Stage Whisperer: Ariana DeBose’s Tonys Hat Trick

This week in theater news: Ariana will host the Tonys, Lempicka is giving Repo! The Generic Opera, and Bronies are an untapped Broadway audience.

This post is the latest edition of Vulture’s Stage Whisperer newsletter, recapping weekly theater news from Broadway, Off Broadway, and Off–Off Broadway. Subscribe below to get it delivered directly to your inbox. 

Hello Whisperites,

This week brought us the news that Ariana DeBose will once again host the Tony Awards on June 16, her third time doing the thing. Intriguingly, CBS and the American Theatre Wing, which produces the event with the Broadway League, announced that DeBose will also be producing the event and choreographing the opening number. Remember, this time around, with the WGA strike resolved, she can talk! What will she say?! We can’t wait.

On Monday night, I got a brief glimpse at another big mysterious event coming toward us in June: the ballroom-inspired revival of Cats, directed by Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch. At an event for the new Perelman Arts Center’s upcoming season, the show’s musical director, William Waldrop, previewed a bit of the revised score, which now comes with club beats — a friend joked I should try to leak and sell a recording to 3 Dollar Bill — and choreography that blends the style of the original musical (by Gillian Lynne) with the vocabulary of ballroom, as one of the show’s choreographers, Arturo Lyons, explained. Then they had their Munkustrap, Dudney Joseph Jr., emerge from the audience and perform “The Naming of the Cats” as if he were the MC for a ball (I guess, specifically, the Jellicle Ball). All in all, the whole concept’s just wild enough to possibly work. —Jackson McHenry

Visit our theater calendar for a complete list of shows.

Box Office Banter

This week’s grosses are out. Critics Jackson McHenry and Sara Holdren, editor Zach Schiffman, and writer Rebecca Alter discuss.

Jackson McHenry: Lempicka! She’s here — and averaging $65 bucks a ticket but 96 percent capacity.

Zach Schiffman: On the other side of Rachel Chavkin Boulevard, seems like there wasn’t a dip in attendance without Lola Tung.

Jackson: I love the existence of Chavkin Way. Yeah, the average ticket price is down but still over a million at Hadestown. And now they have the father-daughter Briones act, which is fun. I’m also very curious to see what shakes out with The Notebook (not-so-positive reviews, to put it lightly) and Water for Elephants (generally kinder reviews, somehow a Timescritic’s pick) in the great book-but-also-movie-to-musical-adaptation spring onslaught. And The Outsiders is still yet to have press previews!

Rebecca Alter: I misread that as father-daughter Bronies act — different thing entirely.

Jackson: The Bronies are an untapped potential Broadway audience. Maybe they would like the aerialist horse performance in Water for Elephants.

Rebecca: “Aerialist horse” is just another way of saying Pegasus! There’s lots of lesbian excitement over Lempicka, I will say. I already have a group outing on the books for April with at least one friend who’s never expressed interest in going to Broadway. The “Woman Is” video really sold it … she is so over the top. Reminds me of the song in “Icelandic Ultra Blue.”

Jackson: Also gotta respect the villain(?) song about futurism. Sometimes I just mutter “This is the age of the machine” to myself.

Sara Holdren: I’m also getting big Repo! The Genetic Opera vibes.

Featured Review

In making their way through the plays of Brian Friel this season, the Irish Rep has been going backward. Their first two productions, Translations (1980) and Aristocrats (1979), revisited the start of a high tide in Friel’s writing, a wave that would carry him through to the Tony- and Olivier-winning Dancing at Lughnasa in 1990. With the five indelible sisters at its center and its elegant interweaving of Friel’s deep preoccupations — memory; loss of home and innocence; Ireland’s inextricable knot of relationships with its own history, obsolescence, and progress — Lughnasa is a perennial favorite for revival. It’s getting a reading at the theater this coming week, but on the main stage is a much less frequently seen show from 1964: Philadelphia, Here I Come!, which launched the playwright’s career when he was 35. The play — about a young man’s imminent move to the United States — was also Friel’s first outing on Broadway, where (shocker) the critics were divided. Walter Kerr called it a “warming fire” — “funny,” “prickly,” and “most affecting.” Stanley Kauffman found it naïve, a play of “considerable pleasantness, little poetry and insufficient power.”

➽ Read Sara Holdren’s full review: Becoming Brian Friel: Philadelphia, Here I Come!

Whispers of the Week

“Guess who walked by.”

“I talked to him for an hour last night. He’s not exciting anymore … Should we leave? Is that rude?”

— Two gay guys at a sneak preview of an upcoming Broadway musical

“You keep drinking, we’ll write the checks.”

— American Theatre Wing CEO Heather Hitchens at a reception after a celebration concert for winners of Jonathan Larson Grants, given to emerging musical-theater writers