Ian McKellen, In Costume For Godot, Mistaken For Actual Bum

ArtsJournal via Daily Mail:

"Recounts the actor, 'During the dress rehearsal of Godot, I crouched by the stage door of the Comedy Theatre [in Melbourne], getting some air, my bowler hat at my feet [and] seeing an unkempt old man down on his luck, a passer-by said, 'Need some help, brother?' and put a dollar in my hat.'"

New Kushner Play at the Public Next Spring

From NYT:

"Tony Kushner’s latest play, “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures,” his first epic-size work about American life since his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Angels in America” in the early 1990s, will have its New York premiere next spring in a co-production by the Public Theater and the Signature Theater Company, the two theaters announced Monday.

The play, which explores politics, marriage, sex, radicalism and the labor movement under the roof of a retired longshoreman’s Brooklyn brownstone, was first produced under a commission from the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis as part of a festival of Kushner plays last year. Michael Greif (“Rent,” “Next to Normal”) directed the Guthrie production, as he will the new one, which will run in the Public’s 299-seat Newman Theater from March 22 to June 12, 2011. The production is expected to cost slightly less than $1 million, with the Public and the Signature, both not-for-profit companies, sharing the cost."

Weird, I never heard this reviewed. I'll have to track one down...

Henry Miller's Theatre Will Become The Stephen Sondheim

From Arts Journal via NYT:

"'At a gala performance on Monday night of the new Broadway musical 'Sondheim on Sondheim,' the director James Lapine and the musical book writer John Weidman were to announce that Henry Miller's Theater, which re-opened on Broadway last fall after a nearly complete overhaul, will be renamed the Stephen Sondheim Theater.'"

What can rightly be called artistic progress.

Backstage With Lena

From ArtsBeat Blog at NYT:

"Lena Horne, who died on Sunday at 92, won a special Tony Award in 1981 for her Broadway revue “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music.”

In the show Ms. Horne sang many famous numbers, including “The Lady Is a Tramp” and “Stormy Weather,” while dressed in costumes designed by Giorgio Sant’Angelo. The production ran for more than a year at the Nederlander Theater before touring the country.

David LeShay, now the director of communications for the Theater Development Fund, a nonprofit organization that runs New York’s three TKTS discount-ticket booths, was a press assistant at the time and was assigned to take photographs of the many celebrities who visited Ms. Horne after the show.

“As a young photographer I was called upon to take the backstage photos whenever celebrities came backstage,” Mr. LeShay wrote in an e-mail message. “It was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done in my career.”

A slide show featuring some of those photographs can be found here."