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Theatre News: Cherry Lane, Lucille Lortel Theatre and Look Dine-In Cinemas

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Executive director Angelina Fiordellisi agreed to sell the Cherry Lane Theatre to the Lucille Lortel Theatre Foundation for $11 million in 2021, but the deal fell through. Now the historic, Off Broadway theatre has been purchased by the film studio A24. A24 purchased theThe 179-seat mainstage venue and the smaller 60-seat theater for $10,026,428.

Located on one of the most picturesque side streets of Manhattan’s West Village neighborhood, the theatre is a central part of Off Broadway history, founded as a playhouse in 1923 and eventually providing a home space for such major theatrical figures as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams, Harold Pinter, Eugene Ionesco, LeRoi Jones, Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, Joe Orton and David Mamet.

We are excited to announce that the Lucille Lortel Theatre has purchased a three-story carriage house in Chelsea which will help support emerging artists, the creation of new theatrical works, and bolster New York’s iconic downtown theatre scene.

Located at 134 West 18 Street, the building will act as the Theatre’s new headquarters, featuring a fully accessible 61-seat studio theater, a public collaborative co-working space for artists, and new office space for the growing theatre company.This will be the Theatre’s second space, in addition to its recently renovated historic Lucille Lortel Theatre on Christopher Street.

Their is also the appointment of Michael Heitzman and Caridad Svich as Co-Artistic Directors of new work, joining Kimille Howard, Artistic Director of Educational Programs. Michael and Caridad will be creating new programming and initiatives as the Theatre expands its physical and artistic footprint.

“As Artistic Director for New Musical Development I am honored to have this opportunity to expand my over ten-year relationship with this legendary organization. I’m proud to continue Lucille Lortel’s legacy of championing artists by providing a vibrant and exciting home for developing new musical theater,”said Michael Heitzman, newly announced Artistic Director for Musical Development of Lucille Lortel Theatre.“It is with great pleasure that I am joining Lucille Lortel Theatre as Artistic Director of New Play Development. My passion and commitment to new writing for performance both as an artist and new play champion finds a home in this historic organization. I am looking forward to establishing an artist-centered, climate-conscious program that will nurture theatre-makers and their works for now and the future. During these perilous times, it gives me hope that the Lortel wants to support the kind of artistic dreaming necessary that will help guide us all through and toward the light,” said Caridad Svich, newly announced Artistic Director of New Play Development.To learn more about our Artistic Directors, please visit their website.

The former Landmark Theatres Site on West 57th Street will be called the Look Dine-In Cinemas. They have reached a long-term lease deal with the Durst Organization, owners of 57 West, and will begin showing first run films this summer.

The new 8-screen site will be Look’s first New York City location and will serve as the company’s flagship. It already operates 11 theaters and 111 screens in Texas, California, Florida, Arizona, Georgia and New York.

Suzanna, co-owns and publishes the newspaper Times Square Chronicles or T2C. At one point a working actress, she has performed in numerous productions in film, TV, cabaret, opera and theatre. She has performed at The New Orleans Jazz festival, The United Nations and Carnegie Hall. She has a screenplay and a TV show in the works, which she developed with her mentor and friend the late Arthur Herzog. She is a proud member of the Drama Desk and the Outer Critics Circle and was a nominator. Email: suzanna@t2conline.com

Events

The Olivier Awards Return

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Celebrate the very best in British theatre in a star-studded evening as the Olivier Awards return to the Royal Albert Hall on April 2nd.

Three-time Olivier Award nominee & Primetime Emmy winner, Hannah Waddingham will be hosting the awards for the first time.

The event will feature performances from all of the Best New Musical nominees, including The Band’s Visit, Standing At The Sky’s Edge, Sylvia and Tammy Faye. Also performing will be Oklahoma! and Sister Act, both nominated for the Best Musical Revival award, as well as Disney’s Newsies, which has been nominated for Matt Cole’s choreography.

