If you missed “Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn” when it aired on PBS’ “Great Performances” last month, you can find it on the streaming channel BroadwayHD. Before it was on Broadway, the show premiered (with a different cast but the same director) at the Goodspeed Opera House. Another recent “Great Performances” broadcast, of “Indecent” (which premiered at the Yale Rep in 2015) will be on BroadwayHD in January.
Heavens to Murgatroyd!
Jan. 3 is the release date for DC Comics’ new “Snagglepuss” comic book. The 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon character has been recast as a closeted gay playwright in New York during the McCarthy era. An eight-page preview story, “House Fires,” appeared in the Suicide Squad/The Banana Splits crossover comic earlier this year, and it was a doozie, involving the pink lion testifying before the House Un-American Activities hearings, fleeing a fire in a crowded theater and strolling around Washington, D.C., with another Hanna-Barbera veteran, Augie Doggie. The comic’s creator, Mark Russell (who oversaw an equally audacious overhaul of “The Flintstones” for DC) has said that Tennessee Williams was the inspiration for Snagglepuss’ new persona. Snagglepuss has been a gay icon for decades; when Proposition 8 banned gay marriage in California in 2008, “Saturday Night Live”’s “Weekend Update” dressed up Bobby Moynihan in a Snagglepuss suit to deliver the news.
Extensions, Extensions
Six performances have been added to the run of the children’s show “Elephant & Piggie’s ‘We Are in a Play” at Playhouse on Park in West Hartford. Details at 960-523-5900, playhouseonpark.org.
TheaterWorks had to add a couple of performances of “Christmas on the Rocks,” which runs through Dec. 23. They did so by doing two shows instead of one on the nights of Dec. 8 and 22. This is the fifth year TheaterWorks has offered the show, so having to add more performances is a good sign of its continued popularity.
A newer Christmas show that hopes to become an annual tradition, Goodspeed Musicals’ “A Connecticut Christmas Carol,” will be at the Norma Terris Theater in Chester for a week longer than originally planned. The show now runs through Dec. 30. Just as with “A Christmas Carol” at Hartford Stage, the Scrooge in “A Connecticut Christmas Carol” will still be spooked by spirits long after Christmas Eve.
Lamarre Behind The Bar
The bartender in “Christmas on the Rocks” at TheaterWorks, Tom Bloom, is unable to do the Tuesday, Dec. 12 performance. Rather than cancel the show, Director Rob Ruggiero has turned it into a special event. Playwright and Hartford celebrity Jacques Lamarre, who has written two of the one-acts that comprise the show, will play the bartender for that one night. The bartender character is the only one onstage for the whole show, pouring drinks for depressed middle-aged Christmas icons such as Clara from “The Nutcracker” and Tiny Tim from “A Christmas Carol.”
‘In The Heights’ For Disaster Relief
The original cast recording of “In the Heights” will get a limited edition vinyl LP release, specially remastered, in honor of the landmark musical’s 10th anniversary. “In the Heights” was the musical Miranda was working on when he was a student at Wesleyan, and which was later workshopped at the O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford.
Bridgeport’s Downtown Cabaret Theatre is performing a one-night concert version of “In the Heights” on Dec.16 as a benefit for Puerto Rican disaster relief. The theater performed a full production of the show last year, and has reunited that cast for the benefit show. Tickets to the show quickly sold out. All proceeds from the concert are going to the Hispanic Federation’s UNIDOS Hurricane Relief Fund, the same charity for which Miranda raised millions through his all-star benefit recording “Almost Like Praying.”
Miranda performed a delirious three-minute distillation of “Hamilton” on Ellen DeGeneres’ daytime talk show Dec. 5.
Social media went wild when it was revealed, in a Dec. 3 tweet that simply said “Oh hell yeah” in response to the question “is v..?”, that Lin-Manuel Miranda and his wife Vanessa Nada are expecting their second child. Miranda’s 3-year-old son Sebastian was taken to see the first act of “Hamilton” on Broadway in November, fodder for a much lengthier Miranda tweet.
“Hamilton” opened in London on Dec. 6. The opening had been postponed two weeks due to technical issues at the Victoria Palace theater.
Where Are They Now?
The new musical “Miss You Like Hell,” about an undocumented immigrant and her daughter, has a book by Quiara Alegría Hudes (“In the Heights,” “Water by the Spoonful”) and will be directed by Trip Cullman, at New York’s Public Theater in March.
Remember Fiasco Theatre’s delirious doorjamb version of Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” at the Long Wharf in 2015? The troupe’s got a new “Twelfth Night” running at the Classic Stage Company in New York through Jan. 6. Most of the key players in “Twelfth Night” will be familiar from the Long Wharf.
Julia Sirna-Frest, fresh from the dark drama “Seder” at Hartford Stage, will star in Kate Benson’s new play “[Porto]” at New York’s WP Theater in 2018. “[Porto]”’s an “upside down romantic comedy” about a woman who meets a stranger in a bar. It begins performances Jan. 28.
Evan Yionoulis is directing the new play by Adrienne Kennedy, “He Bought Her Heat Back in a Box,” at New York’s Theatre for a New Audience in January. Yionoulis is a “professor in the practice of acting and directing” at the Yale School of Drama. She’s also a resident director at the Yale Repertory Theatre, where she’ll be staging the Guillermo Calderón drama “Kiss” in April. Adrienne Kennedy, best known for her 1964 one-act “Funnyhouse of a Negro,” adapted Sophocles’ “Oedipus the King” for Hartford Stage in 2001 and
Lindsay Ferrentino’s “Amy and the Orphans,” seen in New Haven last year as part of Yale’s Carlotta Festival of New Plays, will be at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Laura Pels Theatre space in New York in February. The cast includes Mark Blum, who was in “Meteor Shower” at the Long Wharf last season. Another Lindsay Ferrentino play, “This Flat Earth,” will be at Playwrights Horizons in March, directed by Rebecca Taichman (“Indecent” at Yale Rep and on Broadway).
