Two months after accusing the Tony-winning Broadway show of copying “the heart and soul” of their book “Making Rumours” about the iconic band, Caillat and co-author Steven Stiefel have filed to adjourn the initial conference ahead of Thursday’s scheduled date.

“The parties have resolved the dispute in principle as to all claims and defendants, and are working to commit their agreement to writing,” the pair wrote in Tuesday’s filing, which was obtained by TheWrap. They also noted they plan to ultimately finalize their resolution ahead of their proposed rescheduled conference date of Dec. 23 as they are all in mutual consent.

The initial lawsuit accused Adjmi of “uncannily” duplicating events from their 2012 book about the 1977 album “Rumours” for his play, including famed fights and break-ups. “Stereophonic” does indeed feature two couples and five members, both British and American.

“Mr. Adjmi implicitly acknowledges having read ‘Making Rumours,’ calling it an ‘excellent book,’ but incredulously proclaims that ‘[a]ny similarities to Ken Caillat’s excellent book are unintentional,'” Caillat’s suit claimed.

“Stereophonic” won five Tonys in June: Best Play, Best Direction of a Play, Best Featured Actor in a Play for Will Brill, Best Sound Design of a Play and Best Scenic Design of a Play.

It is currently playing at the John Golden Theatre in New York City.

Pamela Chelin contributed to this reporting.

The post Fleetwood Mac Producer, ‘Stereophonic’ Playwright Reach Copyright Lawsuit Resolution appeared first on TheWrap.

Arnold died Sunday, according to the Edmonton Journal. No cause was given. He was playing the role of Fezziwig, the high-spirited apprentice of Ebenezer Scrooge, when he was stricken onstage.

Paramedics rushed to the theater and attempted to resuscitate Arnold, but he died at the scene.

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“It is with heavy hearts we share the news of the sudden passing of Julien Arnold, a beloved actor and dear friend of the Citadel Theatre,” the company posted on Instagram. “A cherished member of the Edmonton theatre community, Julien was a gifted performer whose charisma and talent graced our stage in countless productions, including ‘A Christmas Carol.'”

The company said Arnold “brought joy, heart and depth to every role, and his artistic contributions – and big hugs – will be deeply missed.”

Citadel said it was dedicating the remaining run of “A Christmas Carol” to his memory.

The post Canadian Stage Actor Dies During ‘A Christmas Carol’ Performance in Edmonton appeared first on TheWrap.

The bald and blue silent performers did more than 17,000 performances over three decades in New York. No reason was given for the closings. The troupe is a subsidiary of Cirque du Soleil.

Despite the big city closings, companies will continue performing Blue Man Group shows in Berlin, Boston and Las Vegas. There is also a plan for an Orlando show, which closed during the pandemic and now will reopen in the spring. There have also been touring productions.

Jack Kenn, the company’s managing director, announced the New York closing as Off-Broadway has struggled since the pandemic, with fewer shows and smaller casts.

The Blue Man Group performance artists first formed in 1987. Combining music and art, the Blue Men performers are mute and always appear in threes. They rose from disruptive street performance to clubs, then began performing at New York’s Astor Place in 1991. The troupe has toured internationally, appeared on TV programs, released multiple studio albums and contributed to film scores and performed with live orchestras.

The post Blue Man Group to End Its Runs in New York, Chicago appeared first on TheWrap.

These immediate survivors have gathered to observe their mother’s death and finish a quilt that she designed. The mother and her ancestors created over a hundred of these quilts that are works of art charting the family’s history since a slave ship brought them to the United States. A granddaughter, Zambia (Mirirai), also works on the new quilt, and because she had met her grandmother only a few times, this young character is the vehicle in the play that asks questions. Through Zambia’s inquiries, we learn that each of the four adult women has a different father. We learn that opinions of their mother run the gamut: Clementine (Crystal Dickinson) was her mother’s caretaker and is now the keeper of the flame, as well as all the quilts that decorate the stage in Adam Rigg’s breathtaking recreation of a cabin on an island off the coast of Georgia.

