Broadway’s first revival of Stephen Flaherty, Lynn Ahrens and Terrence McNally’s Ragtime starts previews tomorrow night, but we thought we’d whet your appetite with some behind-the-scenes video. Adam Feldman took a quick look at the musical based on the E.L. Doctorow novel then (1997) and now. Enjoy.

Job reviews. We all get ’em. We all dread ’em. But none is quite like the one you’ll see on the latest webisode of Jack in the Box, the delightfully insidery comedy series by talented and charming Michael Cyril Creighton. The beleaguered protagonist of this series is a frustrated actor who slaves for an Off Broadway ticket service. By the way, this puckish Mr. Creighton is currently appearing in MilkMilkLemonade, a new play at Under St. Marks directed by TONY contributor and blogger Isaac Butler. Enjoy.

Among the many annual fund-raisers in the Broadway calendar, perhaps none is so eagerly anticipated as the annual Broadway Bares spectacular at Roseland, in which hundreds of the Street’s comeliest dancers, extravagantly costumed and made up, perform elaborate bump-and-grind striptease numbers. We dropped by a Broadway Bares rehearsal last week—practice makes pervert!—to capture some video footage of the show’s unique take on “Fantasy Football.” We hope this will whet your appetite for the real show on Sunday, June 21; you can buy tickets here (we recommend the midnight show, which has a higher likelihood of wardrobe malfunction) or sponsor individual dancers here (though we wish there were a thumbnail gallery). Lusting after chorus girls and boys has rarely felt more virtuous.

The final video in Upstaged’s exclusive Inner Circle series—documenting the speeches at this year’s New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards—captures an encounter to be treasured by all true fans of the American theater. In it, stage great Marian Seldes, who has been a mainstay of NYDCC ceremonies for many years, presents a Special Citation to her erstwhile Deuce costar, the monumentally classy Angela Lansbury. It was a magical moment, and one that we’re happy to be able to share with you today. Enjoy.

Today we continue our series of exclusive videos from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards reception last week. The two videos we have already shared—those for Best Play and Best Musical—convey some of that evening’s unusually emotional quality. Today’s selection is a different kind of treat, and captures the fun of one of the night’s most memorable presentations: that of the Special Citation to director Matthew Warchus and the cast of the Broadway revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy The Norman Conquests. Two members of the plays’ infamously factious original 1975 Broadway cast—Estelle Parsons and Carole Shelley—are currently back on the Great White Way (in August: Osage County and Billy Elliot, respectively), so I thought it would be neat to ask them to present this award together. Happily, they were both more than game, as this hilariously dishy video shows.

We’re three weeks away from the Tony Awards and things are getting really, really tense. Check it out:

Every year since 1936, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle has given out awards to what it considers the best theater of the year. The awards ceremony and cocktail reception—attended by the city’s theatrical press agents as well as the critics and the award recipients and presenters—is a cozy industry affair, traditionally held at the Algonquin Hotel, where the group was founded in 1935. In olden days, the ceremony was broadcast live on the radio, but it has been many, many years since anyone not invited to the party could catch a glimpse inside. As president of the NYDCC since 2005, I have tried to make the workings of the Circle as transparent as possible—creating a website with photos of the members, for example, and posting the full details of our annual voting meeting as soon as it has concluded. So it is with great pleasure that I also revive the early tradition of inviting the public (now via video instead of radio) into the Circle’s annual party.

We have recorded the entire ceremony in four installments, which we will be unveiling here daily for the next week or so. First up is the award for Best Play, which went to Lynn Nottage for Ruined. My intro here is truncated—there were some microphone problems—so what you need to know is that the presenter of the award is none other than the playwright and Yale professor Paula Vogel, who won the NYDCC Award herself in 1997 for How I Learned to Drive, and who taught Nottage at Brown University many years ago. Both Vogel’s intro and Nottage’s reaction were quite moving. We hope you enjoy this sneak peek, and the others to come.

