Melba Moore has lot to be proud of. Listen to her as Dionne on the original Broadway cast recording of Hair, and you can hear the roots of musical-theater singing to come: Her high wail over the pleading final moments of “Let the Sunshine In” is among the most vivid early examples of the soulful belting that has come to dominate Broadway music since; an even more impressive example is her astonishingly rangy and joyful performance of “I Got Love” two years later in Purlie, which won her a Tony Award (and a slot on that year’s telecast to perform it). Moore’s respectable post-Broadway career has taken her into light-soul music and gospel, and she is still performing regularly: This Saturday, she is appearing at the intimate Metropolitan Room for a pre–Valentine’s Day set.

It’s a pity, then, that Moore and/or her handlers feel the need to exaggerate her place in history. For here is a selection from Moore’s biography, as it appears on her website, and as it has been reproduced elsewhere:

She began her career in the groundbreaking musical Hair, where she originated the role of Dionne. During her 18 months in the show, she eventually replaced Diane Keaton, becoming the first black actress to replace a white actress in a lead role on Broadway.… Her show-stopping performance in Purlie won Melba the Tony Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Musical, again making her the first black actress to do so. In 1996 history repeated itself the third time when Melba took over the role of Fantine in the Broadway musical Les Misérables. She was the first black actress to step into the leading role in that milestone Broadway musical.

But Moore is less than this passage alleges. Let’s look at each claim to groundbreaking in turn. First, Moore’s bio says that taking over the role of Sheila in Hair made her, in 1969, “the first black actress to replace a white actress in a lead role on Broadway.” This is not true: Pearl Bailey famously replaced Carol Channing in the title role of Hello, Dolly! in 1967. Next, the bio claims that Moore’s 1970 featured-actress Tony for Purlie was the first to be won by a black woman; this would come as quite a surprise to Juanita Hall (who won the very first such award in 1950, for South Pacific) and Lilian Hayman (who won for Hallelujah, Baby! in 1967). So history wasn’t repeating itself at all when, ten years into the run of Les Misérables, Moore stepped in for a few months as Fantine—which in any case is not the leading role in that show; and the production has already proven itself open to ethnicity-blind casting in 1992, when it cast Lea Salonga as Éponine.

Melba Moore has a genuine place of her own in Broadway history. It’s unfortunate that she seems to be trying to elbow her way into places that belong to other accomplished women of color.

Back in September, Signature Theater Company announced that the first production of its 20th-anniversary season, devoted to Tony Kushner, will be the great Angels in America, to be directed by Michael Greif. (Season tickets for the Signature—the best deal in town, thanks to corporate sponsorship that keeps ticket prices to just $20 per show—are set to go on sale in the spring.) No casting has yet been announced for the project, which offers some of the juiciest roles in modern American drama. Who can fill Ron Leibman’s shoes, for example, as the loathsome Roy Cohn? On that one, we’re stumped. But for the role of Joe Pitt, the closeted Mormon Republican, we have an actor to suggest—and the Signature wouldn’t have to go far to find him. Bill Heck is currently starring in the central role of Horace Robedaux in the Signature’s mammoth staging of Horton Foote’s the Orphans’ Home Cycle, and he strikes us as an excellent candidate to play Joe: Not only does he have the requisite all-American looks, but also the emotional reserves to tap into when Joe’s facade finally cracks wide open. (Watch Heck’s breakdown in 1918—the first section of the third part of Orphans—for  a sample of what he is capable of.) If he’s available in the fall, we hope he’ll be considered for Angels. We think he would do—yes, we’ll go there!—a Heck of a job.

Lincoln Center Festival has just announced that England’s Royal Shakespeare Company will come to New York in July and August 2011 for an astounding six-week residency at the Park Avenue Armory. While here, RSC’s 44-member ensemble will perform six of the Bard’s classics in repertory in a full scale replica of its Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon (pictured left). Where will this replica live? In the Armory’s vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall, as part of Lincoln Center Festival 2011. The plays are: Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet and The Winter’s Tale. This impressive residency (co-sponsored by Ohio State University) will also be supported by an extensive education program, developed by the RSC. In the embargoed press materials, Lincoln Center Festival head Nigel Redden says: “We are proud to be bringing to the festival one of the world’s most important theater companies, so wonderfully revitalized in recent years by Michael Boyd. This is only possible because of the close collaboration with Park Avenue Armory and the participation of The Ohio State University. Lincoln Center Festival is happy to join with these exceptional organizations to bring Americans—and New Yorkers in particular—this unique opportunity to experience Shakespeare’s plays performed by an ensemble of actors whom they will get to know over the course of watching five different productions.”