Most colorful of the four sisters is Gio (Adrienne C. Moore), a cussing, beer-guzzling and marijuana-smoking cop who hates her mother. Last to arrive on the scene is Gio’s polar opposite, the youngest sister, Amber (Lauren E. Banks), who is a Hollywood entertainment lawyer who wears designer clothes (costumes by Montana Levi Bianco). Meanwhile, Zambia’s mother recedes into the background for much of Act 1. She is Cassan (Susan Kelechi Watson), a nurse who hasn’t taken off her scrubs. One of Zambia’s many questions is how all the women got their respective name. Only Cassan doesn’t know, which is maybe a question Zambia might have asked a year or two ago since Cassan is her mother.

On the page, these female characters could not be more different. On stage in the vivid performances delivered under Lileana Blain-Cruz’s very showy direction, they sometimes border on caricatures from vastly different melodramas. When one of them makes a major pronouncement, and there are a flood of them, Blain-Cruz lets go with storm effects (lighting by Jiyoun Chang, sound by Palmer Hefferan) in case anyone is dozing off.

Hall has clearly studied ”The Piano Lesson.” In the August Wilson play, it’s the piano. In “The Blood Quilt,” it’s the quilt. Amber wants to sell them for big bucks, Clementine wants to keep them. The other characters emphasize this power play by having a wide range of opinions on the topic. As with the Wilson classic, Hall ends her play with a big supernatural surprise. What this playwright hasn’t been able to duplicate is Wilson’s poetry.

But back to Mom. In Act 2, Gio finally reveals why she hates her mother, something only Clementine knows, and Cassan makes a big discovery about her long-lost father when the mother’s will is read by Amber. Nothing gives a play needed focus like the reading of a will, but it’s here, with disclosure of some old letters, that Hall borrows not from Wilson but Nicholas Sparks and his sudsy novel “The Notebook.” Gio’s confession and Cassan’s discovery are so damning of the mother that Hall gives Clementine a speech that turns this woman into a miracle-working midwife. It’s meant to give the unseen character some semblance of humanity. Instead, it turns the dead person into nothing more than a writer’s conceit.

The post ‘The Blood Quilt’ Off Broadway Review: 4 Sisters Gather to Finish Their Mother’s Work appeared first on TheWrap.

When something is great, it works because the material fits the chosen medium perfectly. Wrench it from that platform, and failure is sure to follow. Second- or third-rate material in one medium, however, can be improved by transferring it to another. Case in point is the new musical “Death Becomes Her,” which opened Thursday at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. 

The premise of a youth potion that promises eternal life, if you don’t mind being dead, is a clever play on the vampire legend. David Koepp and Martin Donovan’s original screenplay has narrative drive, but director Robert Zemeckis dipped into his usual bag of CG and green-screen special effects to squeeze almost every drop of comedy from this dark fantasy. When Meryl Streep’s head is spun around or Goldie Hawn gets a big hole blown into her abdomen, it’s all too gruesome and real to be much fun.

Directing the new musical, Christopher Gattelli gleefully embraces the material’s inherent tackiness. It helps that Derek McLane’s sets manage to be both grand and deliciously godawful. More important is the absurdity of the Grand Guignol special effects: When Megan Hilty’s Madeline Ashton (the Streep character) takes a shot-gun to her despised best friend, no attempt is made to make Jennifer Simard’s Helen Sharp (the Hawn character) look like anything but an H&M mannequin being thrown across the stage. When Helen pushes Madeline down the stairs, it’s obvious that a stunt double has taken over for Hilty in what has to be the best use of a grand staircase since Jerry Herman wrote “Hello, Dolly!”

Speaking of the Pleistocene, back then Ethel Merman and Mary Martin performed together in a one-night benefit on Broadway. Walter Kerr in the New York Times wrote a rave to say that Merman was the fire to Martin’s smoke. In “Death Becomes Her,” Hilty is the rear-end to Simard’s poo-poo cushion. Marco Pennette’s book gives Hilty all the grand-dame one-liners, but it’s Simard who gets the more unexpected laughs with delightful line readings that take a second or two to register. The sharp dialogue is in perfect tune with Julia Mattison and Noel Carey’s lyrics, and that duo’s music, which is merely serviceable, manages not to get in the way of the characters and the story, which Pennette has made far less convoluted than its source material.

