Nearly 10 years ago, Billy Crystal and writer Quinton Peeples started work on a screenplay they’d eventually call Have A Nice Day. Not terribly long in Hollywood development years, but eons removed from our current political climate. Performed and recorded (by Amazon’s Audible) as a staged Off Broadway reading last…

Stephen Colbert, presenting the award for best revival of a musical at tonight’s Tony Awards, took a moment to maul President Donald Trump. It has been a “great year for revivals in general – especially that one they’re reviving in Washington D.C.” Colbert began. “It started way off Broadway, in the 80’s, on 5th…

At the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, a small and personal comedy titled Dean slayed the competition and won a top prize for its writer-director-star Demetri Martin. CBS Films wisely picked it up and is now opening it right in the heart of summer blockbuster season. If you are looking for a little respite from the…

Sara Bareilles’ stint in the title role of Waitress continues to pay dividends for the holdover from last season, which brought her a Tony nomination for the score. Last week the show sold $1.3 million worth of tickets at the Nederlander Organization’s Brooks Atkinson Theatre, almost 30 per cent above its gross…

UPDATE, 2 PM: Adds comments from Mary Beth Piel and Denée Benton in last paragraphs. EARLIER: Blame Canada: Come From Away, a long-aborning musical about the Newfoundland town that hosted some 7,000 travelers diverted there when U.S. airspace was closed in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, came away with…

And they’re off. Eligibility for this season’s Tony Awards began last spring with the opening May 25 of Paramour, Cirque du Soleil’s first made-for-Broadway venture (it closed April 16) and ending with last night’s opening of A Doll’s House, Part 2. The season included 13 new musicals, six revivals of musicals, 10 new…

Kevin Kline has loomed, larger than life, over Broadway for more than four decades: as the preening, prat-falling Pirate King opposite Linda Ronstadt in The Pirates of Penzance; the proboscoid panache-flaunting poet Cyrano de Bergerac; the narcissistic hunk Bruce Granit in On The Twentieth Century, among other choice…

Music is in the air as the Broadway roster fills up with new shows, especially the tuners that have been circling the airspace over Times Square looking to land as close as possible to the April 27 Tony Awards cut-off date. Four new shows began previews last week, including two big new musicals that enjoyed strong…

“I want to stop talking about how I’m not grieving right.” Here is the first trailer for Dean, which scooped the top narrative award at Tribeca last year. Written, directed by and starring Demetri Martin, it follows a son and father as they come to terms with the recent loss of the family matriarch — in diametrically…

Two-time Tony winner Kevin Kline (A Fish Called Wanda, In And Out) will return to Broadway after a decade-long absence to star in Present Laughter, the Noël Coward comedy that will open a limited engagement April 5 at the St. James Theatre. That’s where Kline won his first Best Featured Actor in a Musical Tony, in…

UPDATES with video:  Is there anything Meryl Streep can’t do? In Ricki And The Flash she sings the hits and then manages to hit you in the heart as a lowly San Fernando Valley club rocker who never quite made it in the big time and suffers from a dysfunctional family she basically abandoned.  As I say in my video…

Here’s the first trailer for the first film from Tom Rothman’s revived TriStar Pictures. Ricki And The Flash stars Meryl Streep as Ricki Rendazzo, a hard-rocking singer-guitarist trying to make things right with the family she left behind in her quest for musical stardom. The Oscar perennial’s real-life daughter Mamie…