Ethel Barrymore Theatre Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

opened Thursday night on Broadway, is mostly in tune.  The August Wilson play’s greatest asset is its young leads John David Washington and Danielle Brooks, both of whom are already widely admired, but display an altogether new and enticing range of skills. 2 hours and 45 minutes, with one intermission. At the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W.

Jenelle Riley Deputy Awards and Features Editor How do you play someone as notorious as Vladimir Putin? It would be easy to telegraph his cruelty, to turn him into a mustache-twirling villain. Or to give over entirely to caricature, without capturing what’s beneath the surface. Will Keen, who embodies the president of Russia in Peter Morgan’s latest play, “Patriots,” avoids these pitfalls.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter Netflix is getting into the business of Broadway. The streaming behemoth is producing the upcoming play “Patriots,” from “The Crown” creator Peter Morgan. The show, set in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union, is about Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, a billionaire who helped orchestrate the ruthless rise of Vladimir Putin.

Harmony.It took several years of workshops and regional stagings to get the show to its current form, but to paraphrase one of Manilow’s own songs, “Looks Like They Made It.” After a highly praised 2022 run at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, the production finally transferred to Broadway at the Barrymore Theater. It was well worth the wait.Stage stalwart Chip Zien (best known for originating the role of the Baker in Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods) leads a modest but marvelous cast as the older Josef Roman Cyckowski, aka “Rabbi.” Reminiscing, he narrates the tale of his fellow singers, all of whom he meets in 1927.“These are my friends, my buddies,” he tells us.

the musical “Parade” and Tom Stoppard’s play “Leopoldstadt.” The problem is that while “Harmony” is about a sextet of singers whose voices blend like milk and coffee, its elements do not similarly fuse into a cohesive and satisfying musical.The show, directed and choreographed by Warren Carlyle, has been tinkered with by Manilow and lyricist/book-writer Bruce Sussman for nearly 30 years, but on its largest stage yet it still doesn’t quite work.Structural flaws that were mostly forgivable when the production played the more intimate Museum of Jewish Heritage downtown last year are detrimentally exacerbated by Broadway’s imposing size. The musical, therefore, is lopsided.

Good Night, Oscar, the Oscar Levant bio-play starring Sean Hayes, and El Mago Pop, the Broadway debut of Spanish illusionist Antonio Díaz, ended their limited Broadway engagements on upswings last week, with the former selling out for its best week take of $1,147,057 and the magician conjuring a big $2,717,000 to break the house record at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre with an unusually busy 13-performance week.

Four-time Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Erykah Badu (What Men Want) has been set to make a cameo appearance with musical performances in Netflix‘s film The Piano Lesson, based on the play by August Wilson. 

Angelique Jackson Grammy winner Erykah Badu has joined the all-star ensemble for Netflix’s feature adaptation of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson.” The singer-songwriter (“What Men Want”) will make a cameo, delivering “her soulful sound and eclectic style” with musical performances in the film,” starring Oscar winner Samuel L. Jackson and John David Washington. Jackson and Washington reprise their roles from the highly successful Broadway revival of Wilson’s play, which recently received two Tony Award nominations (best revival of a play and best performance by an actor in a featured role in a play for Jackson).

Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” the happily hyperactive comedy that opened Wednesday night on Broadway, provides: missteps, mayhem, incapacitations, faulty sets and, in a roundabout way, “Fawlty Towers.”The very funny British play’s premise is the season’s simplest. The amateur Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society tries to put on “Peter and Wendy” and fails epically. 2 hours and five minutes, with one intermission. At the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W.

All’s right in the world when Peter Pan Goes Wrong.

Angelique Jackson The all-star cast for Netflix’s adaptation of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” has been revealed. Oscar winner Samuel L. Jackson and John David Washington will star in the feature film, reprising their roles from the highly successful Broadway revival of Wilson’s play, which recently concluded its run at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Set in 1936 Pittsburgh during the aftermath of the Great Depression, “The Piano Lesson” follows the lives of the Charles family, a household led by Doaker Charles (Jackson), and an heirloom, the family piano, which is decorated with designs carved by an enslaved ancestor. Washington plays Boy Willie, Doaker’s nephew, a role Jackson originated in the 1987 production.

EXCLUSIVE: Antonio Díaz, one of Europe’s highest grossing illusionists, will bring his El Mago Pop show to Broadway this summer, with a limited two-week engagement set for August.

The long-running The Phantom of the Opera was once again Broadway’s highest grossing show last week, taking in a mighty $2,483,532 for the week ending Jan. 29, outpacing runners-up Funny Girl ($1,872,862) and Hamilton ($1,871,921) by a noticeable margin.

Peter Pan Goes Wrong, the Olivier Award-nominated comedy from the creators of the Tony-winning The Play That Goes Wrong, will make its Broadway premiere this spring.

There’s abundant magic still in The Piano Lesson, August Wilson’s grand, 1987 Pulitzer Prize winning tale of a Black family torn between legacy and ambition, the past and the future, and, it’s not an overstatement to note, between life and death.

Actors’ Equity says it will place Broadway producer Garth Drabinsky on its “Do Not Work” list just as soon as his financially troubled musical Paradise Square ends its run with a matinee on Sunday at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.

Paradise Square makes quite the reach. A musical about the build-up to New York’s horrific Draft Riots of 1863 reaches to the past to tell us about the present. It reaches across cultures to tell us about assimilation and appropriation. It reaches across styles of music and dance to celebrate diversity and commonality. It reaches to contain both epic realism and mythical nostalgia. And somewhere along the line it reaches a point of no return, when all that reaching just wears itself out.

two Broadway productions permanently closed due to surging COVID-19 cases.The shows “Waitress” and “Thoughts of a Colored Man” said on Friday that their productions would not reopen after performing their final shows earlier this week, Playbill reported.Sara Bareilles’ “Waitress” returned to Broadway in September and was expected to run through next month, but its limited engagement at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre was also thwarted by cases of the virus among its cast and company, Playbill

The revival of “Waitress,” and the acclaimed spoken word/poetry hybrid “Thoughts of a Colored Man.”With music and lyrics by Sara Bareilles, “Waitress” was originally scheduled to run through Jan. 9 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.

Waitress, the Broadway hit that, along with Hadestown, brought music back to the New York stage last night after many dark months, grossed $197,878 in tickets sales today, breaking the single-performance house record at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.

NEW YORK -- The musical “Waitress” may have closed on Broadway in January 2020 after a long natural life but it's coming back after the pandemic — with Sara Bareilles leading the way.The singer-songwriter of “Brave” and “Love Song” will star in a resurrection of the musical, playing the lead role of Jenna Hunterson. She’ll be in the show when it restarts at it's new home in the Ethel Barrymore Theatre from Sept.

Waitress, the hit Broadway musical that played more than 1,500 performances during its 2016-2020 run, will return for a limited, four-month engagement this September, with composer Sara Bareilles in the lead role, producers announced today.