last Five Years. Sure, she’s lovely, and talented, and she sings like a dream, but we’re pretty sure that creamy complexion/rosy cheek/flowing blonde locks combo she’s rocking hasn’t hurt at all, either.
2. Cristin Milioti
For a show like Once, no standard-issue belter girl would do. Enter pretty, pixie-ish Cristin Milioti, who manages to be both haunting and unaffected as Girl to Steve Kazee’s introspective Boy. Plus, the lady knows how to wear a dress. Her awards-season frocks bolstered our confidence in Broadway’s ability to look as glam as Hollywood, with half the effort.
3. Caissie Levy
Look, we’re just gonna come out with it here – Ghost star Caissie Levy has a bangin’ bod. With that tiny, tiiny waist and those beautiful boobs, it’s impossible not to have the hots for Caissie Levy. And when she opens her mouth to sing? Fuhgeddaboudid.
4. Kara Lindsay
Playing the perfect smaht girl and winning our hearts with the best song about the joy/anxiety of writing we’ve ever heard on Broadway, Newsies star Kara Lindsay tapped danced her way right into our heart. Looking like actual Disney princess—Belle, anyone?—never hurt, either.
5. Kelli O’Hara
But how gorg is Kelli O’Hara, though? Capable of brightening up a room all on her own, and without the aide of flattering lighting, she made even ugly Oxfords and a newsboy cap look good in Nice Work If You Can Get It. And if you think that was amazing, wait until you see the cavalcade of frocks that Catherine Zuber has hooked her up with in Far from Heaven…
6. Kate Arrington
Holding her own between two huge performances from Paul Rudd and Michael Shannon in Grace, Kate Arrington totally made us love her. It doesn’t hurt that she’s beautiful in the kind of way we dream of being – like a real woman, who just kind of glows as she flips her flowing locks back over her shoulder and smiles. Plus, she hooked Michael Shannon in real life, so, she’s clearly workin it. We could use some tips.
7. Christiane Noll
This lovely lady was the best thing about both Ragtime and Chaplin, but we still remember her fondly as a baby-faced Ellen in the first national tour of Miss Saigon. Several decades and a Tony nomination later, we’re pleased as punch whenever we see her name on the boards. She’s been there for two of the last four seasons, and we hope someone figures out how to get her there next year, too.
8. Kacie Sheik
Between frequent concert appearances around the city, and giving us lessons on how to have perfect hair all the time, Sheik also managed to bring a sense of lightness and joy to February House at the Public this spring. Throw in a blinding smile and that smoky-sexy vibe to her voice, and we’re in love. Besides. The woman played Gypsy Rose Lee, need we say more?
9. Nikki Renee Daniels
Audra ate the stage, but no character this year slayed us more than Clara in Porgy & Bess. Adorbs Nikki Renee Daniels played her with such pathos and warmth – a thing that she must be used to, with her airy soprano, and roles like Belle in Beauty and the Beast, and Sarah in Ragtime under her belt. This year, we also saw her kill it with Sondheim’s “There Won’t Be Trumpets” at a benefit for the NYCLU – all while wearing a sparkly gold dress and stilettos. Unlike Clara’s homespun mom gear, that’s pretty sexy.
10. Katie Holmes
She’s Joey Potter, Tom Cruise’s ex, and mom to the most stylish child who ever wore kitten heels to a play date. So it’s not exactly a surprise that Katie Holmes is… well… beautiful. What is a surprise is that she’s been brave enough to do this Broadway thing at all, never mind more than once. We give Katie props for her style, but also for her audacity – and for whatever insane gown she’ll wear to the Tonys in 2013.
11. Yvonne Strahovski
No one rocks the icy, vintage blond ouvre quite like Broadway newbie – and Aussie — Yvonne Strahovski. Slinking all nine feet of herself across the stage in a vast collection of insane 1930s costumes in Golden Boy, it’s easy to see how the casting folks pegged her as the ultimate New York dame. And how she would easily add to Joe Bonaparte’s considerable torture.
12. Elizabeth Stanley
Looking like a Bond Babe from the days of yore, and oozing sex and talent, Elizabeth Stanley was basically perfect for the role of Gussie in Merrily at Encores! In fact, Stanley is basically perfect for life and exactly who we want to be when we grow up.