The multi-Olivier Award winner The Book of Mormon, will be performing to mark its ten-year anniversary in the West End. Additionally, special award winner Arlene Philips will be honored with a tribute from the cast of Grease.

The ceremony will be broadcast live on Magic Radio from 6pm with Ruthie Henshall and Alice Arnold hosting.

The highlights program will also be aired on ITV1 and ITVX at 10:15 pm in the UK and via Official London Theatre’s YouTube channel elsewhere.

And the nominees are:

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Out of Town

The Unpacking of the First Métis Man of Odesa, An Interview

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Punctuate! Theatre is unpacking a love story. A love story about a couple. A love story about Ukraine. And a love story against an unbelievably complicated backdrop. Starting at The Theatre Centre in Toronto, the company is ushering forth the world premiere of First Métis Man of Odesa before it spins itself out on stages across Canada. Spanning continents and set against the backdrop of the COVID pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Métis playwright and Punctuate! Artistic Director, Matthew MacKenzie (Dora Award-winning playwright for Bears, After the Fire, The Particulars) joins forces with his wife, the award-winning Ukrainian actress Mariya Khomutova (Odesa Film Festival Grand Prix – The Golden Duke award-winner NONNATwo People), to tell the story of their COVID courtship and share an intimate perspective on the personal impacts of the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Matthew MacKenzie and Mariya Khomutova.

Drawn from their real-life love story, a story that is ultimately still unfolding to this very day, First Métis Man of Odesa unpacks the journey of Matt and Masha’s love that spans continents where distance and conflicts can’t tame their passionate connection. After meeting on a theatre research trip in Kyiv, a spark is struck, and a romance between a Métis Playwright and a Ukrainian artist is ignited, taking them from the beaches of the Black Sea to the banks of the North Saskatchewan River, within the onset of a global pandemic, the eruption of a brutal war, but also the many joyous moments that this union begets, including marriage and the birth of their son.

During the height of the lockdown in 2021, an initial version of this piece was presented as a radio play at Factory Theatre, written by MacKenzie and directed by Nina Lee Aquino. This March, First Métis Man of Odesa, as directed by Lianna Makuch (Pyretic Productions/Punctuate!’s Barvinok), makes its stage debut, offering a compelling continuation of the initial story told in that first radio play. The couple, Matthew MacKenzie and his wife, Mariya Khomutova, sat down with Frontmezzjunkies and thankfully answered a few questions about their incredible journey from that first love-struck connection to its World Premiere at The Theatre Centre in Toronto.

Tell me, how you decided to embark on telling your own story and what the beginning of this creative process looked like for you two?

Initially, Matt wrote an audio play for Factory Theatre about our romance, then getting married and having their son during the pandemic.  The plan had been to expand the piece for the stage, a plan that took on much urgency after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Both the pandemic and war have a deeply dehumanizing effect, so our hope in telling our love story is to share the human side of these major world events; a human side that headlines and news clips can’t fully capture.

What aspect of your character, or your involvement with/creation of this play resonates the most powerfully inside you?

For both of us, the opportunity to share all the joy, humour, anger, and frustration we’ve experienced in the past few years is a really therapeutic process.  Many of our friends and family only know snippets of what we’ve been through, so the opportunity to tell our story across the country is one we are deeply grateful for.

The phrase “you don’t know what someone is carrying with them” has really hit home over the past couple of years, as we have had to contend with some pretty epic challenges as a couple and as individuals.

Tell me a bit about what it is like to bring your character to the stage? What does mean to you to be telling this story?

We play ourselves in the play, but we very much play versions of ourselves in the play.  We had to mine conflict between us out of a few outbursts, as there haven’t actually been a lot of [conflicts] in our relationship so that we could bring the drama of what we are going through to the fore.

Challenges of playing ourselves have included the fact that [Matt] is not a trained actor, while Mariya is. Mariya though comes from a theatre tradition that was almost entirely focused on the classics, so playing herself in a play based on her life is definitely a new and challenging experience!