UPDATE: Blogger and TONY contributor Garrett Eisler raises some valid questions. To wit: Will anybody who is not a deep pocketed subscriber to Lincoln Center Festival (or just rich in general) be able to afford tickets? Will there be affordable tickets for students? We asked. A festival official says they have not set single ticket prices yet. And depending on ticket availability, they will offer student tickets, and they do plan to have an affordable ticket price. Of course, affordable is a relative term in this town. Other issues: in case you were wondering, the theater-within-a-theater—which will seat approximately 900–1,000—is not a permanent addition to the Armory (thank goodness). And yes, it is deeply disturbing to hear that 40 percent of private contributions to the RSC comes from the U.S.

That’s August Wilson over there on the left. Though he is gone, he is far from forgotten, particularly at the Black Playwrights Convening, which happened under the auspices of the American Voices New Play Institute in Washington, D.C., this past January. Arena Stage asked Isaac Butler to be the event’s Twitterer-in-chief, and he raised Cain and questions in relatively equal measure. Here, in the second of our three-part series on the convening, he answers a few questions about his time down South.

How did you get involved?
Out of the blue one day, this awesome woman named Amrita Mangus, who works at Arena, e-mailed me and said, “We’d love to have you come down and write about this convening we’re doing about diversity, and we want to pay you to do it.”  I had met David Dower—Arena’s associate artistic director, who runs the New Play program there—at the annual TCG conference, and we got along well, so I assume it came through him. Anyway, David has this great group of fellows and whatnot who are really motivated and hyper organized, and are true believers. Three of them got to organize convenings on subjects relevant to new-play development. The first was on diversity. I went there and blogged and Twittered, but I got so caught up in Twittering that I basically had no time to blog so my blog posts that I wrote for them were…subpar, I’d say. But my Twittering was awesome! I was all, like, posting provocative things people were saying and asking interesting questions and picking fights with people, and it made for a good Twitter feed. So this time, when they had me back, they decided to make me Twitter Bossman. Read more »

Yesterday, details were released about Lincoln Center Theater’s third space, a 131-seat black box for emerging playwrights and directors. The Claire Tow Theater will live on the roof the building that also houses the Mitzi E. Newhouse and the Vivian Beaumont, a home for work assumed to be too daring for the average LCT subscriber (which is a separate issue). This new programming initiative, LCT3, has been in effect for a couple of seasons already, and resulted in the excellent Stunning by David Adjmi, and the ambitious if flawed What Once We Felt. We can’t wait to attend the ribbon-cutting for this new space—planned for late 2011 or early ’12. Who knows? Perhaps in a decade it will mark a turning point in the Off-Off Broadway model of self-production, or usher in a new generation of aesthetically savvy playgoers. And, since nobody asked us, here are five ideas for André Bishop and Paige Evans to make the Claire Tow a destination for “new artists, new audiences” as LCT3’s website promises. Read more »

Hey, kids: Signed up for the Upstaged newsletter yet? No? Well, maybe you should. It hits your inbox every Tuesday with advance links to the latest news, reviews and blog posts. All in one tidy, attractive package. Plus, we offer ticket deals and other cool stuff. Sign up already!

Never let it be said that TONY isn’t watching your wallet. Did you see the compelling historical drama The Temperamentals, about the early days of the gay-rights movement? It ran this past summer and was extended a couple of times after positive reviews and strong word of mouth (I reviewed it for NY1’s “On Stage”). A decade before Stonewall and all the way over in California, activist Harry Hay led the charge for equal rights under the law regardless of sexual orientation (good thing we got over that ancient prejudice). Jon Marans’s play features a crack quintet of actors, led by the cunning, intense Thomas Jay Ryan as Harry and Ugly Betty’s Michael Urie as his lover, Rudy. Now the show returns, starting previews February 18 at New World Stages, and producers are offering seats for $19.52 (a nod to the year in which the story begins). Get your under-$20 tickets one of three ways. Go to broadwayoffers.com or call 212-947-8844 and use code TEPREV110, or sign up for a newsletter from producer Daryl Roth, get the e-mail offer, print it out and bring it to the New World Stages box office at 340 W 50th Street.