Achieving much with little is Christopher Sieber as the star-pecked plastic-surgeon husband (Bruce Willis in the film). Michelle Williams, playing the keeper of the potion (Isabella Rossellini in the film), looks terrific in Paul Tazewell’s extravagant gowns. The show wisely uses the character, now named Viola, as a framing device and narrator, but Williams’ speaking and singing voice lacks the requisite authority.

A nice addition to this story is the creation of a sassy gay assistant to Madeline, played by Josh Lamon, who, maybe, should have been cast as Viola. Given a throw-way exit line, Lamon has the power to turn fluff into a dagger. The only thing campier is watching Nicole Scherzinger go full drag queen in “Sunset Blvd.”

The Zemeckis movie has one great moment. It never gets better than Streep traipsing on a hotel lobby’s circular divan in a disastrous musical version of “Sweet Bird of Youth.” On Broadway, that episode becomes a show within the show that is unimaginatively titled “Me! Me! Me!” That disappointment aside, the song “For the Gaze” delivers big time. And the timing could not be better. After this month’s major dud, “Tammy Faye,” where “the gays” are repeatedly pandered to, it’s fun to see a show that talks one on one to its core audience.

The post ‘Death Becomes Her’ Broadway Review: How to Resurrect an Embalmed Movie appeared first on TheWrap.

Jessica Goldberg’s play is titled “Babe,” but should be titled “Girl,” which is what its bombastic, sexist, untalented, full-of-himself and inordinately successful white straight male A&R legend calls all women, and that includes a cleaning lady who is well into her 60s.

Arliss Howard plays Gus in what is one of this year’s great stage performances. He’s so good that through much of “Babe” you may find yourself taking his side. Some of that is the acting, some of it is Goldberg’s writing. In the play’s first scene, Gus interviews Katherine (Gracie McGraw), a potential employee at the record company. Being the jerk that he is, Gus asks his future assistant if she has a soul. Among a long rambling resume, Katherine mentions something about having “grown up on weekends in Woodstock.” Gus roasts this young woman on the spot, and who can blame him?

Meanwhile, another employee wanders around the edges of the office, as well as the interview, and playing the seemingly meek Abigail, Marisa Tomei nearly evaporates into all the gold records in the office’s display case. Derek McLane’s set design captures both the sleek décor of this executive office and, later, Abigail’s sleek upscale Manhattan apartment.

Abigail is a woman caught between generations. She has had to bow to the old patriarchy, and now young women, like Katherine, misinterpret her compromises.

McGraw’s character has been seen before, most significantly in the second act of David Mamet’s “Oleanna.” Goldberg has a different take on this young litigious female character, but when Katherine launches into her full “Oleanna Moment,” the audience reaction is the same: revulsion.

My opinion of Gus may not be as jaundiced as Goldberg’s, because having worked in an office in the 1980s (as well as the 1970s), I found this boss’ behavior in that time frame – there are flashbacks – rather benign. For example, in 1989 when I was entertainment editor at Life magazine, a female editor asked during a staff meeting with more than a dozen people present (no need to record things as Katherine does) why this photo magazine always required female celebs but not male celebs to look sexy on its cover. She wanted the guys to turn on readers too. The recently installed top editor was quick to respond, “I’m too homophobic for that.” A month later, not only was the female editor fired, but so was I, the token gay on the editorial staff, even though I kept my mouth shut during this cover dissertation.

Tomei’s Abigail also keeps her mouth shut, and it’s why she has enjoyed success, although not to the degree Katherine believes she deserves. Certainly Abigail doesn’t make as much money as Gus.

McGraw, under Scott Elliott’s direction, is seamless in her impersonations of the young feisty assistant and the Janis Joplin-esque rock star that Abigail discovered but could not prevent from destroying herself. Not so subtle under Elliott’s direction is Tomei’s performance, which involves more transitions than simply switching characters. Abigail’s health is a major topic but appears shortchanged here; the segues to her being healthy and then sick and then healthy again are far too abrupt. What are we supposed to think: Abigail has cancer because she never got to make an obscene amount of money?