Credit: BetsyWolfe.com, Jeff Vespa, Carrie Sipp Photography, Jenny Anderson, Broadway.com, Jenny Anderson, Broadway.com, Monica Simoes, nikkireneedaniels.com, observer.com, InStyle, Susan Shacter
Just in case you were huffing glue and thought that the last year in theater was utterly perfect and special, we’d like to remind you that a lot of shows kind of sucked. Here they are, in no particular order of suckage. And may the stagedoor not hit them on the way to non-recoupment…
Raul Esparza in Leap of Faith
In general, we’ve always believed we’d watch Raul Esparza — one of the most dynamic, compelling actors of his age — read the phonebook. By which we mean we were pretty sure there’s nothing we wouldn’t watch him do. That is. Until we saw him play con-man/preacher Jonas Nightingale in Leap of Faith last spring. Seeing Raul suck so hard was so profoundly depressing you couldn’t even pay us to sit through it ever again. Perhaps it was his dramatic over-acting, scream-singing, or not-so-subtle, mid-show eye rolling at shitty material that was clearly beneath him, but Raul kind of broke our spirits with his badness. Quick, someone cast him in some Shakespeare before we lose faith completely!
Jessica Chastain in The Heiress
Hollywood’s “It Girl” is Broadway’s hottest mess this season — so much so that even Ben Brantley couldn’t help but notice that her character in this classic American play seemed developmentally challenged. Working super, duper hard to play “unattractive” and delivering her lines like a kindergarten teacher on downers, Chastain’s train wreck of a performance left us agog. It also made us wonder why director Moises Kaufman let his pretty leading lady — who by all onscreen accounts can actually act — drown so soundly and solidly. We know who she won’t be thanking when she wins that Oscar…
The Anarchist
It’s like David Mamet knew Glengarry, Glen Ross would make our best list, and he felt that to be fair to the universe he should write and direct one of the year’s worst plays. You know, just to balance things out. Enter The Anarchist, a play so bad it made 60 minutes feel like a lifetime. A really, really boring lifetime. Honestly, who’da thunk seeing Patti LuPone play a convicted murderer could possibly be anything other than batshit? Mamet did, apparently, because he wrote her — and costar Debra Winger — into a corner with soggy, pointless dialogue and a plot that went… well… we don’t know where it went. Nowhere, we guess.
Dead Accounts
It was all over by they time they got to the boxed wine joke. For those of you lucky enough to be spared this dismal play, let us fill you in: In Theresa Rebeck’s show about family life in the ‘burbs (and nine thousand other poorly-considered things), there is a joke about boxed wine, and how it’s imbibed by bumpkin non-city-dwellers. The purpose of this joke to demonstrate that suburbanites and/or midwesterners have no real sense of taste or culinary knowledge — a low-blow, low-brow gag designed so an urban audience will chortle over how sophisticated they pretend to be. Except here are several things that Theresa Rebeck forgot, in no particular order. 1. People in New York drink boxed wine now, without irony. 2. They started doing so at least three years ago. 3. Absolutely none of this is funny. The rest of the play is equally banal, and not even Norbert Leo Butz, working his face off to find something — a laugh, a shard of genuine insight — could make it less so. Katie Holmes is there too, but it’s not her fault. We would describe the ending to you, but you’d think that we did drugs at intermission and hallucinated the whole thing. One upside, though: At least, by that point, it was over.
Evita
Oh, how we wanted this to be good! Featuring Andrew Lloyd Webber’s best score and the American debut of the much-buzzed-about Elena Roger, we wanted to lose our Evita cherries to a truly great production. Except that this revival totally, unabashedly sucked. Blandly performed — seriously, how dare they? — and drained of all its satiric bite, this revival actually thought it was a serious musical about how great and special Eva Peron was. Maybe we’re attaching a lot of romantic ideas to Hal Prince’s original production, which we never saw, but we can’t help but believe that his winking, stark-and-dark take on the material was probably a whole lot more interesting.
Bring It On
Stop pandering to us, Broadway! Yes, we are woman. Yes, we like seeing ourselves onstage in stories that are relevant to our gender and generation, but why do you have to fuck this up so badly, and so often? Lysistrata Jones was both smarter and edgier, and used all the same costumes, and it still died a fast death, so we were questioning the sanity of this production from the get-go. But add the most instantly hateable leading lady in recent memory and a ludicrous plot device that lets her get away with horrible things and you’ve fully lost us.
