NYCPlaywrights June 7, 2025
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Jun 7, 2025, 5:07:09 PMJun 7
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*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
The Public Theater’s Mobile Unit celebrates its 15th year with the beloved romantic comedy MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. Director Rebecca Martínez and composer Julián Mesri (Mobile Unit’s The Comedy of Errors) reunite for their third consecutive year. This bilingual, 100-minute, family-friendly take on the classic tale of love, deception, and misunderstandings blends Latine influences, original music, and Shakespeare’s timeless wit. Mobile Unit visits parks, correctional facilities, and more in each NYC borough free of charge as part of The Public Theater’s commitment to making great theater accessible to all.
Upcoming Locations
June 3-8: The New York Public Library & Bryant Park, West 40th Street and 5th Avenue (Manhattan)
June 11: Wolfe's Pond Park (Staten Island)
June 12-14: J. Hood Wright Park (Manhattan)
June 15: Cathedral of St. John The Divine (Manhattan)
June 17-18: Sunset Park (Brooklyn)
June 20: A.R.R.O.W. Field House (Queens)
June 21: Queens Night Market (Queens)
June 22: Roy Wilkins Park (Queens)
June 25: Maria Hernandez Park (Brooklyn)
June 26: St. Mary’s Park (Bronx)
June 27: Travers Park (Queens)
June 28-29: Prospect Park at The Peninsula (Brooklyn)
https://publictheater.org/productions/season/2425/mobile-units-much-ado-about-nothing/
***
“Thank you for including me, honest to God,” LuPone said. “And just, you know, think of me. Because I don’t want to be onstage anymore. Period.”
This was almost like a queen proclaiming her abdication. LuPone is Broadway’s reigning grande dame, with a big voice and an even bigger mouth. She’s one of the city’s last living broads: brassy, belty, and profane, with the ferocity of a bullet train coming right at you. She’s as famous for playing musical theatre’s iron ladies—Eva Perón in “Evita,” Rose in “Gypsy” — as she is for her offstage rumbles.
She’s fought with Andrew Lloyd Webber, who in the nineties replaced her with Glenn Close in his musical “Sunset Boulevard.” (LuPone trashed her dressing room, sued his company, and used part of the settlement to build herself a pool, which she christened the Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Swimming Pool.)
She’s fought with co-stars. (In her memoir, she called Bill Smitrovich, who played her husband on the TV drama “Life Goes On,” a “thoroughly distasteful man.” Smitrovich: “She’s a very, very guileful woman.”) She has even fought with audience members. She once palmed a cellphone from a texter’s hand, mid-play. In 2022, during a talkback for the musical “Company,” she berated a spectator, “Put your mask over your nose. . . . That is the rule. If you don’t want to follow the rule, get the fuck out!”
Ask her about Madonna (“a movie killer”) or “Real Housewives” (“I really don’t want to know about those trashy lives”), and you’ll get a zinger worthy of Bette Davis—one of her heroines, along with Édith Piaf. (“I prefer the flawed to the perfect,” she told me.) Her bluntness has made her a kind of urban folk hero. On the Tony Awards red carpet in 2017, she declared that she would never perform for President Trump. Asked why, she responded, “Because I hate the motherfucker, how’s that?” The clip went viral.
More...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/02/patti-lupone-profile
***
"Patti and I never had a negative moment, by the way. Working together didn’t change our friendship. I think our friendship is deeper now," said Farrow.
The Rosemary's Baby actress admitted it "never crossed my mind" that she'd one day work with LuPone because "she is the goddess of Broadway."
"We live near each other. Always have. Two of our kids were in the same class at school, at the same school, her son and my son, and I met her on New Year’s Eve, actually," Farrow recalled. "She and her husband gave a New Year’s Eve party, and Steve Sondheim, who was one of my oldest friends, 50 years, he invited me to come to the party at Patti’s 30 years ago, and that’s how I met Patti."
Farrow's comments come after LuPone apologized for her harsh comments made in an interview with The New Yorker that was published May 26. (Farrow mentions the New Yorker interview in the Deadline conversation but did not address the controversy.)
More...
https://people.com/mia-farrow-never-had-negative-moment-patti-lupone-11748076
***
There are many pleasures to be had in watching Patti LuPone perform, particularly on a Broadway stage. There’s her powerful, flexible singing voice, undiminished at age 70. There’s her operatically expressive face, her sharply detailed characterizations. There’s also the plain fact that to see LuPone at maximum, commanding intensity — her default mode — is to see that most thrilling and increasingly rare of theatrical sights: a true diva. (And one who has endured a diva’s share of backstage drama.) “I knew at 4 years old where I was going and what I was going to do,” said LuPone, a two-time Tony Award winner who will be starring in a revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Company” next year. She added with a snap, “And I didn’t think I was going to be in the chorus.”