The character is the office wall flower, the power behind the big desk, and in an attempt to take focus, Tomei delivers a lot of nervous mannerisms that run counter to Abigail’s suppressed nature.

“Babe” runs only 85 minutes. Goldberg packs into her play both too much and not enough. Beyond Abigail’s variable health, there’s something too simplistic in the equation that female equals brilliant, male equals dumb. Is it possible that both Gus and Abigail are equally good at their job, but the one has all the power, fame and money?

Then again, that novel idea might take another 10 or 15 minutes of stage time.

The post ‘Babe’ Off Broadway Review: Marisa Tomei Gets Stuck Between Generations appeared first on TheWrap.

The good news is that Mayer is in top form with his latest Broadway entry. The new musical “Swept Away” opened Tuesday at the Longacre Theatre, and it helps immeasurably that this divisive director is working with great material here. In its first half, the musical recalls the grandeur of Benjamin Britten’s opera “Billy Budd.” Then Rachel Hauck’s set capsizes – the ship really flips over! – and the musical turns into an intimate chamber piece with its four survivors starving and slowly spinning around in the middle of the sea.

John Logan wrote the original book, and what happens in this 105-minute one-act musical is far more harrowing than anything Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall thought up for Captain Bligh and other survivors of that famous mutiny, in “Men Against the Sea,” the second novel in their Bounty Trilogy. Logan won a Tony for his play “Red” and has been nominated for three Oscars: “Gladiator,” “The Aviator” and “Hugo.” His work on “Swept Away” belongs at the top of that impressive list of accomplishments. In an attempt to avoid spoilers, this review will have to leave it there except to say that the finale is as big a surprise as what Cole Escola pulls off in “Oh, Mary!” regarding the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The difference is, where Escola produces shock waves of laughter, Logan simply shocks.

“Swept Away” is an awesomely different and totally unexpected Broadway musical. It comes from the Avett Brothers’ 2004 album, “Mignonette,” based on the true story of a shipwreck in 1880. Adrian Blake Enscoe, in a spectacular Broadway debut, gets to sing the score’s most affecting ballads, his sweet tenor a perfect fit for these folk-country tunes. John Shiver’s subtle sound design lets us hear every word of the touching lyrics. Enscoe plays Little Brother to Stark Sands’ Big Brother, who is something of a prig — until he isn’t. Sands takes the back seat on the boat, playing the least colorful character of the four men who survive. It’s a slow-burn performance. Sands admirably holds back to deliver Logan’s big shocker in magnificent form.

Wayne Duvall is the craggy Captain and John Gallagher Jr. rounds out the quartet, playing the Mate, the outspoken naysayer of the group who gets to sing the score’s one foray into hard rock. It’s the song “Satan Pulls the Strings,” and Gallagher does precisely that. He’s an actor who flips back and forth between work in plays and musicals, and he uses all those dramatic skills to ground a show that will blow you away.

The post ‘Swept Away’ Broadway Review: An Avett Brothers Album Surfaces as a Stunning Musical appeared first on TheWrap.

Instead, one of the stars of the original Broadway musical from 2005, “American Idol” winner Fantasia Barrino, landed the coveted (and demanding) role of Celie. (Barrino replaced original star LaChanze to lead the production in 2007.)

Now in the midst of her press rounds for her highly anticipated starring role as Elphaba opposite Ariana Grande’s Glinda in Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of “Wicked,” the actress appeared on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast on Monday and acknowledged, for what appears to be the first time, standing tensions with the players behind the “Color Purple” movie.

The Tony, Grammy and Emmy-winning actress (and two-time Oscar nominee) shared, for one, that she was not invited to an early friends-and-family screening of filmmaker Blitz Bazawule’s “The Color Purple,” despite, according to Maron, many members of the Broadway cast being there.

She also would not directly address whether or not she was up for Barrino’s role of Celie, but said that it’s “a long, complicated conversation that I probably shouldn’t even get into.”

“I went to a screening for friends and family, and so much of the cast from the original production on Broadway was there,” Maron recalled of his first time seeing the film ahead of his podcast interview with Bazawule (a “good guy,” he said). “It was so overwhelming.”

“Oh, wow, wow, wow. Oh, yeah, I didn’t get that invite,” Erivo responded.