Nice Work If You Can Get It
Never in our lives have we encountered a “sex comedy” so deeply unsexy. Helmed by Matthew Broderick working his triple threat mojo to the hilt (He can neither sing, dance, nor act…), this show mostly made you feel bad for his leading lady. Enter the gorgeous, deeply underserved Kelli O’Hara, who got a Tony nomination despite the creators’ herculean efforts to make her seem both unfunny and unbeautiful. Teeming with dumb jokes and charmless, utterly by-the-book takes on the Gershwin cataglog, the show also featured scads of half-naked chorus girls — presumably to distract from the total lack of anything interesting happening around them.
Outrageously Priced Book of Mormon Tickets
Hey guys, have you heard of this hot new Broadway show about a bro named Elder Price and his wacky bestie Elder Cunningham? We think it’s called The Book of Mormon, though we’re not entirely positive, because at this point we can’t even afford to think about seeing it. And while we understand that Broadway is a business, and not a benevolent charity designed to bring culture to the poor, huddled masses, it seems to us that things are getting a bit out of control. How exactly is the average American supposed to justify taking their family of four to see a show — one of the best Broadway has seen in decades — when the good seats cost as much as a week and a half in Disney World?
The Last Smoker in America
Every once in a while you see a comedy that’s so bad you get angry every time you’re unable to resist laughing. In a world where Mayor Bloomberg can regulate the size of the soda you’re allowed to buy, Bill Russell and Peter Melnick’s The Last Smoker in America — about a woman rebelling against a society whose overreaching laws wouldn’t allow her to make bad choices, even in her own home — seemed like such a good idea. Unfortunately, by pandering to an audience of self-satisfied, “edgy,” suburban health nuts with no taste, The Last Smoker was ultimately a deeply unfunny, tryhard of a show that made us wish Mayor Bloomberg could outlaw bad theater.
Rebecca Implodes
A musical based on a novel set on a wind-whipped English estate? Where people will be in period dress? And some crazy shit happens and an entire staircase burns to the ground ON STAGE?! Rebecca basically sounded like the most amazingly craptacular thing that ever existed, and we were dying to see it. Which is why its implosion sucked so hard. Jobs were lost, money was wasted and reputations were damaged and that all sucked. But most of all, we were sad to lose the chance to see a new musical on Broadway, especially one that had the potential to be truly, gloriously, so-over-the-top-bad-it’s-amazing, craptacular.
Here it is, guys. The whole year in a giant nutshell. Here are the shows and performances and scandals we loved with all our theater-obsessed hearts. As we wait with bated breath for Stark Sands in drag, Cinderella, and the inevitable announcement of a Miss Saigon movie, let’s take a minute to celebrate the last 12 months of theater. Because every once in a while, Times Square has more balls than just that one giant one…
Christian Borle in Peter and the Starcatcher
Christian Borle — hot, or not? This is a question we’ve heard echoed around the theater community quite a bit this year. (We both fall on the side of “hot like fire,” FYI.) The perfection of Borle’s performance as Black Stache in Peter and the Starcatcher, however, has never been up for debate. His bendy, fey, completely madcap villian-on-the-hunt-for-a-foe was an absolute joy to behold. Not many actors can bring the house down with one simple phrase — “Oh. My. God.” — but Borle was more than up to the task, and it made for the most memorable comedic performances of the season.
Rebecca Naomi Jones in Murder Ballad Murder Ballad, the off-Broadway rock musical that plays like a fanfic Rent sequel, wouldn’t be nearly as delicious without its sardonic narrator. Rebecca Naomi Jones, with her killer voice and manic tresses, injects the proceedings with some good old fashioned irony and sarcasm – a welcome addition after Will Swenson and Karen Olivo’s semi-tortured boo-hooing over their characters’ not-that-terrible lives. When Rebecca’s character gets the last grisly laugh, you’ll chortle right along.
Golden Boy
Clifford Odets on Broadway – This is a magic combination for those of us who love New York, words, and beautiful, tortured young men. And Bartlett Sher’s revival of Golden Boy is a stunner on all accounts, a feat of slang-y, homegrown poetry presented with the rhythmic one-two punch of a boxing match. Even the costumes are awesome. Plus, we love shows we can confidently recommend to both our grandmothers and our hipster friends.
Once
Not like it needs accolades from us, God knows, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention Once in our annual best-of list, if only because this show isn’t a full-on embarrassment if you’re a thinking member of the modern world who might occasionally find herself at the theater. Real, non-theater-obsessed people can like this sweet, sad little show about Ireland, love, and music. Plus, Steve Kazee and his myriad of nuanced feelings are pretty sexy.
