This past Saturday, the first "show" on Broadway opened since the pandemic.  It was only a 40-minute production, and the audience was extremely limited, socially distanced and required to wear masks -- comprised mostly of staffers from the Actors Fund and Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.

It was a matinee, directed by Tony-winner Jerry Zaks, and featured Tony-winners Nathan Lane and Savion Glover, who each had solo performances in their halves of the evening.  Only three minutes of each are available, but it's worth it.

Lane performed a new monologue written by playwright Paul Rudnick.  It's the story of a theater-obsessed man self-isolating in his small apartment, as he talks about what he says are his encounters with Hugh Jackman and others.

It's not only very funny, but Nathan Lane is a total joy, and I’ve love to see the whole thing and hope it either gets released (perhaps as a fund-raiser) or that Paul Rudnick can expand it to a full evening, or at least a regular one-act that can be paired with something else..
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Savion Glover's piece is very enjoyable, though from just these two clips -- admittedly not a fair comparison -- Lane's is the standout for my taste.  In his work, Glover uses tap dance to "reflect on his life in the theater, while exploring what Broadway is, was, and will be."
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This is a huge deal for theater-lovers.

Starting tonight and running through this Sunday, October 25, the Goodman Theatre of Chicago is going to stream its 1999 Tony-winning production of “Death of a Salesman” with Brian Dennehy.  

The production won four Tony Awards including Best Revival of a Play, Best Actor in a Play (Dennehy), Best Featured Actress in a Play (Elizabeth Franz), and Best Direction of a Play (Robert Falls, the artistic director of the Goodman.).
 
It begins streaming at 7 PM CDT tonight and will end at midnight CDT on Sunday.  This is being done as a benefit for the Actors Fund

You can stream it here on the Goodman Theatre's website.  Or if for some reasons that's not working, over on Playbill.com.

For some reason, Dennehy loved performing in Chicago, which he did a lot.  Periodically at the Goodman, often at Steppenwolf.  Apparently, he was pushing to do a production of this play in the city for years.  It did so well there and was so acclaimed that they took it to Broadway.

Here are a couple of minutes from the production with Dennehy and Franz.  It gives a good sense why he received the Best Actor award.  It's a low-key scene, but done with such realism and heart. 

And as a bonus, this is the Tony Awards when Dennehy won.  It's quite nice, and often very funny.

Two of the greatest stage actors of the 20th century -- and arguably the greatest husband and wife acting couple, doing much of their work together -- were Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.  Unfortunately, there's very little footage of them, since they did very few movies, leaving most of their work for the stage.

One thing I do remember seeing them in, though not a movie per se, was a Hallmark Hall of Fame TV production of the classic play, The Magnificent Yankee, about Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, which aired in 1965.  My recollection, even watching it as a kid, was that it was a total joy.  Years later, when I went to UCLA for graduate school, I discovered that the school had the greatest collection of Hallmark Hall of Fame specials anywhere, everything in fact -- though it was only available for academic purposes.  Being a student, I thought that that might qualify, and it did.  For some reason, I only took advantage to see two of their classic productions.  One was A Storm in Summer, for which Peter Ustinov won the Emmy Award, written by Rod Serling -- and it was as great as I remembered, though I knew it would be since it hadn't aired that much earlier.  The other I wanted to see was The Magnificent Yankee, curious how it lived up to my memory all that time before when I was much younger.  And...it was just as superb.  I wish both of these were available to the public.  Why one of the several Hallmark Channels doesn't air their collection -- even in the middle of the night, where they could be recorded for later viewing -- is beyond me.

Alas, no, I don't have footage of The Magnificent Yankee.  I mention it only for the sake of perspective.  I should note that many people have seen the work of Lynn Fontanne, though, but don't know it.  And I say "seen the work" specifically, because they haven't seen her in it.  She did the narration of the original, legendary TV production of Peter Pan with Mary Martin.

As I said, there isn't much footage of the two of them acting, though you can get their one, famous film, The Guardsman -- recreating their roles from the major Broadway hit -- which is available on Netflix.  It's old and dated, from 1931, but it's still enjoyable and especially a treat to see them both.  It's the story of an actor husband who suspects his wife of infidelity, and so pretends to be a foreign nobleman to try to strike up an affair with her and prove himself right.

​And at least we have a trailer for that.

All of this is a long way to lead into this video.  It's from 1970, when The Lunts were given a special Tony Award.  It's introduced by Julie Andrews, and then presented by another then-married couple, Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens.

​As I noted here the other day, I've written periodically about attending the wonderful Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum outdoors in the Topanga Forest.  This is also where Billie Eilish performed her recent world premiere video, "My Future," for the DNC Convention.

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The Theatricum Botanicum has just announced a month of special online Zoom events -- all free -- that they will be putting on over the next month, intended no doubt to involve the public to do some fundraising since they've had to shut their performance season down.

First up is a fascinating sounding event, "An Evening of Mummers and Mystery."  This is a small, independent film that Will Geer made In 1974 with other original Theatricum company members.  As they describe it, the film "recreated the experience of a troop of mummers performing a mystery play typical of The Middle Ages in Europe. This rarely seen film, full of familiar faces and screened now for the first time in nearly five decades, illustrates how early acting companies in the 1400s helped give way to the modern theater as we know it."

Here's a trailer for the film -- clearly low-budget, but just as clearly rambunctious and lively.  I did recognize a few performers, like Will Geer, of course, and also -- at the 50-second mark -- Dana Elcar and Arthur Malet (a longtime character actor who, among many other things, played the banker 'Mr. Dawes, Jr.' in Mary Poppins, the character who rehires Mr. Banks at the end, as everyone sings "Let's Go Fly a Kite), as well as, I think, Joyce Van Patten (who memorably played a killer in an episode of Columbo), along with some others I recognized but couldn't quite place in the few moments on screen, , but this is just a brief trailer, so I look forward to seeing the many others .  

If you want to see the film, which is free, you have to RSVP first, and then they'll email a Zoom link and password.  You can sign up at here.  There will be a Zoom discussion afterward.  

By the way, this is the full schedule of their free Zoom events over the next month.  One is their Evening with Woody Guthrie, who was friends with Will Geer.  And there is an evening of storytelling from performers who've worked at  the Theatricum Botanicum, an evening for young children, and a gala "fundraiser" -- which, again, is free -- full of performers and hosted by Pamela Adlon, creator and star of the series Better Things...and daughter of my friend, the late writer Don Segall, who I wrote about here.  

As I've mentioned here, the National Theatre Live streams a production every Thursday for free, and it runs for a week.  (It was supposed to be just for four plays, and then they extended it for four more.  This is the last one starting today, though they may extend it further, but no word yet.)
 
The new production that begins streaming today for free to run until next Thursday is Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.  I wasn’t absolutely sure I was going to watch – not only am I not dying to see it, one of Shakespeare’s lesser plays, but also it’s three hours long.  But I figured I won’t get many chances to see Corionlanus, and I can always watch over two nights.  And it stars Tom Hiddleston who I like a lot.
 
So I read the synopsis.
 
And I was flabbergasted.  It’s about Trump!! 

(Albeit with more pathos, sympathy and courage...  But at its foundation, Trump nonetheless.)
 
A couple passages from Wikipedia –
 
“The play opens in Rome…. There are riots in progress, after stores of grain were withheld from ordinary citizens. The rioters are particularly angry at Caius Marcius, [Coriolanus] a Roman general whom they blame for the loss of their grain….Marcius is openly contemptuous of the people, and says that the plebeians were not worthy of the grain. 
 
“Faced with this opposition, Coriolanus flies into a rage and rails against the concept of popular rule. He compares allowing plebeians to have power over the patricians to allowing ‘crows to peck the eagles’".
 
There’s a lot more, too.  Including the matter of being a traitor and working for Rome's enemy.
 
Okay, you couldn’t keep me from watching.  Though still perhaps over two nights…

Furthermore, it turns out that this is an acclaimed production, originally done at the Donmar Warehouse in 2014.  A friend of mine who is seriously up on such things not only saw a recent movie of the play that Ralph Fiennes directed and starred in and said it was wonderful (I only saw the trailer, which doesn’t count…but it looked good), but he also wrote me last night, “Hiddleston's performance and this production have entered modern theatrical lore so this will be an extraordinary opportunity.”  

Also in the cast is another actor I like, Mark Gatiss, who viewers here may know best as Sherlock Holmes' brother Mycroft opposite Benedict Cumberbatch.
 
For those interested, this is the online link here.  However, it can be watched on a Smart TV, too, through the YouTube app, which is how I've watched these streaming productions.  And again, it will run for a week starting today, and for free.  (Though they do make a request for a donation.)
 
And this here is a brief synopsis, not anything in full detail, but it should give you a pretty good idea.

​This is the trailer --

The Goodman Theatre in Chicago has started a series they call "Live@5," where they stream conversations on Fridays in the afternoon.  Yesterdays was between their artistic director Robert Falls and Nathan Lane.
 
