Issue #207: February 1, 2008

Read the Toronto Star article on Camp Broadway!!
Read the Toronto Sun article on Camp Broadway!!

• The 12-year run of Rent will come to an end in June. This groundbreaking musical took New York by storm when it made its debut in 1996 raking up four Tony Awards, a Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. I’m sure it will live on in touring productions everywhere.

• Primary Stage’s production of Something You Did opens Off-Broadway on April 1 with Joanna Gleason heading the cast.

• A revival of Gypsy is scheduled to open on March 27….this production is based on the success of the Encores! production, which had Patti LuPone heading the cast. You may recall this is how the current revival of Chicago! began about 12 years ago following an Encores! presentation.

• That six foot six Texan Tommy Tune is heading back to the stage when Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice’s Turn of the Century opens at Chicago’s Goodman Theater in September.

• The touring production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is currently in Toronto at the Elgin Theatre. This Tony Award-winning musical is part of the new DanCap subscription series…and runs until February 10.

• Lois Nettleton, who passed away at the age of 80 on January 25, may be more familiar to television viewers of a certain age…but she left her mark on Broadway over the years. In a 1973 revival of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire her portrayal of Blanche DuBois was hailed by critic Rex Reed as “shatteringly brilliant.” Her Broadway debut was in 1949 in The Biggest Thief in Town and in 1955 she understudied Barbara Bel Geddes in another Williams classic Cat on a Hot Tin Roof where she occasionally stepped in as Maggie. Like so many stage stars of her generation she easily transcended into television with roles on The Twilight Zone, Studio One, Cagney & Lacey, In The Heat of the Night, Murder, She Wrote, The Golden Girls, Seinfeld and even took on daytime television for a three year stint on General Hospital. In 1976 Nettleton returned to Broadway in a revival of Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted where she garnered at Tony Award nomination for her performance.