Vivian Beaumont Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Broadway will honor the late actor, dancer and singer Hinton Battle with the traditional dimming of marquee lights on March 12.

Air-conditioned Broadway held its own as New York City plunged ever deeper into a hot summer last week, with total box office receipts keeping steady at $31,520,593, a tiny increase of 2% over the previous week.

Camelot,” the 1960 musical based on the Arthurian legend — this time rewritten by Aaron Sorkin — at the Vivian Beaumont in Lincoln Center. All around the theater are long tables shrouded in black cloth where tech people are writing on notepads, flipping switches and speaking quietly into headsets, their eyes never leaving the 4,000-squarefoot stage suspended above the orchestra pit like a massive UFO. Actors in medieval costumes are talking in small groups, choreographers are nervously pacing, a producer is heatedly whispering, and Bartlett Sher, 64, the director, is standing in an aisle near the back, watching silently, like a captain on the prow of his ship.

A busy week on Broadway saw three official openings (including the Take Me Out return) and three additions to the line-up of previewing productions, with grosses for the 34-show roster jumping by 8% (to $32,314,920) over the previous week.

Two of the fall Broadway season’s buzzy new musicals – A Beautiful Noise, The Neil Diamond Musical and Some Like It Hot – began previews last week, both doing solid business in their first, partial weeks.

EXCLUSIVE: Comic monologist Mike Birbiglia has made an early Broadway splash with his new show The Old Man & the Pool, selling out his first four previews last week – the only other production with all seats filled was The Phantom of the Opera – and, Deadline can report exclusively, getting a two-week extension of his run at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater.