R. Scott Reedy - Page 6

History is being made on Broadway this season, with seven performers of Filipino descent simultaneously bringing luster to the stage and ticket buyers to the box office.

Kathy St. George – who will receive the Elliot Norton Prize for Sustained Excellence from the Boston Theater Critics Association at the 42nd annual Elliot Norton Awards on June 2 at the Huntington Theatre – is that rare breed, a show business quadruple threat.

Classic American theater composers like Leonard Bernstein, John Kander, and Stephen Sondheim have been good to Aimee Doherty – giving her a wide range of characters to play and songs to sing. She has returned the favor by giving standout performances in their musicals that have made her one of the leading lights on greater Boston’s stages.

When it comes to “Star Trek,” George Takei has been there from the beginning, when the now iconic “Theme from Star Trek,” by composer Alexander Courage, first invited television viewers to go “where no man has gone before.”

The 1962 feature film “Light in the Piazza” was shot on location at the Piazza della Signoria and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and the Via Veneto and Roma Ostiense railway station in Rome, making its technicolor splendor a hard act to follow when the story, based on a 1960 novella by Elizabeth Spencer, was developed for the stage in 2003.

And if you’re too busy to take your pencils back to school, and maybe not the biggest stickler for accuracy, then you may want to head to Stoneham for “Founding F%!#ers: The Story of Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold,” a play by Conor Casey being given its world premiere at Greater Boston Stage Company through May 18.

Conductor Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops set the mood for the recent Opening Night at Pops, featuring the luminous Cynthia Erivo, with a rhythmic “The Club” from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights” and the rousing “Gotta Dance” medley from “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway.”

And when it comes to the humble Harlem hair salon in Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, now in its New England premiere at SpeakEasy Stage in the Roberts Studio Theatre, Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA, through May 31, make that something to marvel at.

The musical “The Spitfire Grill” – with book and music by James Valcq and lyrics by the late Fred Alley, who also co-wrote the book – perfectly captures the small-town ethos of its rural Gilead, Wisconsin, setting.

In the summer of 1975, moviegoers flocked to theaters to see “Jaws,” the story of the hunt for a man-eating great white shark attacking beachgoers at a summer vacation spot, making the picture the first summer blockbuster.

The Boston Pops will once again turn to the music and stars of Broadway when the orchestra opens its 139th spring season at  Symphony Hall on May 8 with Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award-winner Cynthia Erivo (“The Color Purple”) as special guest.

Stage star Carolee Carmello has played a wide range of roles in her career – from “Cordelia, the kosher caterer,” in the original Broadway production of “Falsettos,” Lucille Frank in the Broadway premiere of “Parade,” Donna Sheridan in “Mamma Mia!” Dolly Gallagher Levi in “Hello, Dolly!” now she's starring in the national tour of Kimblerly Akimbo. Read our interview!

Few cultural icons have held the public’s attention for as long as the one and only Betty Boop. And now, the wide-eyed vixen has branched out from animated films and television to live-action Broadway in BOOP! The Musical.

And the Plastics of North Shore High School – the self-obsessed, their-way-or-the-highway trio of “mean girls” at the center of the eponymous hit 2004 feature-film comedy, the 2018 Broadway musical it inspired, and the 2024 feature film based on the musical  – have done just that, becoming an enduring part of pop culture.

Kristine Nielsen has made her name on Broadway playing roles in all kinds of comedies and dramas, but only a very few musicals. She’s changing that up this season, however, portraying Susan Proctor, an Actors’ Studio teacher and confidante to Ivy Lynn, a Broadway star preparing to play Marilyn Monroe, in the new musical comedy “Smash,” at New York’s Imperial Theatre.

Over 50 years since its original Broadway production had its out-of-town tryout at Boston’s Shubert Theatre, the Stephen Sondheim musical Company, with book by George Furth, has had three revivals.