Tell me a bit more about your development process? Was there a typical ‘first read’ or was it different, given your own story inspired the work…

We were able to conduct several development workshops over a period of six months.  There was no shortage of content that we could derive from our lives, so the challenge was determining what to keep and what to let fall away. Even after our first read, we cut 15 pages from our rehearsal draft.  Events in our lives and in Ukraine will no doubt continue to necessitate the evolution of our script.

What’s been the most challenging part of this process for you?

For Mariya, it was buying into the idea (that is quite a common one in Canada) that a play about someone’s real life can be art.  Seeing Hailey Gillis’s My Ex-boyfriend Yard Sale, really helped her believe this was possible.

For Matt, it met the challenge of performing for the first time in ten years.  The last time he performed, he made his friends promise they would never let him perform again, but all agreed it didn’t make much sense for anyone else to play him in this piece.

The most rewarding?

Having already performed several shows in Kamloops, the most rewarding part of this process is sharing this story with refugees from Ukraine.  Their responses have been incredible and have really encouraged us to share our story with as many people as possible.

What do you want the audience to get from this play, and from your character?

We want the audience to join us as we relive our sweeping love story, from Odesa to Toronto.  We want the audience to see the human side of the conflict in Ukraine.  And we want the audience to leave the theatre with the hope that love can and will conquer all.

First Métis Man of Odesa is in Toronto for its world premiere run at the Franco Boni Theatre @ The Theatre Centre from March 30 – April 8, 2023 (opening March 31). Following the world premiere in Toronto, First Métis Man of Odesa will appear at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton, The Cultch in Vancouver, and the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg. For information and tickets, please visit theatrecentre.org/event/first-metis-man-of-odesa/

For more go to frontmezzjunkies.com
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Music

Ariana DeBose and Bonnie Milligan Debut A Woman Knows

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Academy Award winner Ariana DeBose and Drama Desk nominee and Theatre World Award winner Bonnie Milligan record “A Woman Knows,” the exhilarating 11 o’clock number from the upcoming original musical comedy Female Troubles, a period piece.

Female Troubles is a completely original musical comedy featuring lyrics by Amanda Green (Hands on a Hardbody, Bring It On), music by Curtis Moore (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”), and book by Gabrielle Allan and Jennifer Crittenden (“Veep,” “Seinfeld”).In Female Troubles, Elinor Benton finds herself surprisingly and undeniably knocked up — and, since she’s unmarried and this is 19th century England, she has a very big problem. Facing devastating ruin, Elinor and her girlfriends set off on a raucous carriage trip to London seeking the services of Madame Restell, an infamous midwife who advertises cures for women with “female troubles.” Through the lens of the past, this original musical comedy comments on the present, asking the trenchant question, “Can You Believe This Sh*t’s Still Happening in 1810?”“It’s been so timely for a long time, but yes, it is now more timely than ever,” Green tells PEOPLE of the musical. “We like to describe it as Jane Austen meets Bridesmaids, but about women’s reproductive freedoms. What the song says is that whatever choice you make is fine as long as you get to make the choice,” says Green.DeBose and Milligan recorded “A Woman Knows” as friends of the authors. (DeBose made her Broadway debut in Green’s Bring It On). The song marks the culmination of  the rollicking journey of leading lady Elinor Benton and her maid, Dabney, where they face a crucial decision that they must each make for themselves.Producers Aged in Wood (Robyn Goodman, Josh Fiedler and Nicole Kramer), Brian & Dayna Lee (AF Creative Media), and Jay & Cindy Gutterman have been developing the musical for several years. Future production news about Female Troubles will be delivered soon.Sign up here to receive information about the show: https://bit.ly/3ngflAZMusic video credits:Produced and edited by Ethan NobleDirector of Photography – Lianne Richards1st AC – Jerome Salac Associate Producer – Olivia Skvarenina
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