Wake Up With BroadwayWorld May 10, 2024

Rise and shine, BroadwayWorld! It is May 10, 2024 and it's time to catch up on all of the theatrical happenings you may have missed in the last 24 hours: 

Vote for the Best of Broadway in the Theater Fans' Choice Awards
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Photos: Original Majestic Theater Signage Is Back
by Jennifer Broski
When the phantom took over 44th Street, some changes were made to the theatre's facade, including iconic black bricks surrounding its entrance and an all-black paint job for  the marquee. Now the marquee has been restored to its former color and you can check out photos here.. (more...) 

Photos: Inside Opening Night of SPIRITED AWAY at the London Coliseum
by Stephi Wild
Following a sell-out tour of Japan in 2022, the original Japanese cast will perform this spectacular production for a strictly limited London season. Check out photos from opening night at the London Coliseum here!. (more...)

Ramin Karimloo and Anoushka Lucas Will Lead the World Premiere of A FACE IN THE CROWD With Songs By Elvis Costello
by Stephi Wild
Ramin Karimloo and Anoushka Lucas will lead the world premiere of A Face in the Crowd, directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah in his final production as Young Vic Artistic Director, designed by Anna Fleischle.. (more...) 

Review Roundup: What Did the Critics Make of John Caird's Adaptation of SPIRITED AWAY?
by Aliya Al-Hassan
Studio Ghibli’s Oscar-winning Spirited Away, created by legendary animator and director Hayao Miyazaki is re-imagined for the stage by Olivier and Tony award-winning director of Les Misérables, John Caird. The original Japanese cast perform this extraordinary production with wildly imaginative puppets, dazzling set and costume designs and a live orchestra playing the magnificent original film score by Joe Hisaishi.. (more...) 

Video: Do You Know the Answer to Last Night's Theater-themed Final Jeopardy?
by Josh Sharpe
Last night's final Jeopardy! was 'The Theater.' Recently, Jeopardy has featured a 'World Theatre' category, a 'Songs In Musicals' category, Idina Menzel category, a Tony-Winning Musicals category, a 'Broadway is Back' category, a Broadway Musicals category, a Shakespeare's Women category, and a Stephen Sondheim category. Watch the video and test your knowledge!. (more...) 

Suzan-Lori Parks

Suzan-Lori Parks is a multi-award-winning American writer/musician and the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Topdog/Underdog which recently enjoyed its twentieth anniversary Broadway revival. The production won both the 2023 Tony Award, (Best Revival Of A Play) and the Outer Critics Circle Award. Just last year, in 2023, Parks also had three new works which all received world premieres: at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Sally & Tom (Steinberg New Play Award finalist) at Joe’s Pub in New York City, Plays for the Plague Year (winner of The Drama Desk Award for Best Music in a Play), and, at the Public Theatre, Parks world-premiered a musical adaptation of the 1972 film The Harder They Come (winner: Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Musical.). Her play Sally & Tom is currently playing at The Public Theater.

Parks’ other notable works for theatre include: The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess (Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical), Unchain My Heart: The Ray Charles Musical, White Noise, The Book of Grace, In the Blood, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, The America Play, Father Comes Home From The Wars Parts 1,2,&3 and f-ing A.  Parks’ marathon writing “diary play” 365 Days/365 Plays— her first project in which she wrote a play a day for an entire year—was produced at more than seven hundred theaters worldwide, creating one of the largest grassroots collaborations in theater history.

A MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, Parks’ novel Getting Mother’s Body is published by Random House. She also writes extensively for the screen — most recently, as the scriptwriter for the film The United States vs. Billie Holiday and as the showrunner/executive producer/head writer for the television show Genius: Aretha.

 In 2023 Parks was named among “TIME MAGAZINE’S 100.” Other notable accolades and awards include the prestigious Gish Prize for Excellence in the Arts, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is also a recipient of a Lila-Wallace—Reader’s Digest Award, a CalArts/Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.

 In November 2022, Parks was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. She is Writer in Residence of the Public Theater, a professor at New York University, and an alumna of New Dramatists and of Mount Holyoke College where she studied creative writing with James Baldwin, who encouraged Parks to begin writing for the theatre.  In her spare time, Parks also writes songs and fronts her band Sula and The Joyful Noise.

Other birthdays on this day include:

Bono
Caroline Bowman
Katori Hall

See you bright and early tomorrow, BroadwayWorld!