Matthew Morrison returns to Broadway’s Just in Time on October 20, stepping back into the role of Bobby Darin at Circle in the Square for a limited three-week encore engagement.

Morrison previously took over the role last spring following Jonathan Groff’s departure, bringing his own considerable Broadway pedigree to Darin’s music and swagger. Now he is returning once again, following Jeremy Jordan, who plays his final performance on October 18 alongside Carrie St. Louis as Sandra Dee.

The return is an intriguing one because Just in Time has proven unusually adaptable to its succession of leading men. Groff, Morrison and Jordan are decidedly different performers, and rather than demanding an imitation of the actor who came before, the production allows Bobby Darin to shift with the man standing at the microphone. Morrison brings a particularly polished show-business quality to Darin—the confidence of someone who knows exactly how to work a Broadway house while making it look effortless.

Long before television audiences knew Morrison as Will Schuester on Glee, Broadway knew him. He made his Broadway debut in Footloose, originated Link Larkin in Hairspray, earned a Tony Award nomination for The Light in the Piazza, and later appeared in South Pacific and Finding Neverland. Darin gives him the opportunity to combine acting, vocals, movement and old-fashioned leading-man charisma in a role built around a performer who understood that entertaining an audience was an art unto itself.

Directed by Alex Timbers, Just in Time transforms Circle in the Square into an intimate nightclub, placing the audience inside Darin’s world rather than safely on the other side of a proscenium. With a live band and a score packed with “Beyond the Sea,” “Dream Lover,” “Splish Splash” and “Mack the Knife,” the musical traces Darin’s extraordinary career alongside the knowledge that a childhood illness had left him believing his life would be short.

That ticking clock gives the evening its energy. Darin wasn’t merely ambitious; he behaved as if time itself were chasing him. He wanted to sing, act, write, perform and conquer whatever room happened to be in front of him before the opportunity disappeared.

For Morrison, the return offers something Broadway performers rarely receive: the chance to come back to a role almost immediately and discover what else is inside it.

Sometimes the encore turns out to be just as interesting as the original engagement.

Do not miss Morrison on October 20, as he will once again be Just in Time.

Live From The Hotel Edison Times Square Chronicles Presents, is filmed from the Hotel Edison and is a podcast extension of T2C. We are back after a small hiatus.

Today owner Suzanna Bowling talks with with Caricaturist Ken Fallin and his new book About Face. Fallin’s big break was in 1983 doing the posters and advertising for the popular satirical revue Forbidden Broadway. In 1987, he was commissioned by the Boston Herald to do a celebrity caricature every week in the Sunday arts and entertainment section. Fallin has illustrated roughly 500 notable people for the Wall Street Journal, including President Barack Obama, Paul Newman and Tim Russert for Peggy Noonan’s memorial of the newsman in the paper.

The Fabulous Ken Fallin

His Forbidden Broadway posters promoted the show in London, Tokyo and Sydney. Outside of entertainment, Fallin developed relationships with corporate clientele, particularly American Express, which engaged him on several national media campaigns as well as private work. Belvedere Vodka hired him to turn famous icons like the Playboy Bunny and Quentin Tarantino into bottles of the alcohol. Other clients have included HBO, Showtime and Walt Disney Productions.

Ken Fallin in Shubert Alley

His new book About Face is a distinctive art and cultural publication that brings together a broad collection of caricatures celebrating notable figures from entertainment, music, Broadway, Hollywood, and contemporary popular culture. Through expressive artwork and recognizable subjects, the book captures the personalities and visual character of individuals who have made an impact on audiences across different generations. The collection reflects the author’s ability to transform familiar faces into engaging artistic interpretations while maintaining recognizable characteristics. With its combination of artistic expression, cultural familiarity, and entertainment value, ABOUT FACE offers readers more than a traditional collection of drawings. It presents a visual journey through the personalities and cultural figures that have shaped entertainment and public life.

Join Ken Fallin on October 7th at New World Stages, 340 W 50th St, from 5 – 7 for the unveiling of his art with a wine and cheese soiree. You have been invited.

I am so grateful to Ken Fallin for his conversation, his joy of life and his art that captures the imagination.

We are so proud because the show and our guests are featured on the TV screens in the lobby and the hotel rooms.

Rommel Gopez, Ken Fallin, Suzanna Bowling

Thank-you Magda Katz for videoing and creating the content to go live, Rommel Gopez and The Hotel Edison for their kindness and hospitality, Broadway HD and Dr K and at 200 West 54th Street for giving me back my health and my smile.

We have been named by Variety Entertainment News as one of Summer’s Best Picks in the category of Best Television, Radio, Podcasts. The company we are in, has made us so humbled, grateful and motivated to continue.

