Among the surprises during this intense theater award week is the awarding of the 2018 Regional Theatre Tony Award to La MaMa, “for celebrating diversity and helping to introduce the Off-Off-Broadway movement!”

For the first time, Broadway honors Off-Off Broadway

Below: All about the 2018 Tonys: Nominations, Quiz, YOUR Picks, Photo Essay, the Impact of a Tony. Plus: winners of New York Drama Critics Circle, Outer Critics Circle, and Lucille Lortel Awards. Also: Spring Awakening gets a new song, Angels in America gets a new full-time angel, Hamilton gets a new exhibition.

THE WEEK IN NEW YORK THEATER AWARDS

1. Tony Tony Tony

“I Hope I Get It”: impact of Tony Award nominations and wins on Broadway production longevity. A scientific study by Russell Warne whose key finding is: Winning a Tony Award for Best Musical helps keep a show running. Other category wins, not so much.

2. New York Drama Critics Circle

The New York Drama Critics’ Circle named Mary Jane by Amy Herzog best play of the 2017-18 season. Hangmen by Martin McDonagh was named best foreign play. No award was given for best musical.

Special Citations

Park Avenue Armory for adventurous theater programming

Transport Group

The staging, design and illusions of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

3. Outer Critics Circle

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child won for new Broadway play, SpongeBob SquarePants for new Broadway musical in the 68th annual Outer Critics Circle Awards. Admissions won for Off-Broadway play, Desperate Measures for new Off-Broadway musical. Angels in America and My Fair Lady won best revivals.

Full list of winners.

4. Lucille Lortel Awards

KPOP won best musical and the best play was a tie between Cost of Living and School Girls, in the 33rd Annual Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Achievement Off-Broadway.

Full list of winners

5. Theatre World Awards and Obies — previews

The 74th Annual Theatre World Awards Ceremony will take place at Circle in the Square the afternoon of June 4th, and announced that Victor Garber will be receiving the John Willis Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theater

The 63rd annual Obies, which will be held at Terminal 5 on May 21st, announced that Kathleen Chalfant will be receiving a lifetime achievement award.

Need to sort out all these theater awards? Check out my

THE WEEK IN NEW YORK THEATER REVIEWS

“Summer and Smoke,” Tennessee Williams’ ripe Southern Gothic tale about a preacher’s daughter and her lifelong longing for the doctor’s son next door, is being given a minimalist co-production by the Classic Stage Company and the Transport Group, which feels neither classic nor transporting.

It seems clear what director Jake Cummings III, Transport’s artistic director, is trying to do (and if it weren’t clear, it would be after reading his note in the program): He wants to stage the play in such a way as to “return the focus back on the acting and writing.” But ironically the staging has the opposite effect.

How Woke the 3017-2018 Broadway season?

In a HowlRound article entitled Broadway in a Year of Reckoning, I look at how eight shows that opened during the Broadway season handled the past in light of current efforts to dismantle stubbornly antiquated values and assumptions — Angels in America, Carousel, Children of a Lesser God, The Iceman Cometh, M Butterfly, Mean Girls, My Fair Lady, and Summer.

THE WEEK IN NEW YORK THEATER NEWS



Dorothy Bruns, 44, was arrested at her Staten Island home accused of driving into a Brooklyn crosswalk and killing the 4-year-old daughter of Broadway actress Ruthie Ann Miles and a 1-year-old boy on March 5.

Beth Malone will assume the role of “The Angel” in Broadway’s Angels in America full-time beginning May 23rd.

Jane Chu has announced she will resign as head of National Endowment for the Arts June 6 after 4-year term. The Obama appointee has navigated the federal arts agency through some perilous waters. (Trump proposed eliminating it, but Congress instead increased its funding)

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For David Henry Hwang, conflict feelings about “The King and I” inspire the ambitious new musical, “Soft Power,” written with composer Jeanine Tesori. It opens May 16 in Los Angeles

“Hamilton: The Exhibition,” put together by the creative team of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, will open in November in Chicago, where the musical has been running since 2016, and then move to other cities. Miranda narrates, set designer David Korins is the creative director.

Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik have written a new song for the hit musical, “All You Desire” that will debut in the season finale of Rise on May 15.

In honor of two new books about Bob Fosse — “Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical” by Kevin winkler, and “All That Jazz: The Life and Times of the Musical ‘Chicago” here are two videos of Bob Fosse as a dancer

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