Since it opened six years ago, 59E59 has become one of our favorite destinations for new shows. In addition to the indispensable Brits Off Broadway series, the East Side venue is home to Primary Stages and a range of smaller companies. And the second-floor bar might only be as big as a landing but it’s relaxing and packed with a fine assortment of wines and scotch. Now, artistic director Elysabeth Kleinhans and executive producer Peter Tear celebrate 59E59’s sixth birthday by giving away 59 free memberships (valued at $59.59 each). The first 59 people to visit the 59E59 box office this Friday between 12:30 and 5pm will nab this special birthday present. Members enjoy a 30% discount on tickets to all 59E59 shows, no-fee ticket ordering via phone on the dedicated Member E:Line, invitations to special members-only events, reduced pricing for the famous Brits Off Broadway BritPass, a 15% discount at select neighborhood restaurants, drink discounts at the lively E:Bar and more! To be eligible, go to the box office in person. Winners must be new members to qualify (former and current members are not eligible).

Elaine Stritch concluded her triumphant run at the Café Carlyle last night with a special 85th-birthday show. As we wrote last month, Stritch’s set was a tremendous evening of dramatic song, with the star applying her unique brand of caustic sentimentality to the eminently well-suited oeuvre of Stephen Sondheim. The ticket price was heavy: $125, plus a required dinner. We think that Stritch’s show was worth the exorbitant cost of entry, and said as much at the time; but this price was also sadly representative of the prohibitive expense of cabaret in the city’s fanciest venues, a factor that contributes to the genre’s increasing marginalization in the city, especially among young people. Today, the Carlyle announced that Stritch would be back for an additional 13 shows: three Monday nights (March 22, March 29 and April 5) and then Tuesdays through Saturdays from April 20 through May 1. This is happy news, and we urge anyone who can afford it to see her when she returns. But the Carlyle’s spin on this return is making us a bit dizzy.

“There has never been a greater demand at the Café Carlyle than for Ms. Stritch’s latest show,” said Erich Steinbock, the Carlyle’s managing director.  “We have turned dozens of patrons away each night, and felt that it would be a shame not to make this extraordinary ‘happening’ available to as many fans as possible.” Fair enough. But the press release buffers this quote with a passage from Charles Isherwood’s appreciation of the show in the New York Times:

“[Ms. Stritch] is burrowing more deeply into this rich material than ever.  What really breaks my heart about her new show is how few people will have a chance to attend.”—Charles Isherwood, The New York Times

So what’s the problem? As usual in our Ad Nauseam series, the answer is: context. For here is what Isherwood actually wrote:

[What] really breaks my heart about her new show is how few people will have a chance to attend. It’s not just the small capacity of the Café Carlyle I’m referring to; it’s the price of entry. Tickets are $125, and purchase of dinner is required. The total for two could easily top $500. Ms. Stritch might as well be performing in the boardroom at Goldman Sachs. It would be a pity if Ms. Stritch couldn’t find a way to bring the show to a site where a less well-heeled audience can see it, like Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater. Or hey, maybe the Met has a night available. At least they have some cheap seats.

Note that the reason Isherwood is disappointed is not just, or even mainly, because the Carlyle lacks the capacity to accommodate Stritch’s many fans (as the press release implies), but rather because the ticket price excludes most people from attending. If the Carlyle were serious about addressing Isherwood’s heartbreak, it would not only invite Stritch back but also make cheaper seats available. (The venue has several suboptimal seating locations, in corners and with obstructed views, that would be appropriate for such treatment.) Whether it chooses to do so or not is the Carlyle’s business—but the venue has no business using Isherwood’s quote so misleadingly until it does.

February is starting to look like a bonanza of cheap-ticket deals for frugal playgoers. In addition to the 20@20 program, there’s the excellent two-for-one deal from NYC & Company (the city’s official tourist agency) called On the House. From February 8 through 28, if you purchase a ticket to any one of about 25 Off Broadway shows, you get another one for free. And these aren’t bottom-of-the-barrel productions either. A Lie of the Mind (directed by Ethan Hawke), Mr. & Mrs. Fitch (John Lithgow and Jennifer Ehle), Happy Now? and Manhattan Theatre Club’s Equivocation are all on offer. With OB ticket prices regularly hitting the $60 and $75 mark, you’d have to be on the Goldman Sachs payroll not to take advantage of it.