Bea Arthur, who died this weekend at the age of 86, had a most unusual career as a pop icon: When she entered the national consciousness as the gonad-breaking, umbrage-taking, anything-but-cookie-baking feminist Maude on TV’s All in the Family, she was already 50 years old. Leading roles in Maude and The Golden Girls followed, making her one of the most successful leading ladies in television history. But before she seduced the nation with her peerlessly withering glances and sardonic baritone put-downs, she had already made a name for herself as a uniquely flavorful character actor in musical theater. In Marc Blitzstein’s 1954 adaptation of Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, she played Lucy Brown, Polly Peachum’s rival for Mack the Knife’s affections. (Her version of “Barbara Song” on the original cast recording remains, to my mind, the definitive account.) She originated the roles of Yente, the matchmaker, in 1964’s Fiddler on the Roof, and Vera Charles, the stage star and bosom buddy, in 1966’s Mame (for which she won a Tony). And in 2002, after a long absence, she returned to Broadway in a one-woman show. (See this 2002 TONY Hot Seat interview with Gia Kourlas.)

We wrestled with which clip to use to bid farewell to Arthur, one of our all-time favorite musical performers, but we’ve settled on this relative rarity: Arthur’s delicious performance as a Tatooine bartender, singing goodbye to her rowdy patrons, in 1978’s disastrous The Star Wars Holiday Special. Even in the silliest of circumstances—in this case, dancing with plastic-faced aliens while singing a Kurt Weill knockoff number—she kept her stately dignity intact. Goodnight, Grey Lady.

Welcome back, fans of Troma Entertainment and all things Lloyd Kaufman. Here the raffish director-producer talks about the score to the new musical based on his 1985 cult film, The Toxic Avenger. Keeping it New Jersey, the producers tapped Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan (on the right) to pen the tunes. Standing to the left of Lloyd is book writer Joe DiPietro. The Toxic Avenger opens April 6 at New World Stages.

Last night we caught up with Lloyd Kaufman at New World Stages following a performance of The Toxic Avenger. This goofy new musical is based on the infamous 1985 cult comedy of the same name about a New Jersey nebbish who falls into a vat of toxic waste and emerges a hideously mutated superhero. And Kaufman—as you know—is the cofounder and head honcho of Troma Entertainment, purveyors of kitschy, campy, low-grade cinematic fun. Toxic Avenger (the movie) put them on the map. Now Lloyd is happy to see his twisted creation adapted into a musical. So! Question No. 1 for Lloyd: Did you ever imagine you’d see Toxie Off Broadway singing and dancing?

Last week I was given a guided tour of one of TONY’s favorite downtown venues, Soho Rep (haven’t been yet? what’s the matter with you?!?). The theater has been reconfigured for its latest production, Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Rambo Solo (see Helen Shaw’s napalm-hot review). My tour guide? Rambo Solo star Zachary Oberzan, who regales audiences with his twisted retelling of the 1972 novel First Blood by David Morrell—not so much the Stallone flick. Rather than just enter the theater like at a normal show, you go down into the bowels of Soho Rep and then pop up in the playing space, which has been plushly carpeted. Here’s the video. Enjoy, PTSD-addled vagrants!

Leslie Kritzer kicks back.

This week’s opening article in the Theater section is on the terrific Leslie Kritzer, and I must admit, this is a piece I’ve been waiting to write for some time—since 2006, in fact, when I saw her for the first time in her Joe’s Pub triumph, Leslie Kritzer Is Patti LuPone at Les Mouches. (I ended up seeing the show three times, which—given the sardine-can compression of my schedule—testified to just how much I loved it.) No footage of that show is publicly available, unfortunately; although it was recorded, it was never released. But other footage of Kritzer does exist, and so we’ll give you a small taste of the magic…after the jump.