“The Daily Geek Report” named host Suzanna Bowling on the list of Most Engaging Hosts.

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Spring Awakening Ken Fallin

There is something almost unbearably poignant about the timing.

On September 16, Seaview announced the young actors who will inherit Spring Awakening, the revolutionary musical Duncan Sheik created with Steven Sater. One day later, Sheik died in Manhattan at the age of 56. His family announced his death Friday, saying that he died Thursday night surrounded by love.

Duncan Sheik

So a production that was already about introducing one of the defining musicals of this century to another generation suddenly becomes something more: a continuation of the artistic life of the man who gave it its extraordinary sound.

Sheik had already lived one successful musical life before Broadway claimed him. His 1996 song “Barely Breathing” became one of those records inseparable from its decade, remaining on the Billboard Hot 100 for 55 weeks and earning him a Grammy nomination. But the introspective singer-songwriter never seemed particularly interested in spending the rest of his career repeating the thing that had made him famous.

Broadway gave him somewhere far more interesting to go. With Sater, Sheik took Frank Wedekind’s once-banned 1891 play about adolescents trapped between sexuality, ignorance, repression and authority and gave those young people a contemporary musical language. Spring Awakening didn’t merely put rock music into a period story. Its great theatrical trick was allowing the music to become the interior world its characters could not otherwise express.

When Spring Awakening opened at Broadway’s Eugene O’Neill Theatre in 2006, it introduced Broadway audiences to a remarkable young company that included Jonathan Groff, Lea Michele, John Gallagher Jr. and Skylar Astin. The production won eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Sheik received Tonys for Best Original Score, shared with Sater, and Best Orchestrations, and the cast recording later received the Grammy for Best Musical Show Album. More importantly, it changed the sound of Broadway.

The Civilians, Duncan Sheik and Kyle Jarrow

Sheik understood that contemporary music didn’t need to dress itself up as traditional musical theatre before being allowed through the stage door. His music could remain intimate, restless, erotic, angry, melancholy and startlingly modern while serving a story written more than a century earlier. The result was not simply a successful rock musical. It was a score that made an entire generation of young audiences feel that Broadway might actually be speaking their musical language.

Now Spring Awakening is about to speak to another one. Beginning November 27, the musical returns to New York for a limited 12-week Off-Broadway engagement at Studio Seaview, officially opening December 17. Tony Award winner Danya Taymor directs, with choreography by Celia Rowlson-Hall, making her theatrical debut, and music supervision by Or Matias.This isn’t a production built around established stars. It is deliberately handing the material to young performers who may become tomorrow’s. The newly announced principal company features Jack Bateman as Georg, Jada Simone Clark as Thea, Leif Coomer as Ernst, Ryo Kamibayashi as Moritz, Ashlyn Maddox as Wendla, Nando Morland as Otto, Antonio Porciello as Hanschen, Khadija Sankoh as Martha, Grace Slear as Anna, Tyler Jordan Wesley as Melchior and Amalia Yoo as Ilse.

Duncan Sheik

There is something particularly appropriate about Bateman and Porciello reaching the production through its open casting call, where 2,532 performers were seen. Twenty years ago, Spring Awakening helped introduce Broadway to actors whose names would become enormously familiar. This production is once again looking toward the unknown.

The revival intends to return the musical to the rawness of Wedekind’s original play, placing its young people in an intimate space where desire, fear, repression and discovery cannot easily be escaped. That intimacy feels particularly right for Sheik’s music. These songs were never really about spectacle. Their power came from hearing everything these characters were forbidden to say suddenly explode into sound.

MCC theater presents ‘Alice By Heart’ book by Steven Sater with Jessie Nelson, music by Duncan Sheik, lyrics by Steven Sater, choreographed by Rick and Jeff Kuperman, directed by Jessie Nelson starring, in alphabetical order, Mia DiLena, Zachary Downer, Noah Galvin, Molly Gordon (Alice), Ari Groover, Michael Hartung, Zachary Infante, Andrew Kober, Grace McLean, Andrew Mueller, Nkeki Obi-Melekwe, Catherine Ricafort, Colton Ryan, Heath Saunders, Wesley Taylor and Natalie Walker

Sheik’s theatrical life extended far beyond Spring Awakening. He wrote music and lyrics for American Psycho, collaborated again with Sater on Alice by Heart, and composed for The Secret Life of Bees and Whisper House. He remained an unusual Broadway figure: cerebral, musically sophisticated and never particularly interested in sounding like everyone else.

Remarkably, Spring Awakening isn’t the only Duncan Sheik musical moving forward without him.

On Monday, September 21—just four days after his death—the cast and creative team of the new Off-Broadway musical Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen are scheduled to meet the press in New York and perform one of its songs publicly. Sheik wrote the music, with a book by Leah Nanako Winkler.

