Category — Awards

The Tony winner fights death in “The Lyons”

Sometimes, an actor has to play a character more than once before he’s happy with his performance.

Just ask Dick Latessa (pictured above left), whose forty years of theatre experience include Cabaret, The Will Rogers Follies, and a Tony Award-winning turn as Wilbur Turnblad in Hairspray.

Currently, Latessa’s on Broadway in The Lyons, Nicky Silver’s dark comedy about a family that’s trying to make peace before Ben Lyons, the patriarch, dies. And sure, there are tender moments, but they always devolve into shouting matches about drinking problems, ancient grudges, and the romantic potential of a cancer patient down the hall.

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How sets and costumes survive the Broadway farce

Whether it’s Venice in 1743 or the British seaside in 1963 or Broadway in 2012, you’ve got to have doors. Two of them. And not just any doors, at least when you’re staging a farce.

“They need to be on opposite sides of the stage, and they need to slam both ways offstage as well as onstage. And they have to withstand any number of bodies caroming into them.”

That was the first of many tasks faced by Mark Thompson, who designed the sets and costumes for one of London’s more unlikely recent hits: One Man, Two Guvnors, Richard Bean’s chaotic revamp of Carlo Goldoni’s commedia dell’arte staple The Servant of Two Masters. The Evening Standard Award-winning adaptation made its way from the National Theatre to the West End, and now it’s on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre.

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The actor becomes Perón in Broadway’s “Evita”

Welcome to Building Character, TDF’s ongoing series about actors and how they create their roles

Michael Cerveris has recently starred in dark, brooding shows like Sondheim’s Sweeney Toddand the Kurt Weill bio-musical LoveMusik, but at the moment, he’s embracing grandeur and passion for the Broadway revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Evita.

According to Cerveris, playing Perón, the Argentine leader and husband to Evita, is not as much of a stretch as it may seem. “I think what people tend to think of with Andrew Lloyd Webber is big, romantic melodies and pop sensibilities, but Perón is the one character in this who sings not quite atonal, but very angular, quasi-opera sort of [music],” he says. “Of all the characters in the show, I think my vocal parts are probably closer to Sondheim than anything else. I feel like my experience with singing and learning how to sing Steve’s work has prepared me really well for some of the stranger writing that Andrew’s given to Perón.”

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Jeff Bowen’s overnight edits for “Now. Here. This.”

During dress rehearsals and preview performances, a new musical constantly adds, deletes, and changes songs. This can be stressfully exhilarating for the composer, who has to crank out fresh material, and for actors, who have to learn it on the spot.

But when you’re the composer and the actor, you face twice the intensity. Just ask Jeff Bowen (above, second from left), the composer and co-star of Now. Here. This. at the Vineyard Theatre. The show began previews on March 7, and before its official opening on March 24, he says it “may be totally different every night.”

On March 6, one day before audiences arrived, Bowen decided he needed a new song for the moment his character realizes he’s afraid of being himself. “There was a song that had a different temperature,” he recalls. “We needed a song that said the same thing, but at a different temperature.”

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Theatre Development Fund’s offices were buzzing with gratitude yesterday as the Tony Award’s Administration Committee announced that TDF’s Open Doors program will be among those honored with a special 2012 Tony Honor for Excellence in the Theatre.

The Tony Honor for Excellence, which is awarded to groups that are not eligible in any of the established Tony Award categories, is a welcome celebration of a program that was piloted in 1998 with the late, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein.

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