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Well, we really mean it this time: This is our very last Trick of the Day. The series ends here, with a lagniappe from Michael Chaut, who wowed us last week with his ring-stealing routine. It’s been a wonderful week, we know you’ll agree. If you’ve enjoyed our modest video samplers, treat yourself to a whole buffet at Monday Night Magic or Magical Nights, where the lineups change weekly and the magic never stops.

Okay! Okay! We admit it! When we said that yesterday’s Trick of the Day was our last, we were not being entirely, completely 100 percent honest with you. As it turns out, we do have a couple of extra tricks up our sleeve: Two of the magicians who visited us were gracious enough to record backup tricks, which we will now unveil as bonus material. First up is Simon Lovell, who violated my chest space in the first installment of this series. In addition to being a rogue, he is a topflight sleight-of-hand man with a special aptitude for cards. In today’s Trick of the Day extra—rated R for profanity, moms and dads out there—Lovell hits the deck again.

A whole weekend has gone by without a new Trick of the Day. Hungry for more wizardly artistry? Of course you are. In today’s clip, we are visited by sideshow king Todd Robbins, star of the 2003 Off Broadway show Carnival Knowledge and a coproducer of (and frequent performer at) Monday Night Magic. It’s worth noting that there is no sleight of hand or other chicanery involved in what this man does: When he chews glass, it’s real glass, and when he hammers nails into his face, as in the video below, they’re bona fide nails. So relax, take a deep breath and bask in Robbins.

Michael Chaut has a hard act to follow: I have already received about a dozen spontaneous expressions of amazement at the cleverness of yesterday’s mind-blowing Trick of the Day, by David Schwartz. But Chaut is a pro. Below, he runs rings around…my ring.

While we’re on the subject of Chaut, I’d like to plug two shows he coproduces. If you enjoyed our selective roundup of magicians this week, and are wondering where and when you can see them and others of their caliber, the answer is: at the schedule page for Monday Night Magic and the schedule page for Magical Nights. Choose the former for a more traditional magical variety show, the latter for a more elegant night on the town, with close-up magicians pulling up chairs at your table.

One more note about these events: Chaut has four producing partners for both of these shows. One of them is Todd Robbins, who appears in the article (and will share a Trick of the Day next week), but space didn’t permit us to include the other three, accomplished conjurers all. For the record, they are: Peter Samelson, who has starred in two solo Off Broadway shows; Frank Brents, a veteran entertainer famed for his work with ducks; and Jamy Ian Swiss, who was profiled by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker last year. Check the schedules above, and maybe you’ll eventually get to see them all.

In yesterday’s Trick of the Day, I had to defend my admittedly magnetic chest from the roving fingers of cardsharp Simon Lovell. Today’s magician, David Schwartz, is also doing an impressive card trick. But unlike certain nipple-happy ex–con men we could mention, Schwartz is a gentleman, and keeps all hands on his deck. Enjoy:

It’s magic time at TONY! The opening article in this week’s Theater section features ten of the city’s best conjurers, mentalists, tricksters and illusionists—not a comprehensive list, by any means, but a good place to start. And what better way to get acquainted with these wondersmiths than to see them in action? With that in mind, we invited five of the magicians in question to drop by our offices and each perform one of their signature routines for our camera, with no fancy lights, sets or setups: just the tricks, ma’am. So every workday for the next week, starting now, we will unveil a new video: our Trick of the Day.

To inaugurate the series, we give you the incorrigible Simon Lovell (above). Don’t even try to corrige him; it simply can’t be done. Trust me. I tried to be nice, and he bit me. It’s all in the video and, well, it’s aces.

We love The Civilians, a troupe of actor-singers who tackle big issues in a cheeky musical-semidocumentary form. The company’s newest project is This Beautiful City, in previews at the Vineyard Theatre. In it, they take a long, hard, uncynical look at the ecstatic evangelicals of Colorado Springs (including disgraced megachurch leader Rev. Ted Haggard). My preview piece is here and below, enjoy a little behind-the-scenes action as I sit in on a Civilians rehearsal. Thank Jebus for this heavenly group.