This post is the latest edition of Vulture’s Stage Whisperer newsletter, recapping weekly theater news from Broadway, Off Broadway, and Off–Off Broadway. Subscribe below to get it delivered directly to your inbox.Â
Fellow Ozians,
We’re heading into an exciting few weeks, full of new show openings and big anniversaries in the run-up to Thanksgiving. But before we get into all that, I dropped by The 24 Hour Plays on Broadway Monday night to enjoy the chaotic, slapdash performances put together by pros (many of whom had been employed by the guest of honor, SVU’s Warren Leight) in a single day. Highlights included Dagmara Dominczyk in a Kenny Lonergan scene, the surprisingly delightful pairing of Susannah Perkins and Christian Slater as animal rights activists, Raùl Esparza singing “Being Alive,†and David Krumholtz joking, in character during one play, that these actors were all there because, well, there’s still a strike.
On the horizon, there’s the 20th anniversary of the opening of Wicked coming up October 30. We got the show’s original Elphaba and G(a)linda, Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, together for an interview and a photo shoot — props to New York director of photography Jody Quon and the amazing photographer Mark Seliger. Beyond encouraging you to read the story and enjoy the photo (and memes made out of the photo), the one thing I want to share is that Kristin, a true Oklahoma girl, was insistent that Idina’s son, who plays basketball, should root for the OKC Thunder — apparently their young players are good? I can’t comment on basketball, as I’m too busy observing the game of how Wicked is preparing for this big happening, including a series of events and theme performances through the weekend. And one can only imagine how it’ll play into the rollout for the film adaptation.
Speaking of which, though she isn’t allowed to promote it yet, the film’s Galinda, Ariana Grande, was spotted with her Boq, Ethan Slater, attending the 54 Below show of the original Fiyero, Norbert Leo Butz. Thankfully, a tipster has provided us an answer to the most pressing question about that night out: What did they order to meet 54 Below’s famous food-and-drink minimum? The guacamole and a bottle of wine. —Jackson McHenry
Box Office Banter
This week’s grosses are out, and we have some advice for the team at Kimberly Akimbo. Editor Christopher Bonanos, critics Jackson McHenry and Sara Holdren, writers Rebecca Alter and Jason P. Frank, social-media editor Zach Schiffman, and editor Brandon Sanchez discuss.
Christopher Bonanos: Gutenberg! The Musical! Is selling! Pretty well!
Jackson McHenry:Â Buoyed! By! That! Familiar! Name! Duo! And! Also! Parade! of! Guest! Producers!
Sara Holdren: I mean, I’m not going to lie, I was impressed with the Max Bialystock cameo. Wish it had been my night.
McHenry:Â My cousins are visiting this weekend, and it felt like the sweet spot of a show to take high school/college kids to, which might help explain the appeal. Hopefully they recognize whoever is on.
Holdren: That’s real — it was literally the only show playing right now that I could suggest when my friend asked me what to take his non-theater-kid 12-year-old to.
Bonanos: Someone on Reddit (and God bless them) is keeping track of every cameo.
McHenry: I think Back to the Future is also aiming at the kind of theater-uninterested family audience, which helps explain those sales, though I can’t say I’d recommend it.
Zach Schiffman: It’s funny how influential the “return to the stage†narrative can be — it felt like so much of Take Me Out’s audience last year was buzzing over Jesse Tyler Ferguson being back onstage, and Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad have that factor times one million. They are the correct level of fame where it gets normal people who know them from TV or whatever but also die-hards who are happy to see them back onstage.
Bonanos: I’m always tickled when a person who’s huge on the New York stage but not too well known elsewhere gets famous among normies for a sitcom or something, and has two distinct and barely overlapping audiences thereafter.
Holdren:Â Yeah, maybe it helps that Josh has been a very famous snowman in the meantime.
Jason P. Frank: And Andrew was on the beloved TV show Girls, which everybody loves and nobody has any issues with.
Rebecca Alter: Jason, Girls is the best show of the century. And Elijah was one of the best characters on the best show of the century.
Bonanos: A best character on a best show of the century.
McHenry: Elijah cornering Adam when he books a Broadway show and telling him to go to either Glass House Tavern, if you’re in the ensemble, or Bar Centrale, if you’re a star, is very Stage Whisperer–coded.
Frank: I’m tickled by seeing Gutenberg! do so well because it feels like a throwback to the early-2000s wave of musical comedies, when we thought that the next decade would be filled with musical comedies like The Producers, Spelling Bee, and Spamalot. Instead, we got the rise of jukebox musicals.
Schiffman: Who knows what the holidays will look like, but it feels like Kimberly Akimbo will make it past January? There’s plenty of stops they could pull with that show to keep it open, and they’ve pulled none, except the crazy-ass NJ Transit–centric campaign with Steven Boyer and Alli Mauzey. Like, I don’t know, put Christine Ebersole in. There are a handful of actors who would do it, and older gay men would shell out.
Alter: The mental image of Christine as Kimberly has me choking laughing. I think Kimberly Akimbo should be adapted into a Disney+ limited series. I don’t even need it to be a musical. It can just be an extended look into what Kimmy and the choir nerds are up to episodically.
Schiffman: Surprised they haven’t pulled the marketing trick of getting trick-or-treaters for Kimberly AkimBOO … at the BOOth.
Brandon Sanchez:Â Kimberly Akim-go to the polls.
Holdren: Stage Whisperer just giving away marketing consulting for free.
The Last Midnight: Sondheim and Ives’s Here We Are
By Sara Holdren
Unlike an Orwell or an Odets, the cheekily (and correctly) self-described“icon of the American musical theater†Stephen Sondheim is not ordinarily associated with overt political righteousness. Yet what Orwell called “a sense of injustice†is right there flowing through his work — sometimes as a quiet underground stream, sometimes as a heaving, filthy flood. “What does a man do, when at last he realizes his suffering is caused not by the cruelty of fate, but by the injustice of his fellow human beings?†asks the anarchist Emma Goldman in Sondheim and John Weidman’s Assassins.
Elphablurbs
In honor of Wicked’s 20th anniversary, the Stage Whisperer team shouts out a few other memorable Elphabas.
Lindsay Mendez played the role for the show’s tenth anniversary, landed the mouthful that is “no father is not proud of you,†and took us backstage in Broadway.com’s must-watch video diary series “Fly Girl.â€Â It’s the perfect greenifying tutorial. —Tom Smyth
Elphaba is canonically tall and Glinda is canonically short, these are the rules. Lilli Cooper is a supremely underrated Tallphaba with her crisp, clear vocal tone. —Zach Schiffman
I’m a big fan of/apologist for “No Good Deed,†Elphaba’s Act II scream-rock ballad of evil (perhaps because a girl in my high-school class once did it entirely in head voice at a talent show, which has to be heard to be believed). No one does “No Good Deed†better than Shoshanna Bean, specifically Bean as intro’d by Martha Stewart dressed as Jane Goodall(?) on a Halloween episode of her TV show, in one of the most intense displays of commitment I’ve seen on daytime TV. —Jackson McHenry
More Links
➽ Eddie Redmayne and Gayle Rankin will take a revival of Cabaret to Broadway this spring.