The rest played out as follows:

Maron: “Oh, I’m sorry.”

Erivo: “That’s alright.”

Maron: “That feels like there’s a little tension.”

Erivo: “Well, I don’t know why though.”

Maron: “No, I don’t know either. Were you up for the part?”

Erivo: “Um, that’s a long, complicated conversation that I probably shouldn’t even get into.”

Maron: “Well, there’s your answer why.”

Erivo: “Yeah. Lord knows why. But, you know.”

Warner Bros. representatives for “The Color Purple” did not respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.

Of course, Erivo went on to star in perhaps the even more coveted lead role for “Wicked,” but she agreed with Maron that her experience playing Celie on Broadway ultimately prepared her for everything she’s done since, from Elphaba to Harriet Tubman (“Harriet”) to Aretha Franklin (“Genius”). The actress also shared with Maron how emotionally daunting the role of Celie was, particularly after playing her for eight shows a week over 14 months — around 400 shows total.

“I knew it like the back of my hand,” she said. “I remember I said to someone, after time 400 or something, you get called ‘ugly’ onstage, the line between you and reality and the character … the line is already kind of gone because your body starts to do whatever it needs to to get where it needs to faster. So you start, it becomes really thin, the veil becomes really, really thin, and so it stops being the character is being called this and it starts being you are. And you start feeling it, and you start believing it, and it’s really hard every day to do that.”

Of the musical’s famous 11 o’clock number, “I’m Here,” Erivo said that she had to live in a place where she learned to believe she’s beautiful — but only after inhabiting the belief that she was ugly.

“To be able to sing ‘I’m Here’ and to get to a place where you can say, ‘I’m beautiful,’ you have to believe to some degree that that isn’t the truth until you believe it,” she said. “I’m not myself, but I’m funneling all of my things.”

Listen to Erivo’s full “WTF” interview here.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly cited Barrino as the actress who originated the role of Celie on Broadway. That has since been corrected to reflect LaChanze as the original star.

The post Cynthia Erivo Acknowledges Tensions With ‘The Color Purple’ Movie Team: ‘That’s a Long, Complicated Conversation’ appeared first on TheWrap.

Jane Krakowski, playing a miniskirt-wearing wife and mother of a miniskirt-wearing teenager (Genevieve Hannelius), hosts with her dull husband (Neil Patrick Harris) a most unusual party. They all gather ostensibly to watch a lunar eclipse from the spacious terrace of the couple’s Dumbo apartment (fabulous set by Clint Ramos). Krakowski’s Eve suggests that everybody, including their five guests (Garret Dillahunt, Debra Messing, Michael Oberholtzer, Tramell Tillman and Constance Wu), keep their iPhones on and face up on the living room coffee table. The rule is, when the phone goes off, the owner must put it on speaker so everyone in the room can hear the conversation. As someone at the party puts it, this is the grown-up version of Truth or Dare.

As with the characters in Albee’s play, a lot of alcohol lubricates the evening, as well as lines and lines of cocaine. Faster than a toilet can overflow when loaded up with too many Magum condoms (Eve is aghast at what she finds in her daughter’s purse), old secrets gurgle up to the surface at this fete. It helps that the four men at the party belonged to the same fraternity in college. That they are still close friends is a bit head-scratching, since their careers run the gamut from a plastic surgeon to an ambulance driver who wants to transition to being a nurse.

There are other wild, incredulous set-ups. Most unbelievable is Tillman’s bachelor switching phones with Dillahunt’s husband, who has an addiction to porn. The party’s sole single guy harbors a far greater secret than repeatedly receiving videos of a talking vagina.

“S.M.F.” leaves unexplained the same conundrum as “Take Me Out.” Why has the baseball star of Richard Greenberg’s play stayed in touch with his best friend who’s a chronic bigot? Did the friend’s extreme prejudice not make itself known a year or two ago? Why didn’t the baseball star say something at the time? Or better yet, why didn’t he just get another best friend long ago? In “S.M.F.,” two characters of color clearly hate the company they keep, but O’Hara gives us no indication why these two continue to keep that hateful company.

O’Hara, who also directs, makes sense of everything in a conclusion that resorts to a ploy used long ago on a famous nighttime TV soap opera.

