City Hadestown Showbiz Latest News and Updates

EXCLUSIVE: Broadway casting director Benton Whitley announced today the creation of Whitley Theatrical, a New York City-based casting and producing office for theater, film, and television.

EXCLUSIVE: Broadway casting director Duncan Stewart, whose big-name clients include the Tony-winning Hadestown, the new Life of Pi and the acclaimed The Great Comet of 1812, is dissolving his Stewart/Whitley agency after 14 years to head up the new casting arm of global live event company RWS Entertainment Group.

EXCLUSIVE: Alex Boniello (Jessica Jones) has been cast as Jack of Diamonds in the Disney+ original movie Descendants: The Rise of Red (formerly known as The Pocketwatch), the latest installment in Disney Branded Television’s Descendants franchise.

EXCLUSIVE: New York’s Drama League has named Tony winner Andre DeShields, the theater district Drama Book Shop and Encores! artistic director Lear deBessonet as this year’s Special Recognition Honorees.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor Tony-awarding-winning choreographer Sonya Tayeh behind the stage adaptation of “Moulin Rouge!” has joined the creative team of the upcoming “Gatsby” musical. The show’s producers Amanda Ghost, Len Blavatnik, Jordan Roth and American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) also announced that the stage adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel will have its World Premiere at A.R.T. in 2024. With “Hadestown” alum Rachel Chavkin on board to direct. As previously announced, Florence Welch, the force behind Florence + the Machine will write the lyrics. Welch will be joined by Thomas Bartlett to work on the show’s music.

Gatsby, the Broadway-aimed musical adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby first announced a year into the Covid pandemic shutdown, will make its world premiere at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge in 2024.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter Ephraim Sykes, a Tony nominee for the Temptations musical “Ain’t Too Proud,” is returning to Broadway in “Room,” a stage version of the Oscar-winning movie. The play and the 2015 film, starring Brie Larson, were based on Emma Donoghue’s 2010 best-selling novel. “Room” tells the story of Ma, who was kidnapped as a teenager and held in captivity for seven years. She’s trapped with her five-year-old son Jack, who was born in confinement and has no concept of the outside world. But the time has come to escape imprisonment and face their biggest challenge to date: life outside Room. As previously announced, “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical” star Adrienne Warren is leading the cast as Ma. Sykes, whose stage and screen credits include “Hamilton” and “Hairspray Live,” is playing SuperJack.

Broadway continued filling seats last week as the annual deep-discount Broadway Week promotion (actually three weeks) came to a close. Total receipts for the 21 productions tallied to $23,064,393, with attendance of 192,323 at 95% of capacity.

Big holiday ticket prices, bonus performances and large audiences spurred a hefty surge of nearly 50% in Broadway box office last week (ending Jan. 1) over the previous week, with productions including Funny Girl, MJ, Six, Beetlejuice and & Juliet among the shows smashing house records.

EXCLUSIVE: The CW has expanded the cast of Riverdale for the upcoming seventh and final season. Nicholas Barasch (Hadestown) and Karl Walcott (Le Chalet) have been tapped for major recurring roles on the Archie Comics series, developed and executive produced by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa.

Broadway cast albums have made a clean sweep of this year’s Grammy nominations for Best Musical Theater Album, the first time in at least several years that the competition hasn’t included music from the West End, Off Broadway, social media and live TV performances.

The first trailer for Apple’s upcoming “Spirited” is here! Watch as Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell team up to haunt each other and sing snark through the most wonderful time of the year.From director Sean Anders (“Daddy’s Home”) and featuring a script from Anders and John Morris, the musical comedy is also the latest project from EGOT-winning composers Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (“La La Land,” “The Greatest Showman,” “Dear Evan Hansen”) – so you know these show-stopping tunes are going to be your newest Christmasy earworms. Oscar winner Octavia Spencer also stars with “Hadestown” Tony Award nominee Patrick Page. Per an official synopsis of the feature: “Each Christmas Eve, the Ghost of Christmas Present (Will Ferrell) selects one dark soul to be reformed by a visit from three spirits.

Patti LuPone is opening up about the true reason she chose to hand in her equity card from the Actors Equity Association.

Patti LuPone has branded the Actors' Equity Association (AEA) the "worst union". The 73-year-old actress announced earlier this week that she is leaving the organisation and although she's been a member for five decades, the 'American Horror Story' star claimed they have no idea who she is. She told People magazine: "They accepted my resignation and told me that if I ever wanted to rejoin, I'd have to be approved.

Patti LuPone has left the Actors’ Equity union and hinted an end to her Broadway career. The 73-year-old actress - who infamously stopped production of 'Gypsy' she was starring in in 2009 when an audience member was on their phone - has spent decades on the New York stage starring in acclaimed productions of musicals such as 'Les Miserables', 'Sunset Boulevard' and 'Sweeney Todd' but is "no longer part of that circus" just days after seeing her name "bandied about" in connection to a more recent incident, which saw an audience member at 'Hadestown' reprimanded for using a captioning device.