Followers of this blog and magazine know that we are looking forward to the Broadway transfer of Geoffrey Nauffts’s moving drama Next Fall, which debuted Off Broadway last year and will be starting previews on February 16 at the Helen Hayes Theatre. We were taken with the play in its initial production, and have every reason to believe that it will be just as effective in a larger venue, with its original cast intact. The only cause for concern is whether a serious new play on gay themes, without matinee names to draw an out-of-town crowd, can survive in today’s competitive climate for Broadway audiences. So we are pleased with today’s announcement that the brave producing team has been joined by two new money men: Sir Elton John and his husband, David Furnish. “We are excited to join the team bringing Geoffrey Nauffts’s extraordinary play to Broadway,” said the couple. “After fulfilling experiences bringing new musicals to the stage, it was seeing this inspiring and timely new work that attracted us to take on our first play.” The connection is not entirely random: John is currently working on the score to a movie called Showstopper, for which Nauffts has cowritten the screenplay with Anthony Barrile. But it is cheering to see gay celebrities lend their financial support to worthy gay-themed projects in the theater. Next Fall is by no means a play that will appeal only  to the LGBT community; its themes of love and faith are universal. We hope that John and Furnish’s assistance may give it the boost it needs to find the large audience it deserves.

On a recent weekend in January, Washington’s Arena Stage held a conference of black playwrights at their annual meeting for the  American Voices New Play Institute—it was an opportunity for big names like Lynn Nottage to share space with smaller (but up-and-coming) names like Marcus Gardley, as well as a forum for the discussion of the health of black theater. The Institute invited three cyber-savvy bloggers  (Parabasis animating spirit Isaac Butler, 99 Seats alter ego J. Holtham and Mission Paradox’s Adam Thurman) to twitter and blog the event—there was even a streaming video of some of the new play readings themselves—and you should bustle over to the website to check out the bounteous offerings.

TONY then asked the three bloggers to tell us about their experiences Down South and to reflect on their reflections. It’s wheels within wheels, people! This week we feature Adam Thurman’s responses. Check back next week for Holtham and Butler.

Time Out New York: How did you get involved in going down there?
Adam Thurman: At my blog, Mission Paradox (missionparadox.com), I cover a wide variety of arts-related issues.  My core subject is marketing, but I often discuss subjects like diversity, leadership, etc.  David Dower, at Arena Stage, found one of my posts and was kind enough to invite me down to cover the convening. Read more »

Just a reminder that the indispensable NTLive brings a new National Theatre production to these shores through the wonders of high-def digital broadcast: This time it’s family-friendly drama Nation, based on the fantasy novel by Terry Pratchett. Reserve your afternoon this Saturday, to see the show; scroll down here to locate a venue near you. Sites include BAM and the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts.

Musical-theater know-it-alls will not want to miss If It Only Even Runs a Minute at the West Bank Café’s Laurie Beechman Theatre this Sunday, January 31st, at 9:30pm. For the low, low price of $10—plus a reasonable $15 food and drink minimum—Jennifer Ashley Tepper and Kevin Michael Murphy’s revue offers a smorgasbord of fine performers (including Nancy Anderson, Heidi Blickenstaff, Lisa Brescia, Autumn Hurlbert, Nick Blaemire, Jaclyn Huberman and many more) in an anthology of stories and songs from great Broadway failures, including such recent duds as Amour, Dracula and Blaemire’s own one-night wonder, Glory Days.

In one of my favorite passages in his brilliant analysis of gay men and the Broadway musical, Place for Us, the literary critic D.A. Miller unpacks the psychic appeal of unsuccessful musicals for the show-tune aficionado:

It is by no means true that, as someone says in Applause, “nobody loves a flop.” The serious devotee of the Broadway musical has always been as much drawn to flops as to hits, barely bothering, perhaps barely able, to distinguish between them, as though his having a taste for the genre precluded his having any taste in it, and the detailed exposure required to make him a connoisseur had only succeeded in making him indiscriminate. Nor may this addiction to flops be convincingly put down to the savagery of enjoying seeing people fail. Such sadism merely belatedly encrusts…his excruciated sense that these flops have spoken the truth of the Broadway musical…almost as though he were himself the bad idea, unworkable from the start, that, in the intolerable verdict of retro-analysis, no one or nothing could have saved.