“S.M.F.” lives up to that title. The play delivers far fewer laughs than a decent production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” But what it lacks in genuine wit – many of O’Hara’s zingers land flat — this s–t show compensates with sheer outrageousness as the phone calls quickly turn X-rated. O’Hara skewers white privilege and the pathetic sex fantasies it unleashes. In the process, he creates a super-stud character that borrows a lot from Mandingo.

The post ‘Sh-t. Meet. Fan.’ Off Broadway Review: Phone Games Upend a Night With Debra Messing, Jane Krakowski and Neil Patrick Harris appeared first on TheWrap.

That ghastly waking nightmare will give you some idea of what it’s like to sit through the new musical “Tammy Faye,” which opened Thursday at the Palace Theatre after its world premiere last year in London. Just as TV Evangelists suck up to their right-wing audience, the makers of “Tammy Faye” pander to feminists and “the gays.” Jake Shears’ puerile lyrics to Elton John’s weak country-Western tunes encourage women to take control of their life by using those “credit cards.” Much worse and more pervasive are the many ways James Graham’s book turns the title character into a gay icon somewhere to the left of Lady Gaga. We’re expected to find Tammy Faye sympathetic, even though she begs for money from poor people so she can look like a hideously dressed drag queen. Costumes are by Katrina Lindsay; Luc Verschueren designed the hair, wigs and make-up.

Once upon a time, the real Tammy Faye Baker hugged a man who was HIV-positive, and this episode on her TV show has led Graham to create a Broadway first: in the show’s first scene, a proctologist examines the title character, played by Katie Brayben. Since Tammy Faye has been beatified by “the gays” for not spitting on them like everybody else in the Evangelical community, this modicum of civility allows her to level jokes about anal sex at the butt doctor, who’s gay.

What “Tammy Faye” completely misses is the derision “the gays” have for certain famous and ridiculously overdressed women like Tammy Faye Baker. They don’t worship these women, they laugh at them.

Beyond that major gaffe, there’s a problem with stage musicals about TV shows. Even “Hairspray” suffers from it, since we’re being asked to watch a TV program while sitting in a theater. Because so much of “Tammy Faye” takes place on the set of “The PTL Club,” the thought can’t be avoided, “Why didn’t I just stay home and watch something on Hulu instead?”

Director Rupert Goold doubles down on this TV-show-within-a-stage-musical concept by having Bunny Christie’s set resemble that of “Hollywood Squares,” complete with little windows that open to feature talking and singing heads. When the actors actually manage to escape those squares on a monolithic wall, they have to watch their every step. Christie has bugged the stage with all sorts of huge TV-set-like boxes that rise up from the bowels of the stage so Tammy Faye and others can use these pedestals to make their confessions or damn “the gays.”

Goold begins Act 2 just the way Jamie Lloyd begins Act 2 of “Sunset Blvd.” Brayben is filmed sitting backstage getting ready for her entrance, singing yet another one of Elton John’s sanctimonious female empowerment ballads. Brayben sounds a little like Dolly Parton on an off night, and in the second act when she’s high on pills, this scam artist resembles Lucille Ball in the Vitameatavegin episode of “I Love Lucy.”

Tammy Faye is the charismatic one. Her husband, Jim Baker, is the TV klutz, and playing him, Christian Borle gets stuck being a klutz with bad timing. Borle is very successful at not getting laughs in this show.

What’s downright risible is Lynne Page’s choreography for all the staged TV commercials, which are staged exactly like the other big production numbers.

Downright reprehensible is the way in which “Tammy Faye” slut-shames Jessica Hahn (Alana Pollard). To refresh your memory, Hahn was the young acolyte whom Jim Baker deflowered and then she cashed in on her notoriety. Pollard begins the show as if dressed by Laura Ashley on a budget and ends it wearing some black leather bondage outfit from the local sex shop.

Playing the villainous Jerry Falwell, Michael Cerveris isn’t nearly quick enough in plotting Tammy Faye and Jim Baker’s demise.

The post ‘Tammy Faye’ Broadway Review: Elton John Delivers a Very Long Infomercial appeared first on TheWrap.