This week lawyers for heirs to the estates of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello filed a lawsuit in New York against the author and producers of Hand To God, claiming that the show — a Tony nominee for best play and four other awards at tomorrow night’s ceremony — violated the copyright protection of “Who’s On First?” by…

EXCLUSIVE: Hand To God producer Kevin McCollum says there’s something rotten about a lawsuit filed this week against his show on behalf of the heirs to Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. The suit, which Deadline covered earlier, was filed this week in the Southern District Of New York and claims that the use of “Who’s On…

UPDATE Friday morning, adding comments from Chris Costello, daughter of Lou Costello; and Abbott & Costello’s attorney Marc Rachman: "The legacy of my father is important to me and my family and we felt that this lawsuit was necessary to protect it," Chris Costello, daughter of Lou Costello, said in an email to…

EXCLUSIVE: Six weeks of exhausting campaigning through Earth’s most earnest, swag-free awards season finally come to a close on Sunday with the Tony Awards, broadcast live by CBS from Radio City Music Hall beginning at 8 PM. Harvey Weinstein will be in the audience and for the second year in a row, the ceremony will…

EXCLUSIVE: Five days to go until the Tony Awards (Sunday, 8-11 PM, CBS) and it’s about time we heard from Phyllis Newman, who has been known by many names but these days calls herself the Wicked Widow Of Central Park West. “Being the keeper of the flame, you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. No matter how you…

CBS is gambling on the popularity of Broadway’s 2014-2015 slate of Tony-nominated musicals to draw TV viewers to the Sunday 8-11 P.M. broadcast from Radio City Music Hall, along with hosts Kristin Chenoweth, a nominee for her performance in the nominated revival of On The Twentieth Century, and Alan Cumming, a past…

A long-gestating revival of Dames At Sea, a beloved off-Broadway musical from 1968, has booked the Helen Hayes Theatre for a fall opening. It’s the first show at Broadway’s smallest house since being purchased by Second Stage, the nonprofit company that is fundraising for extensive renovations before opening its own…

It’s down to the wire as we head into New York’s great weekend two-fer: the Belmont Stakes on Saturday, when American Pharaoh hopes to become the first Triple Crown winner since 1978, and Sunday’s Tony Awards, in which the purse can be substantially more than the $800,000 promised to the first Thoroughbred to cross…

Hamilton won’t be eligible for the Pulitzer Prize or Tony nominations until next season, but that hasn’t slowed the show’s prize-winning juggernaut in advance of its July transfer to Broadway. The latest notch on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s expanding belt came Sunday night in New York, where the rap-inflected tuner — the…

Following a pattern set by the original 1996 production and last spring’s West End revival, David Hare’s Skylight has paid off its Broadway capitalization costs in under two months. The producers, led by Robert Fox and Scott Rudin, declined to reveal how much they had raised to transfer the drama, starring Bill Nighy…

In past summers, Andrew Lloyd Webber has invited a select group of friends to his Sydmonton estate for a festival of works-in-progress by Andrew Lloyd Webber. But with his adaptation of the 2003 Jack Black-starring film slated to begin previews in November at the Shubert-owned Winter Garden Theatre, he’s changed tack…

UPDATE, 10 PM:  Adds Betty Buckley review at end. Hal Holbrook mimicked Mark Twain of Hannibal, Missouri; Tovah Feldshuh did Golda Meir from Kiev and Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Julie Harris played Emily Dickinson from Amherst, Massachusetts. Now comes Jim Parsons perhaps responding to a Higher Calling, playing God from…