Maybe that’s why this Beechman event, which might look from afar like an evening of schadenfreude, will more likely be a kind of forgiving group hug. Making good musical theater is hard work, as most of the people in that room will know. And if the Broadway musical has any message for us as a genre, it is that so-called losers—the desperate Billy Bigelow, the spurned Charity Hope Valentine, the crushed Caroline Thibodeaux, the despised Elphaba and many others—can be as lovable as anyone, if not more.

When was the last time you saw eager young people’s faces like these at the theater? Much less at that home for literary erudition and political consciousness, the New York Theater Workshop? Well, subscribers, brace yourselves for the youth onslaught—or at least inure yourself to lots of their baggy pants and cussin’—because Trey Parker and Matt Stone have chosen to debut a new musical at NYTW next season. In 2008,  the South Park duo were penning a Mormon musical for Broadway; Cheyenne Jackson even gave interviews about his performance as “the main missionary, Elder something.” Is this it? The press release from the theater is keeping mum. Also, when the Mormon show was broached two years ago, the boys were collaborating with the full Avenue Q team—Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx—but now only Lopez is on board. Perhaps this is a different project? We can only hope that Jeff Marx hasn’t taken to wearing an orange parka…

At any rate, this news eclipses even NYTW’s welcome confirmation of Ivo Van Hove’s production of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, and yesterday I wouldn’t have believed that possible. Suddenly, fall can’t come quickly enough. For all  those too desperate to wait till August for a hit of Parker’s musical genius, may I suggest adding some “Shpadoinkle” to your day? It will leave your heart as full as a baked potato.

Laura Linney and Brian d'Arcy James

Donald Margulies’s new play opens tonight at the MTC’s Broadway theater. Here is our review, which will run in next week’s print issue.

Time Stands Still
****
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. By Donald Margulies. Dir. Daniel Sullivan. With Laura Linney, Brian d’Arcy James, Eric Bogosian, Alicia Silverstone. 2hrs. One intermission.

Sarah Goodwin is a photojournalist, and everything about her seems to spring from the negative. The central figure of Donald Margulies’s prickly, unsettling new drama, Time Stands Still, she is played with expert strength and impatience by Laura Linney, who knows exactly how to treat Sarah’s scars: not just the obvious ones that scrape across the right side of her face and body—the marks of a near-fatal bombing in a foreign battle zone—but the invisible ones from her wealthy but loveless childhood. “War was my parents’ house all over again, only on a different scale,” she jokes. But she can’t wait to get back into the fray, because a happy domestic life with her doting boyfriend, James (played by the stalwart Brian d’Arcy James) somehow seems to scare her more.

Margulies is onto something interesting here: extreme violence as a form of escapism. This theme is repeatedly cast into relief by James’s writing project, a book about horror films and desensitization, and contrasted with the homier values espoused by Sarah’s editor, Richard (the lived-in Bogosian) and his cheery young girlfriend, Mandy (the delightful Silverstone). Once again, the masterful director Daniel Sullivan has taken a solid play—taut and well-constructed, with hardly a single detail extraneous—and given us the smartest version of it possible. All four characters (including Mandy, who could easily have slid into dismissive caricature) are treated with respect and acted with skill. Manhattan Theatre Club’s naturalistic production doesn’t aim to blow you away. But it may well leave you wounded.—Adam Feldman

Last Friday, former TONY theater editor Jason Zinoman reviewed a Lady Gaga concert as theater, which sounds about right to us—Lady G’s synth-pop hardly lends itself to deep musicological analysis. He describes the multimedia event so vividly, with such wit and showbiz savvy, I actually wish I’d seen the show (preferably bolstered by vodka and Ecstasy). Zinoman is setting an exciting precedent here, extending the boundaries of drama criticism. Next up, let’s apply our dramaturgical perspicacity to WWE smackdowns or evaluate the rhetorical prowess of televangelists. I’m serious. In my humble opinion, theater critics (decent, intelligent ones, at least) are best suited to distinguish reality-TV stupidity and mendacity from the sort evoked by trained actors. Simply put, in a highly mediated and performative (ahem) culture, when everyone is an actor and everything is spectacle, the theater critic should be king.