Triple Tony winner and stage icon Patti LuPone says she’s given up her Actors’ Equity card, a move that could signal an end to her celebrated Broadway stage career.

On Monday (October 17), Broadway legend Patti LuPone sent theater fans into a panic over a tweet she sent out.

The Hadestown audience member with hearing loss who was reprimanded from the stage by Lillias White when the Broadway actress mistook a captioning device for a recording device is urging social media users to “please stop harassing” the Broadway star.

The producers of the Tony-winning Broadway musical Hadestown are speaking out in response to an incident that occurred during a performance on Wednesday (October 13).

The producers of Broadway’s Hadestown and Jujamcyn Theaters have apologized to an audience member with hearing loss whose use of a captioning device drew repeated onstage reprimands from one of the musical’s stars who mistakenly assumed the device was recording the performance.

EXCLUSIVE: TheFrontOffice Foundation, the charitable arm of director/producer Wendy C. Goldberg’s TheFrontOffice entertainment company, announced today that it will award a $25,000+ mid-career grant to a female identifying theater director, one of the largest financial awards given to an individual director.

Eva Noblezada is taking the day off from performing on Broadway to promote her new animated film Luck!

Antonio Ferme editorAlong her journey of becoming a hit Broadway star, one of the valuable lessons that Cynthia Erivo said she learned was accepting “no” as an answer.“Sometimes no’s are the best way to protect you from the thing that you’re not supposed to be doing because it creates the space for the yes that you’re supposed to have in the first place,” Erivo said on Sunday afternoon during a storyteller conversation at the Tribeca Festival. “When the no comes, even though it stings in the beginning, sometimes you’ll know deep down it’s okay.”For Erivo, that yes was accepting the role of the green-skinned Elphaba in Jon M.

A Strange Loop, an irreverent, sexually frank work about Blackness and queerness took home the best new musical crown at the Tony Awards on Sunday, as voters celebrated Broadway’s most racially diverse season by choosing an envelope-pushing Black voice.

Nouveau Productions, which Frazier runs with his husband Robert Pullen.All told, the special, star-studded programming to date has been strong in LGBTQ interest and appeal, ranging from an Ella Fitzgerald-themed Christmas show starring Vanessa Williams to the recently launched “Broadway in Concert” series featuring contemporary stars of the Great White Way paying tribute to iconic musicals.None of the specials have been quite as gay, however, as the latest, the explicitly queer-themed True Colors: LGBTQ+ Our Stories, Our Songs.Timed to kick off June’s Pride month, the program features real-life stories of hope, resilience, and triumph from members of the LGBTQ community, including former NBA player Jason Collins and acclaimed Sex and the City star and activist Cynthia Nixon, tied together with musical performances by a hodgepodge of queer talent, accompanied by the APO under Frazier and hosted by transgender Jeopardy! champion Amy Schneider.The performance lineup includes the pioneering lesbian folk/rock duo the Indigo Girls with their chart-topping breakout hit “Closer to Fine,” Drag Race alums Peppermint, Alexis Michelle, and Jujubee giving a spin of “(A Little More) Mascara” from La Cage aux Folles, trans opera singer Breanna Sinclairé covering “Somewhere” from West Side Story, and Tony-, Emmy-, and Grammy-winning stage veteran André de Shields (Hadestown) reviving “The Colors of My Life” from the 1980 musical Barnum.Additional performers include Glee star Chris Colfer, persevering contemporary Christian singer Trey Pearson formerly of the group Everyday Sunday, and young indie-pop artist Morgxn.Premiering Saturday, June 4, on www.PBS.org, the PBS Video app, and select PBS stations nationwide.Local affiliate WETA is

The Thanksgiving Play, which had its Off Broadway world premiere in 2018 and has become one of the top 10 produced plays, will make its Broadway debut in spring 2023 in a staging by Tony-winning Hadestown director Rachel Chavkin.

Broadway box office held steady last week, the first week of the new 2022-23 season, with the 35 productions grossing a total of $33,093,845, with attendance at 254,692. Both figures for the week ending May 29 indicate a barely noticeable 1% dip from the previous week.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media ReporterArthur Miller’s classic play “Death of a Salesman” is returning to Broadway this fall.“The Wire” actor Wendell Pierce and Sharon D Clarke (a current Tony nominee for “Caroline, or Change”) will reprise their roles as Willy and Linda Loman in the revival, which will be told for the first time on Broadway from the perspective of an African American family. “Death of a Salesman” will run at the Hudson Theatre for only 17 weeks, starting on Sept.

EXCLUSIVE: The acclaimed Young Vic/West End revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman starring Wendell Pierce and Sharon D Clarke will begin previews on Sept. 19 at Broadway’s Hudson Theatre, producers announced today.

With nearly all 36 productions settling into full schedules last week, the Broadway box office tally climbed a modest 7% from the previous week, totaling $31,199,660, with attendance of 249,219 showing a 3% bump.