(Falls, by the way, is pretty acclaimed in his own right.  He’s been the Goodman’s artistic directors for 25 years, and won a Tony Award for directing a revival of Death of a Salesman that starred Brian Dennehy.)

Here's the hour-and-15-minute conversation.  It's fairly entertaining, as they discuss the theater and fill in the spaces with behind-the-scene stories of people they've worked with.  Lane in particular has several amusing tales of working with George C. Scott, who Falls crossed paths with, as well.  There's also a very good, extended clip of a Goodman production of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh that starred Brian Dennehy and Lane.
 
The sound mix is awful for the first 19 minutes, with Falls being quite loud and Lane very soft.  They adjust it, but not enough.  They finally get it -- if not "right" -- much better about 33 minutes in, after working on it during the Iceman Cometh clip.

Also, I'm having difficulty getting this to start from the beginning.  If it doesn't, just grab the scrollbar and drag it all the way to the left.

MEDIA ALERT #1

There is something new from the Broadway’s Best Shows YouTube Channel that they're calling "Spotlight on Plays.".  They’ve gotten casts together to read plays that will be streamed live one time, and one-time only, on Thursdays – and today is the first one.  They stream live in New York at 8 PM and in Los Angeles at 5 PM.  (That time is not ideal on the West Coast, but there are far-worse things “not ideal”  in the world at the moment.  The play today is a notable one -- David Mamet’s political satire November with John Malkovitch, Patti LupPne and Dylan Baker.  The play opened on Broadway in 2007 and is about a fictional U.S. president in the days leading up to his second election.  When the live-stream ends, the show will not be repeated or be available.  
 
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb5QKCN523na2lwqUazKPNA
 
Here’s more about the series which benefits the Actors Fund --

Next up in the series will be Joshua Harmon’s Significant Other on May 14, directed by Trip Cullman and reuniting the play's Broadway original cast of Gideon Glick, John Behlman, Sas Goldberg, Rebecca Naomi Jones, Lindsay Mendez, Luke Smith and Barbara Barrie.
And then A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters, directed by Jerry Zaks, with Bryan Cranston and Sally Field on May 21. The play follows the 50-year correspondence between of two soul mates.

Additional productions will be announced shortly.


MEDIA ALERT #2

And the other Media Alert for today is a reminder that the new National Theatre Live production begins today and will stream for a week.  The play today is It’s Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra with Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo.  This is the online link, though as I said, it can be watched on a Smart TV via the YouTube app or browswer app.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWc6_aCTqI0
 
By the way, so that you can plan ahead, related to this the National Theatre Live productions were only scheduled through today.  But they just announced it will continue with four more, for the time being -- all premiering on a Thursday and streaming for a week..  Not all are Must Sees for me, though they all look interesting –
 

• Barber Shop Chronicles - a never-before-seen archive recording of Inua Ellams’ smash-hit play, about the places where banter is barbed, and the truth is telling.
• A Streetcar Named Desire - Gillian Anderson and Vanessa Kirby play Blanche and Stella in the Young Vic production of Tennessee Williams' American classic.
• This House - James Graham’s timely, biting and funny portrait of British Politics in the 1970s.
• Coriolanus - Tom Hiddleston plays the title role in the Donmar Warehouse's production of Shakespeare’s searing political tragedy

 

I've been mentioning that the wonderful National Theatre Live has been streaming productions from their archives for free every Thursday that will stay active for a week.  

I thought it worth mentioning the new one that is streaming now, as of 2 PM ET.  I've actually written about this in the past.  It's their adaptation of Frankenstein that stars good friends Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller (who like Cumberbatch also played 'Sherlock Holmes' in the CBS series Elementary).  And it's directed by Danny Boyle who directed Slumdog Millionaire, Yesterday, and Trainspotting, among others.  But what stood out most about this production is that every other night Cumberbatch and Miller switched playing the roles of the Doctor and the Creature.

What they will be doing for this streaming is that the version with Cumberbatch as the Creature (and Miller as the Doctor) begins streaming today for a week -- and the version that features Miller as the Creature (and Cumberbatch as the Doctor) will start streaming tomorrow (Friday) for a week, so you can see both, if you're so inclined.

I saw the production with Jonny Lee Miller as the Creature and Cumberbatch as the Doctor.  It's wonderfully done, vibrant and very interesting.  But -- the adaptation takes a few liberties with the original story I didn't care for.

Anyway, here's the link to the NT Live streaming page, where you can find both versions.  Know that while you can watch this online, if you have a Smart TV you can watch the production that way through a YouTube app or via the NT Live YouTube page in a browser.

And this is the trailer for the original production itself.  You'll notice that it edits both actors back-and-forth in the two roles.