Sophie Ann Caruso, Duncan Sheik, Jamie deRoy photo Stephen Sorokiff

The musical stars Sophia Anne Caruso, who made an indelible impression as Lydia in Beetlejuice, as Colette; Cory Jeacoma (Beautiful) as Léon; Nkeki Obi-Melekwe (Tina) as Nana; and Drama Desk Award nominee Jenny Powers (Little Women) as Madame. Tony, Olivier and Emmy Award winner Rob Ashford directs and choreographs, with Or Matias serving as music supervisor.

That gathering was planned as an introduction to a new Duncan Sheik musical. Instead, it will inevitably become something else as well: one of the first occasions on which theatre artists will perform new Sheik music after his death.

The timing is almost impossible to ignore. On September 16, New York learned who would inherit Spring Awakening. On September 17, Sheik died. On September 21, performers are scheduled to sing from a musical he never lived to see fully arrive.

That is not simply legacy. That is work interrupted in motion.

Sheik’s theatrical career extended well beyond Spring Awakening. He wrote music and lyrics for American Psycho, collaborated again with Steven Sater on Alice by Heart, and composed Whisper House and music for The Secret Life of Bees. But Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen now occupies a different place in that body of work. It isn’t something being rediscovered from his past. It is part of the future he was still creating.

His colleagues and performers began paying tribute almost immediately. Michele, Astin and members of the Spring Awakening family remembered not simply the composer whose work helped establish their careers, but a generous musician and mentor who had been there when many of them were themselves young artists trying to discover who they were. Which makes what happens at Studio Seaview this November especially moving.

Duncan Sheik could easily have remained the handsome singer-songwriter forever introduced as the man who recorded “Barely Breathing.” Instead, he followed that success somewhere much stranger and more consequential. He found Wedekind, found Sater, found the theatre and helped create a musical that altered Broadway’s vocabulary.

Twenty years later, another generation has just been handed those songs. At the same time, another company is preparing to introduce music he had only just finished creating. Sheik will not be there for either.

But on Monday, someone will sing one of his newest songs. In November, another young actor will begin singing one of the songs that made him part of Broadway history.

Duncan Sheik is gone at 56. His music, remarkably, was already on its way to the next stage.

For four decades, Ken Fallin has been looking at famous faces and seeing what the rest of us miss.

Joan Crawford

A few strokes of ink become a raised eyebrow. A slightly exaggerated jaw becomes an entire personality. A familiar silhouette suddenly tells you everything you need to know about the person inhabiting it. That is the peculiar magic of caricature when it is done brilliantly: exaggeration somehow produces something closer to truth.

Alfred Hitchcock’s website

This fall, Fallin celebrates that remarkable career on two fronts. On Wednesday, October 7, from 5 to 7 p.m., New World Stages will host the opening reception for an exhibition of his work, offering audiences an opportunity to see the drawings beyond the pages and screens where so many first encountered them.

Gregory Peck

At the same time, Fallin is assembling a self-published book featuring selected drawings from his 40 years as an illustrator and caricaturist—and for those who think they know his work primarily through Broadway, the collection may contain a few surprises.

Ethel Merman in London

Because Ken Fallin’s world has always been considerably larger than the theatre district.

Karl Lagerfeld

The proposed book reaches through an astonishing range of subjects and assignments: actors and filmmakers, politicians and journalists, fashion royalty including Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent, architect Jean Nouvel, and hundreds of figures drawn during Fallin’s long association with The Wall Street Journal. Taken together, the images become something more interesting than a conventional career retrospective. They are a visual record of the people who shaped several decades of American culture.

Fallin’s first major break came in 1983 when he began creating the posters and advertising artwork for Gerard Alessandrini’s deliciously wicked Forbidden Broadway. It proved an ideal marriage of artist and subject. Fallin’s ability to lovingly skewer a famous face mirrored exactly what Forbidden Broadway was doing musically to Broadway itself.

Andy Warhol

Those drawings eventually traveled far beyond Manhattan, with Fallin’s Forbidden Broadway artwork appearing as productions reached London, Tokyo and Sydney. His visual language became inseparable from the show: you could recognize Forbidden Broadway before reading its title.

Bassets

By 1987, The Boston Herald had commissioned Fallin to create a weekly celebrity caricature for its Sunday arts and entertainment section. But another chapter of his career would eventually introduce his work to an enormous national readership.

Jean Nouvel

For The Wall Street Journal, Fallin has illustrated roughly 500 notable figures, ranging from presidents to movie stars, cultural figures and newsmakers. His subjects have included Barack Obama and Paul Newman, as well as journalist Tim Russert, whom Fallin drew for Peggy Noonan’s memorial following Russert’s death.