But back to pop as theater and vice versa. Some folks who follow the music industry and theater are drooling over the thought of the two merging. The enthusiasm is understandable: It would be great to see Broadway have more relevance to mainstream culture, for producers of new musicals to take advantage of the variety of pop music that exists. But despite such boosterism, let’s admit that pop and Broadway never truly parted ways. Even in the dark days of the 1970s and ’80s, you could hear scores clearly shaped by rock, pop, the blues, R&B or jazz. Those shows just weren’t the norm, and they had minimal impact on the entertainment industry. Henry Krieger and Tom Eyen in 1981 were not nearly as culturally significant as Cole Porter in 1934. And yet, over the decades, many pop and rock musicals have made a lasting impact or had commercial success: Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, Dreamgirls, The Who’s Tommy, Rent, Spring Awakening, In the Heights, Rock of Ages.

The latest potential game-changing mash-up of the musical and not-shitty rock is American Idiot, based on the 2004 concept album by Green Day. This much-buzzed-about show starts previews at the St. James Theatre in late March. And this Sunday the Broadway cast of American Idiot will perform with Green Day on the band’s two-time Grammy-nominated song “21 Guns” The Grammy ceremony takes place live at the Staples Center in Los Angeles and will be broadcast on the CBS television network 8-11:30pm. Tune in to see the future…or the continuation of the past, whichever way you want to spin it.

Full admission: We didn’t go back to God of Carnage in November to see the first replacement cast. It was a busy time of year and even though Yasmina Reza’s comedy is a sweet-and-spicy dish (with just a sprinkling of philosophical inquiry for flavor), the quartet currently at the Jacobs Theatre didn’t seem unmissable. But now, we’d really like to see it again. Dylan Baker (brilliantly smarmy in Mauritius), Broadway-debuting action hottie Lucy Liu and our favorite stage queen, Janet McTeer (Mary Stuart,) will start performances March 2. Here’s the kicker: Jeff Daniels, from the first Broadway cast of Carnage, rounds out the cast. But this time, Daniels plays the other male role, the henpecked and ultimately rather brutal Michael (originally James Gandolfini). This is very exciting news, since Daniels nearly stole the show last time around. We’ll race you for tickets.

As one-man shows go, Jim Brochu’s Zero Hour is as traditional as they come: a tribute to a famous person—in this case, the great comic actor Zero Mostel, who died in 1977—in which the subject, near the end of his or her days, looks back at a life both well and nearly spent. Full Gallop, Thurgood, Tru, Occupant and many other plays have traveled this dramatic path before. But not every solo show need be an aesthetic innovator, and Brochu’s tribute to Mostel, directed by Piper Laurie, does exactly what it sets out to do: Brochu’s explosive performance makes the most of Mostel, and proves wildly engaging even as it educates the audience about the trials and triumphs of the outsize showman. We were swept up in Brochu’s merry wake when we reviewed the show in its current incarnation at the Theatre at St. Clement’s, where it closes on Sunday, January 31, and are delighted with the news this week that Zero Hour will transfer to the DR2 Theatre in Union Square for an open-ended run, starting February 24. If you haven’t seen the show yet, head to Telecharge soon—tickets for the DR2 run are scheduled to go on sale later today—and make a date with a Broadway legend.

Betty Buckley

The dual hats that I wear as both a theater and cabaret critic for TONY sometimes turn out to be the same hat worn at a slightly different angle. I got into cabaret, after all, through my interest in musical theater; and many of the genre’s most gifted performers come from the Broadway stage. Here are four upcoming music shows that theater lovers might find especially rewarding in the next few weeks:

The 2010 Nightlife Awards (January 25): No single event offers a better sampler of the city’s cabaret than Scott Siegel’s annual prize night, voted on by a panel of industry critics. The show consists entirely of performances by winners and guest artists, with no windy acceptance speeches; this year’s stellar lineup includes Christine Ebersole, Cheyenne Jackson, Nellie McKay, Todd Barry, Tovah Feldshuh, Baby Jane Dexter, James Barbour, Noah Racey and many more. The rotund and ribald Bruce Vilanch plays host; you can get tickets here.

Read more »