Neil Patrick Harris News

Chris Isaacson Presents and Upright Cabaret proudly present Broadway diva Lillias White: The Night After The Tonys, as she belts out the best of Broadway and Jazz, at the Catalina Jazz Club in Hollywood, for one performance only, on Monday, June 11. Showtime is 8pm, with cocktail and dinner service beginning at 6:30pm. (more...)

Chris Isaacson has announced that Upright Cabaret’s AMERICAN ICON Series ends another stunning season with VIVA LAS VEGAS - a presentation of personality and pop that honors the flashiest performers of all time: Elvis, Cher and Elton John. Joining the group of all-star performers will be Patrick Cassidy. (more...)

The 2012 Tony Awards are drawing near! In just two weeks, the best of Broadway will gather with host Neil Patrick Harris at the Beacon Theatre for a three-hour ceremony, which will be broadcast on CBS television network on Sunday, June 10, 2012. (more...)

Today the 2012 Tony Awards Clip Countdown continues with a look at the 2008 Best Musical winner, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s IN THE HEIGHTS. Possessing a contemporary and classification-defying sound and style all its own, IN THE HEIGHTS is one of the most important modern musicals if only for the reason that it cemented the place of rap on Broadway and exhibited that hip-hop could be used to excellent effect in creating character, setting a tone, creating a mood and conveying the story over the course of a musical. Based in part on Miranda’s own life growing up in New York, IN THE HEIGHTS is responsible for bringing one of the most vital sounds in modern music to the Broadway stage and, also, for solidifying the place of a Broadway baby born and bred as a Tony Award-winning superstar leading man - Lin-Manuel Miranda. (more...)

Oprah Winfrey's primetime series "Oprah's Next Chapter" features an all-new interview with Newark New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker this Sunday, May 27 (9-10 p.m. ET/PT) on OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network. Neil Patrick Harris is set to appear June 3. (more...)

Nationally-syndicated morning show "LIVE! with Kelly" announces the lineup of guest co-hosts who will join Kelly Ripa during the week of June 4 - 8, 2012, including Bryant Gumbel, Neil Patrick Harris and Andy Samberg. (more...)

CBS is giving back to its millions of loyal fans who have, once again, made CBS America's most-watched network, by launching a first-of-its-kind campaign to reward viewers throughout the summer. (more...)

Today we continue the 2012 Tony Awards Clip Countdown - culminating in the final entry on June 10, aka Tony Sunday - with a focus on two tremendous theatrical talents who have crossed over from Broadway fame to international acclaim on Fox’s hit musical dramedy series GLEE, which ends its third season tonight: HAIRSPRAY’s Matthew Morrison and SPRING AWAKENING’s Lea Michele. (more...)

Upright Cabaret’s AMERICAN ICON Series ends another season with VIVA LAS VEGAS - a presentation of personality and pop that honors the flashiest performers of all time: ELVIS, CHER & ELTON JOHN. (more...)

TEEN CHOICE 2012 will once again celebrate the hottest teen icons in television, music, film, sports, fashion, comedy and the web in the choicest, star-studded two-hour event airing live Sunday, July 22 (8:00-10:00 PM ET live/PT tape-delayed) on FOX. Among the nominees are GLEE star Lea Michele and 'How I Met Your Mother's Neil Patrick Harris. (more...)

RENT owned the 90s. No other Broadway show managed to have the dual impact on society by becoming not only a pop culture phenomenon, but also changing perceptions of what a musical on Broadway could be - and, most importantly, how it could sound. Contemporary, cool, caustic and engaging, RENT updated LA BOHEME to the East Village just as Jonathan Larson updated the way the general public looked at Broadway at a time when musicals had fallen farther out of fashion than they had since their early years approaching the turn of the last century. Yet, at the end of the millennium - to quote one of the show’s lyrics - RENT represented the hopes, dreams and desires of many Broadway babies and what we hoped would be achieved on the Great White Way in the new century. While SPRING AWAKENING, AMERICAN IDIOT and NEXT TO NORMAL certainly stand as solid continuations of the rock musical formula recalibrated and made anew in the mold made by RENT, no show since RENT has quite managed to have the cultural impact and win over audiences and critics alike in as major a way as that Tony Award-winning and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical has - with the exception, perhaps, of WICKED, which obviously owes a debt to its Oz-ian source inspiration and the built-in audience that comes along with that. Yes, indeed, RENT represents an entire generation in its sound, style, ideals and overall feeling, mood and tone and the subsequent success of the many members of the simply astounding assortment of talents that comprised the original cast acts as evidence that the show may have had the cast of the decade, as well. (more...)

The Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza Foundation and Chris Isaacson Presents concludes their smash season in Upright Cabaret’s American Icon Series with VIVA LAS VEGAS on Friday, June 15, 2012 at 8:00pm at the new Cabaret Lounge in the Scherr Forum Theatre. (more...)

Adult Swim, basic cable's #1 network with young adults for seven consecutive years, sets out to "control" the night by announcing a slate of new and returning programming at its annual Upfront presentation in New York City. (more...)