The Tonys Get It Right
If we’re all very honest right now, we can admit that the Tony Awards fuck shit up all the time. With an eye toward crowd-pleasing tour potential and a voting body dominated by the very producers who profit from a show’s success, they’re not always doling out the accolades based on quality alone. But this year, it seems, quality won out. Or at least, it met in the middle with more commercial interests. Either way, between Once and Porgy & Bess and Christian Borle and Steve Kazee and Audra McDonald and Clybourne Park… and, and, and… it really felt like the Tony Awards got things quite right this year — a feat totally worth celebrating.
Goodbar
This Public Theater show, presented early in the year as part of the Under the Radar Festival, stuck in our teeth like a toffee-studded candy bar and would not get out. A bananas rock opera about a mild-mannered woman who enjoys the after-dark company of insanely dangerous men blew our minds with its strobe-lit, blood-and-guts visuals, and its unapologetic, enunciation-be-damned rock score. Finally, someone figured out how to make a rock opera that actually rocked, instead of just pantomiming it. Bonus points for the show’s high gross-out factor and a video cameo from Ira Glass.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
Yeah, but Tracy Letts is awesome, though. In a piece that’s known for giving its lead actress career-making props, it’s the dude who wins the day here. If you can call it winning when a character is totally screwed up and unhappy. In Edward Albee’s tale of the most dysfunctional marriage ever, Letts bellows, skulks, and threatens his way through a nightmarish confrontation with his wife and his demons — and several bottles of bourbon. Yes, normally we’d politely ask Edward Albee and his ideas about how modern woman has ruined EVERYTHING to kindly shut his face, but this show is really well done and really affecting. And you’ll walk out of the theater with the satisfying, Jerry Springer-ish sense that your life will never be that demented.
Anthony Warlow Comes to America
Ok, so James Lapine’s paint-by-numbers revival of Annie is kind of an unoffensive dud. But Anthony Warlow as Daddy Warbucks is a gem forever with his powerful voice and forceful onstage presence. No kidding, said the entire Australian continent and a small but fervent worldwide fandom that still thinks of him as The World’s Greatest Enjolras, No Offense to Aaron Tveit. We hope Broadway finds twenty more reasons — and musicals — to keep him here, and that the people who issue the visas agree.
Lin-Manuel Miranda in Merrily We Roll Along
Everything about this Encores! production was so, so good, but nothing blew our minds quite so hard as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s take on neurotic lyricist Charlie Kringas. Nearly unrecognizable in epic nerd gear — polyester, glasses, Justin Bieber’s haircut — his Charlie was a hand-wringing knot of grasp-y emotion. And his “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” was what it should be — basically the best song that Sondheim’s ever written. The composer himself, we suspect, was proud in fifteen million ways.
Aaron Tveit in Les Miserables
It was the casting announcement that made us fully fall off our chairs. Totally obvious and yet totally… not… the choice of Aaron Tveit for Les Miserables’s goldest golden boy was too perfect for words. So we just screamed our faces off. Sometimes we get bitter and jealous when Broadway stars leave us and ascend the echelons of mainstream entertainment. And sometimes we get like proud moms. Count this development among the latter. No one was happier to see Gabe Goodman turn in his New Balances for the tricolor cockade than we were.
Jeremy Jordan and Andy Mientus, We Hardly Knew ‘Ye
About this time last year we — along with all of Broadway– were losing our damn minds over Jeremy Jordan, and rightly so. It’s hard to imagine what we would have done with ourselves this past 12 months without having JJ to swoon over. But almost as soon as we held him in our hands, Jeremy slipped away, taking that Tony nomination and running right into the cast of Smash. Who followed hot on his heels? Only Andy Mientus, the cutest of the cute, and a theater actor with not a Broadway credit to his name. In one fell swoop, Broadway lost its hottest current star, and the one it hadn’t even had yet. We ain’t mad, really. Mostly we’re kind of thrilled we’ll get to see them on our TVs once a week, and brag to all our friends that we knew them first. But. We are a little terrified we’ll lose them forever. They’re far too cute to let go of so soon.
Rebecca Dies… in Epic Fashion
It’s likely that the show itself wouldn’t have been nearly as entertaining as its total, catastrophic implosion. There were arrests and angry letters from the cast. Patrick Healy went on NPR. People got sued. When Rebecca went down, she sure as hell went down in flames, and we’re not talking about the pyrotechnics that were supposed to end the actual show. No musical in recent history — except maybe Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark — held our undivided attention so keenly without ever playing a single performance. For the theater of theater, we were never so grateful.
