Theater

Producers announced that 9 To 5: The Musical is coming to Broadway next spring, with previews starting March 24 at the Marriot Marquis Theatre. We so wish that Dolly Parton was actually going to be on stage for this one, but Megan Hilty will play her role from the 1980 film. We're booking tickets for opening night (April 23) so we can spot the country star in the audience.

Ms. Parton was at a Times Square studio yesterday to announce the big news. "It's the most fun I've ever had as a songwriter," she announced to reporters at the press conference. Ms. Parton wrote the music, with 20 new songs, for the musical. "I feel like Minnie Pearl! I'm just so glaaaad to be here."  read more »

It's the 20th anniversary David Mamet’s Speed-The-Plow and the Belasco Theatre will start the birthday celebrations on Oct. 3. with director Neil Pepe (who recently helmed Ethan Coen’s Almost an Evening) and stars Jeremy Piven as greedy producer Charlie Fox hugging it out with The Homecoming's Raul Esparza as Bobby Gould, according to BroadwayWorld.com.

The play is a scathing portrait of the film industry and the people who are willing to sell their souls for sex, fame and fortune--a timely revival with the Screen Actors Guild and studio negotiations still in the works. Speaking of unfinished business, producers have yet to cast is the role of Karen that Madonna originated on Broadway in the 1988 production.

My excited interest in the production of The Bacchae during the Lincoln Center Festival was less about Euripides, good though he is. It was my admiration for the dynamic creative team who’ve taken a few liberties with the play (which premiered successfully in 405 B.C.).

The National Theatre of Scotland’s John Tiffany, The Bacchae’s director, and the leading Scottish playwright David Greig, who adapted it from a literal translation by Ian Ruffell, are the immense talents responsible for the modern masterpiece about Scottish soldiers in the Iraq war, Black Watch. I sang the praises of that production unreservedly last season, singling out its fantastic imaginative daring and simplicity.  read more »

MUSIC

British pop music has been known for its tendency to get bored with itself and search for outside influences--think of New Order mining Detroit house music to transform the Joy Division formula--but the movement known as Brit Pop was always about wallowing, if sometimes with tongues in cheek, in the national sound.

Which is why Blur frontman Damon Albarn's recent projects have been both a break from his Brit Pop roots and the inevitable result of too much of a good British thing. There was his platinum-selling Gorillaz project, of course, in which he teamed with Cibo Matto's Miho Hatori and Dan "The Automator" Nakamura, among others, to create two albums of spaced-out hip-hop.  read more »

An Australian writing duo are dropping Angels onto Broadway during the 2008-9 season. They wrote a new musical based on John Milton's poem Paradise Lost and will stage the work, Angels, in a Louisiana theater starting Aug. 29 before bringing it to New York. According to the press release, an aeronautical engineer, Ken Lai, composed the score and an architect, Marcus Cheong, co-wrote the book and lyrics with Mr. Lai. The musical recounts an ancient war between the angels and Lucifer's fallen minions, told through the eyes of Sera, the angel of light.

The musical will feature lots of flying angels and aerial choreography tricks, which is perhaps the only way you can keep a theater audience awake during a rendition of Paradise Lost.  read more »

CONCERTS

"The live show is the new album cover," says David Tobias, singer/guitarist for Brooklyn's electro-funksters Apes & Androids. In a piece in July's Spin on the new vogue for psychadelic stage-shows, we learn that the Androids hand out kazoos to their audience so they can play along to Gary Glitter's "Rock & Roll Part 2," and that the band's friends are known to dress up like zombies on-stage and perform a dead-on impression of Michael Jackson's "Thriller." Sounds like a good time. Even better when you consider who the boys are playing with—the borough's most accomplished sonic terrorists, A Place To Bury Strangers.  read more »

Andy Blankenbuehler, the dance choreographer who won a Tony award for his saucy Latin and contemporary routines for Broadway's In the Heights, will be a guest on the best (in our humble opinion!) reality show on network TV this summer: Fox's So You Think You Can Dance. He'll be creating a new routine for one of the seven remaining couples in the competition. They dance a new routine in pairs each week in different styles, including Broadway, hip-hop, ballroom, contemporary and jazz. If the competitors make their moves on stage and don't get on judge Mary Murphy's "hot tamale train," they'll have to dance solos and risk being eliminated.  read more »

Notes for and against Macbeth 2008, directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna, hailed by some as a theater visionary:

I think the avant-garde Polish director should have given his contemporary take on Shakespeare’s tragedy a different title.

Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 masterpiece, is famously based on Macbeth, but its title takes us directly into another world. Set in medieval Japan, the movie uses very little of Shakespeare’s language. Mr. Jarzyna’s Macbeth 2008, which has been compared to watching a movie onstage, is set in a blood-soaked U.S. war zone, and the director rarely uses Shakespeare’s language either. But his title links this production too closely to the original play, and sets up unfounded expectations.  read more »

Chekhov's The Seagull is back on Broadway, this time with indie movie hipster god Peter Sarsgaard as Trigorin, pretty Brit actress Kristin Scott Thomas as Arkadina and Zoe Kazan (featured in the forthcoming film August) as Masha. Pretty great casting, especially considering Ms. Thomas' Olivier award for best actress for the last time she performed The Seagull. But how will Mr. Sarsgaard do compared to Alan Cumming's performance as the broody famous writer who woos an older woman and a budding actress in the Classic Stage Company's production last spring? We'll find out when the play opens open Oct. 1 at the Walter Kerr Theatre. Preview performances begin Sept. 16, according to the Associated Press.

Adding Machine, the little Off-Broadway show that could about a man who lost his job to a machine, will close its curtains at the Minetta Lane Theatre on July 20. The play began previews Feb. 8 and officially opened Feb. 25.

Producer Scott Morfee said in a statement, "Adding Machine is a labor of love for all involved. The New York production, which sits so perfectly at the Minetta Lane Theatre, has allowed this musical to get the kind of attention it deserves. My partners and I are proud to know that Adding Machine will prove to be a significant addition to the repertoire of opera companies and adventurous theater troupes around the world, and the introduction of an extraordinary new voice in the musical theater (Mr.  read more »