Today we continue BroadwayWorld’s extensive look at highlights from the sixty-plus years of the Tony Awards as we anticipate this year’s ceremony on June 10 on CBS with the absolutely riveting final moment of last year’s telecast, featuring peerless host Neil Patrick Harris performing a verbally dexterous and dizzying - and damn good - wrap-up/rap-up penned by Tony-winning IN THE HEIGHTS composer/lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda and director Tommy Kail. (more...)

Neil Patrick Harris will return as the host of the 66th Annual Tony Awards Telecast, which will be broadcast live from the Beacon Theatre in New York City, Sunday, June 10, 2012 (8:00-11:00 PM, live ET/delayed PT) on the CBS Television Network. The awards show, which honors theater professionals for distinguished achievement on Broadway, has been a part of the CBS family since 1978. This will be the second year that the show will be broadcast live from the Beacon Theatre. (more...)

OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network presents all new episodes of OPRAH'S NEXT CHAPTER this summer beginning Sunday, May 20 (9-10 p.m. ET/PT) when Winfrey travels to Nashville, Tennessee for an intimate in-depth interview with country music superstar Carrie Underwood and her husband NHL player Mike Fisher fortheir first ever television interview together. (more...)

Variety reports that Sony Pictures Animation and Columbia Pictures have already begun work on a third installment of the SMURFS movie franchise. The first film saw a worldwide gross of over $563 million. (more...)

CBS announced today the dates and storylines for its 2011-12 series’ season finales. (All times are ET/PT.) (more...)

“It’s always gorgeous when you sing,” and so the same goes for NBC’s musical drama series SMASH. This week’s penultimate episode of the first season order of fifteen gave us a long-awaited real look at the actual production of the musical-within-the-show live onstage in the form of the first Boston preview in the out-of-town tryout of BOMBSHELL. Up until this point, we have only been provided with sporadic glimpses into the mind’s eye of the director of the show as he stages and rehearses the various song sequences. With last night’s “Previews” episode we got our third major iteration of “Let Me Be Your Star” - following the full-out song at the conclusion of the pilot episode and the subsequent ballad opening number version shown in Episode 2 - with Rebecca Duvall (guest star Uma Thurman) belting it out to mixed results. Mixed results is the kindest way to say that the volatile and kooky movie star character simply does not work in any way as Marilyn Monroe in the bio-musical about her life being created - not physically, tonally and certainly not musically. Croaking out the sumptuous and richly melodic Marc Shaiman/Scott Wittman gems that have been specifically created for SMASH‘s BOMBSHELL - songs dutifully doled out in sparingly small doses of one or two each week - is near-sacrilege when one ponders the talent even on the very same stage; Ivy (Megan Hilty) or Karen (Katharine McPhee) could both kill the role, as wee have seen. So, who will ultimately make it to the stage that now, in the eleventh hour, the star of the show has walked? Of course, the sure-to-be action, drama and music-filled finale to Season One arrives next Monday at the same SMASH place and same SMASH channel - will the Marilyn musical be a bomb or a smash? Will the show even go on at all given the unforeseen obstacles? A lot remains to be answered, but the fever pitch fans and viewers have been yearning for has definitely entered, stage right. Next week we will see who truly sparkles, who really shines - and who ends up exploding. (more...)

This Tuesday marked the second most exciting day of any given year for Broadway babies - the Tony Award nominations. The actual awards ceremony on CBS - Broadway’s night of nights - is still a few weeks off, but now is certainly an ideal time to size up the competition(s) and see who will most likely walk away with Tony gold come June 10 - and this year‘s ceremony, more than most before, could very well be as surprising as this season was; or Tuesday’s nominations themselves were, for that matter. While the 2011-2012 Broadway season certainly fell far short of the heady promise many ascribed to its prospects way back last Summer, we certainly saw the fulfillment of some big dreams for some notable names if not an all-in-all banner year for Broadway when collectively considered. The highly-praised Off-Broadway critical darling LYSISTRATA JONES landed with a thud early in the season, as did the re-jiggered, gender-bending revival of ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER and its star Harry Connick, Jr., and, even the lauded and relatively successful revival of Stephen Sondheim’s peerless masterpiece FOLLIES failed to make any money and closed. GODSPELL did not fare much better, though it is still running. The two highly-anticipated revivals of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s classic early successes JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR and EVITA were met with indifferent reviews - with the latter receiving some nasty press for its stars, neither of whom received Tony nominations - but receptive audiences so far. THE GERSHWINS’ PORGY & BESS could take Best Revival, after all - but will NICE WORK’s Kelli O’Hara edge out four-time Tony recipient Audra McDonald? New plays did not fare much better than the measly crop of musicals, but OTHER DESERT CITIES and VENUS IN FUR seemed to hit their target demographics squarely, but CLYBOURNE PARK looks to be the frontrunner for Best Play despite all that. We shall see. Mike Nichols may take home another Best Director for his sensitive, if workmanlike revival of Arthur Miller’s DEATH OF A SALESMAN, as conceivably could Philip Seymour Hoffman and Andrew Garfield. John Lithgow is offering up some fierce competition in THE COLUMNIST, though. The acting races are tight, for sure, in both plays and musicals, with more newcomers and first-time nominees than any season this century. (more...)