Bernard-Henri Levy

That work reveals something particularly interesting about Fallin’s gift. Caricature can easily become cruelty. Fallin rarely needs cruelty. His drawings can certainly be wicked—and anyone who has followed his theatrical work knows that his pen possesses teeth—but underneath the exaggeration is observation.

Warren Buffett

He isn’t merely drawing what someone looks like. He is drawing what makes us recognize them.

Cole Porter

Sometimes it is posture. Sometimes hair. Sometimes the architecture of a face. Sometimes it is simply attitude. Fallin understands that likeness has surprisingly little to do with photographic accuracy. Capture the right three things about somebody and suddenly there they are.

DOVER Quartet

That ability made him equally valuable outside editorial illustration. His commercial clients have included American Express, HBO, Showtime, CNBC and Walt Disney Productions, while assignments have taken his distinctive line into national advertising campaigns and commissioned work far removed from Broadway.

Patti LuPone

LuPone Carnegie Hall

Then there are the subjects themselves.

Gloria Vanderbilt

Sunset Blvd. Gloria Swamson

Fashion designers. Architects. Movie stars. Presidents. Broadway legends. Journalists. Cultural eccentrics. Fallin has spent forty years quietly assembling an extraordinary paper cocktail party populated by people who, in many cases, would never otherwise have occupied the same room.

John Williams

The forthcoming book promises finally to invite us into that room.

Judge Douglas Ginsburg

What makes the project especially appealing is the possibility of seeing work that even longtime admirers may never have encountered. Editorial illustration is ephemeral by nature. A drawing appears beside an article, advertisement or review and then disappears into an archive. Decades later, an artist can discover that he has created an enormous visual history almost accidentally. Fallin has.

Lani Bell

While the mediums surrounding illustration have transformed dramatically during those forty years—from newspapers and print advertising to digital publishing and social media—the fundamental appeal of his work hasn’t changed. A Ken Fallin drawing remains unmistakably a Ken Fallin drawing.

Robert Glasper

That may be the greatest achievement of all. In an age increasingly dominated by photographic perfection, filters, digital manipulation and now artificial intelligence capable of manufacturing faces that never existed, there is something wonderfully human about the visible intelligence of a hand-drawn line. You can see the decision. You can see the joke. You can almost see the instant when Fallin looked at his subject and thought, Ah. That’s it.

Steve Jobs

The October exhibition at New World Stages brings that line back where so much of Fallin’s story began: the theatre.

Yves Saint Laurent

The book promises something larger.

Vivek Ramaswamy

It reminds us that Ken Fallin hasn’t simply been drawing Broadway for forty years. He has been drawing his time. And what a cast he has had.

Ken Fallin

Just as the Jonas Brothers are taking Madison Square Garden back to 2008, T2C’s resident caricature master Ken Fallin has turned his pen toward Kevin, Joe and Nick Jonas, capturing the brothers as they bring The Burning Up Tour All Over Again to New York.

The Jonas Brothers are at Madison Square Garden tonight, August 21, and tomorrow, August 22, following the opening performance of their three-night Garden engagement on August 20. What was initially conceived as a limited New York return to the spirit of their enormously popular 2008–09 Burning Up Tour proved irresistible to fans: overwhelming demand led first to the addition of a third MSG performance and has now prompted the brothers to take the revival on the road for a 45-city North American tour.

It is a delicious subject for Fallin, whose deceptively simple lines have always had a way of getting past celebrity polish and finding the personality underneath. Here, the three brothers are instantly recognizable as individuals while remaining unmistakably a unit—the chemistry that has kept the Jonas Brothers culturally alive through changing musical eras, solo careers, marriages, movies, breakups, reunions and now more than two decades together.

This particular tour is built unabashedly on memory. The Burning Up Tour All Over Again reaches back to the period when “Burnin’ Up,” “S.O.S.,” “Tonight” and “When You Look Me in the Eyes” helped turn three brothers from New Jersey into one of the defining pop acts of the Disney generation. Nostalgia only works when people still care. Clearly, they do.

The response to the Madison Square Garden dates was strong enough that the Jonas Brothers announced this week that the celebration will continue across North America beginning September 25 in Boston, eventually returning to the metropolitan area for its December 21 finale at Newark’s Prudential Center.

There is something rather wonderful about the symmetry of it all. The Jonas Brothers are revisiting the tour that helped define their youth while performing for an audience that has grown up alongside them—and, in many cases, is now introducing another generation to the music.

Ken Fallin, who has spent decades chronicling performers with a few perfectly chosen strokes, has caught them at exactly the right moment.

Kevin. Joe. Nick. Three brothers, twenty-plus years—and apparently still burning up.

Jonas Brothers at Madison Square Garden