Shakespeare knew Kavanaughs well: “Say what you can, my false o’erweighs your true”

The 2018-2019 Broadway season, launching in earnest this week with two plays, is shaping up after several exciting announcements. Check out the preview guide

Week in NY Theater Reviews and Previews

The Revolving Cycles Truly and Steadily Roll’d

Karma, a “dirty little hood rat” of 17, is looking for her missing former foster brother Terrell, though she didn’t know him long and he didn’t like her much. He was, however, all she had. The first place she looks is the funeral parlor of Madam Rose Profit, 65, who insists her last name is pronounced Pro-fee, but she indeed profits from the tragedies in her community.

The two women, both portrayed by extraordinary actresses — Kara Young as Karma, Lynda Gravátt as Madam Profit — more or less compete to dominate the play by Jonathan Payne, who is making an arresting New York debut as a professional playwright.

As Polly Noonan, Edie Falco, late of The Sopranos and Nurse Jackie, can make almost any show more engaging than it would otherwise be, even a relatively sedate one like “The True,”…

Except….Polly is only partly the fruit of the playwright’s imagination. “The True” is more or less true. There was an Albany Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd who in 1977 was facing his first primary challenge in 35 years; he did have a long-time aide named Dorothea “Polly” Noonan who was rumored to be in a romantic relationship with him. And what’s more, Polly Noonan gave birth to a daughter, also named Polly Noonan, and that daughter gave birth to Kirsten E. Gillibrand, now a U.S. Senator from New York, who is said to be a likely candidate for president in 2020. Gillibrand has called her grandmother “my greatest political hero.”

La Femme’s revival of Tennessee Williams’ late, little-known play about four women living and working and bickering with one another, offers something you won’t find in A Glass Menagerie — though it’s set in the same year (1937) and place (a rundown section of St. Louis), contains a familiar dose of heartbreak, and reflects the playwright’s poetic sensibility and deep compassion. But “A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur,” despite its precious title, is also wickedly witty, Williams creating smart-mouthed characters and letting them loose on one another.

I Was Most Alive With You – Accessible for the Deaf…and Complicated

As the family gathers for a Thanksgiving right before everything starts to fall apart, Knox (Russell Harvard) gives thanks for “three things I used to think weren’t gifts at all: Deafness… Being gay…. Addiction. They are gifts… Each brought me to great clarity.”

Clarity is the great aim of Playwrights Horizons’ production of “I Was Most Alive With You,” Craig Lucas’s play about a family that suddenly must cope with a series of calamities. But it’s an unusual kind of clarity for the theater – clarity for deaf people.

As I point out in my article for TDF Stages, 14 actors are performing the play divided into two casts playing the same seven roles: Russell Harvard, Lois Smith and five other actors portray the characters on stage, while simultaneously seven other actors use ASL to portray the same characters from a balcony above

Playwrights Horizons is also the latest NYC theater to offer the GalaPro app — an app you can put on your smart phone that offers captions in real time of the show you’re attending. Part of a push to make theater more accessible to all

Week in NY Theater News

The third Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, starring Annette Bening and Tracy Letts directed by Gregory Mosher, will open at Roundabout’s American Airlines Theater April 22, 2019

Judy Kaye, 2-time Tony winner (Phantom, Nice Work If You Can Get It), will return to Broadway in Anastasia on Sept 28, 2018, to play the “Dowager Empress,” the role originated by Mary Beth Peil.

Brandon Uranowitz, (An American in Paris, Falsettos) will take over as Itzik (the role originated by John Cariani) in The Bands Visit starting October 4

No, @HPPlayNYC is not a musical, but there’s enough music in it to fill an album — “The Music of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child In Four Contemporary Suites by @imogenheap” will be release on November 2. pic.twitter.com/vcWQUqIgP4 — New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) September 20, 2018

Top 10 Most Produced Plays and 20 Most Produced Playwrights of the 2018-2019 Season

The Times Square Theater, built in 1920, is the final historic theatre on 42nd Street to be redeveloped. Deemed an unsuitable space for a modern theater, it’s being turned into “a multi-floor experiential retail property” – aka a mall. pic.twitter.com/7cPUwYgzWF — New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) September 20, 2018

Tonight: Off-Off Broadway awards show

RIP

Stephen Jeffreys, playwright known for ‘The Libertine,’ 68

How they used to ventilate Broadway theaters, from Heating & Ventilating magazine in 1925.

How theaters are ventilated now —

A Broadway Fixer, Keeping Theatergoers Safe and Comfortable

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