Ryan Steele in Newsies
Sure, we loved Newsies for its straight-to-the veins hit of nostalgia and cute boys — things we never deny or argue with. But nothing prepared us to go quite so gaga over the show’s most heavily featured dancer. Ryan Steele was veritable unicorn of grace and precision, and he was pretty damn easy on the eyes, too. We sat next to a 14-year-old girl at one performance who summed things up pretty accurately: She gasped audibly when he first appeared on the stage.
Lindsay Mendez in Dogfight
After several years of supporting roles on Broadway — from Grease to Godspell — and near constant performances in the concert circuit, wherein she belted her damn face off, Lindsay Mendez finally got her crack at a starring spot this summer. As Rose in Second Stage’s production of Pasek and Paul’s Dogfight, Mendez blew our expectations out of the water. Her sensitive, nuanced, utterly belt-free performance perfectly captured Rose and all her awkward, smart, righteous angles. We hope to see a lot more of Lindsay — and Rose, too — in the future.
Glengarry Glen Ross
If you’ve worked with salesmen, even for a minute, you know the characters in David Mamet’s Glengarry, Glen Ross — they’re so real it’s painful. That felt especially true during Daniel Sullivan’s thoughtful, understated revival, which highlighted the humanity of Mamet’s characters, and not just their f-bomb laced linguistic fireworks. We sat in rapt attention as Bobby Cannavale slithered across the stage in Ricky Roma’s slick skin while Al Pacino’s aging Shelley Levine staggered through his career’s tragic last gasp. After the show we talked for ages about every perfect performance — the show felt universally well-acted — and nuances to the material we’d never noticed before. After a fall of disappointing shows that just never lived up to the hype, this quieter Glengarry was a shock to our systems in the best way possible.
Ramin Karimloo at B.B. King’s
Iranian/Canadian star of epic hotness, Ramin Karimloo, has been burning up the West End for years now — as both an uncomfortably hot Phantom, and an uncomfortably hot Jean Valjean — but New York City couldn’t seem to get his ass on the stage. That is, until this fall, when we managed to steal a few nights of his beautiful, precious time for concerts at B.B. King’s. By the time we heard his rock rendition of “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” we were so drunk on his panty-melting hotness and molten vocal stylings, that we felt high. And what a beautiful high that was. Please, universe, bring Ramin back to NYC soon. We’d like another hit. Or a million.
Cock
Sometimes, smaller is better. That’s usually not the case with cocks, though. Unless, of course, the Cock in question is a play by Brit Mike Bartlett, which made its stateside debut at The Duke this past spring. And what a debut it was. Smartly styled like a cockfight and staged in a tiny, bare amphitheater with no sets to separate the audience from the actors, or the actors from each other, Cock blew the doors off the traditional love-triangle story. Perfectly performed by stars Jason Butler Harner, Cory Michael Smith and Amanda Quaid, this moving exploration of relationships in the modern world made a huge impression.
Will Chase in Drood
Sometimes it takes the perfect role for you to truly see an actor for all he’s worth and not just, say, his really handsome face and bangin’ bod. In the case of Will Chase, that was definitely the case. Sure, we’d seen him around. And we knew he was beautiful. But it wasn’t until we caught his performance as John Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood this fall that we really got him. Chase tears into the role with abandon/sings his face off, and his handsome, dastardly John Jasper was so delicious we fell hard. Finally. And now we never, ever want to look back.
35MM
New musical theater can be a terrifying place, full of hinky lyrics, pat, saccharine plotlines, and scores that bore you half to death. That’s why it’s so damn exciting to find good new musical theater. One of our favorite finds this year? Ryan Scott Oliver’s 35MM: A Musical Exhibition, which made its New York debut this past spring. Each song in Oliver’s piece tells the story of one of photographer Matthew Murphy’s snaps, and performed in Galapagos Art Space in Dumbo, while Murphy’s photos were projected on the stage—and strewn about the space with abandon—it totally wrecked our heads in the best way possible. We expect a lot from Mr. Oliver in the future. And from the show’s stars: Alex Brightman, Ben Crawford, Jay Johnson, Lindsay Mendez and Betsy Wolfe. But this smart, eclectic, entertaining piece will always hold a special place in our hearts.