There’s a bit of a paradox going on with Broadway musicals right now. On one hand, they seem to be in good shape, because shows like “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Frozen” are making so much money. But on the other hand, those shows are not really vehicles for traditional musical-theater stars like yourself. “War Paint” was that kind of show and struggled to find an audience. Does that at all make you wonder where you fit in the Broadway ecosystem these days?
No. But some of those shows should be in Las Vegas and not on a Broadway stage. The thing really bugging me now about Broadway musicals is that they’re making me deaf. They’re all so damn loud. But you don’t know what’s going to hit. You don’t know what’s going to flop. I was disappointed that “War Paint” didn’t catch on, because it was beautiful, and Christine Ebersole and I played like gangbusters. How can you know why it didn’t hit? It could have been where the theater was located. It could have been because other musicals attracted people. So when you ask me how do I fit: I know that I have box-office draw, and I know that I’m relied on for it. In a way, that’s unfair. The pressure shouldn’t be on me to draw a crowd. The pressure should be on the producers.
There was a time on Broadway when having a theatrical star like Mary Martin or Ethel Merman in a show was a guarantee that it would play for at least a full season. Is that kind of star power a thing of the past?
No. They used to write for the stars, and they don’t anymore. Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers were writing for Ethel. So you know you had a good combination. But I don’t think it’s over. Last night, there was a line for the cast of “Betrayal,” especially for Charlie Cox and Tom Hiddleston. Hugh Jackman is going to come onstage for “The Music Man.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/21/magazine/patti-lupone-broadway-company.html
***
I first saw Patti LuPone, currently starring as the community-theater maven Irene in Shows for Days, onstage in Three Sisters. It was 1975, I was in high school, and the world was free of cellphones. LuPone was playing the youngest sister, Irina. The friend with whom I went insists to this day that the production, from The Acting Company, also featured Kevin Kline. It did not. Kline had played Vershinin when the Chekhov production was on Broadway in 1973-74, but had moved on by the time of the reprise, in repertory at the Harkness Theatre.
Of LuPone what I chiefly remember is the passion with which Irina insisted she was a grown-up. I also remember thinking that I wished I had seen her, as Lady Teazle, in The Acting Company’s earlier production of The School for Scandal. It had been presented, in 1972, at the Good Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church, which is on West 66th street and shares a city block with the Juilliard School, from which LuPone and Kline had graduated in the famous first class of the Drama Division.
More…
http://www.lct.org/explore/blog/watching-patti-lupone/
***
Patti LuPone’s quick snatching of an audience member’s cellphone on Wednesday made her a vigilante heroine to those frustrated by breaches of theater etiquette. But the incident, at an evening performance of “Shows for Days” at Lincoln Center, also highlighted a seemingly intractable problem: What to do about people who think a darkened theater is a great place to check Facebook?
“I’m at my wit’s end,” said Ms. LuPone, who in 2009 stopped in the middle of a song in a Broadway production of “Gypsy” to berate a photograph taker.
Theaters’ standard practice is to use recorded preshow announcements, often laced with humor, to encourage the silencing of mobile devices. And once a show starts, an usher may try to quell a rule-breaking patron. In rare cases, actors like Kevin Spacey, Hugh Jackman and Laurence Fishburne, have broken the fourth wall to address silence-shattering rings during a show.
More…
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/theater/theaters-struggle-with-patrons-phone-use-during-shows.html
***
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Evita opened at the Broadway Theatre September 25, 1979. The musical would go on to run for 1,567 performances. Patti LuPone starred as Eva Peron, with Mandy Patinkin as Che Guevara, the quasi-narrator of the musical.
The musical defied mixed reviews and received 11 Tony Award nominations. LuPone and Patinkin won Tonys for their roles, and Harold Prince won for Best Direction of a Musical. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice received Tonys for the score and book, and the show took home the top honor of Best Musical.
Look back at Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin in EVITA on Broadway 1979 - 35 photos.
https://playbill.com/article/take-a-look-back-at-patti-lupone-and-mandy-patinkin-in-evita-on-broadway
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
The Public Theater’s Mobile Unit celebrates its 15th year with the beloved romantic comedy MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. Director Rebecca Martínez and composer Julián Mesri (Mobile Unit’s The Comedy of Errors) reunite for their third consecutive year. This bilingual, 100-minute, family-friendly take on the classic tale of love, deception, and misunderstandings blends Latine influences, original music, and Shakespeare’s timeless wit. Mobile Unit visits parks, correctional facilities, and more in each NYC borough free of charge as part of The Public Theater’s commitment to making great theater accessible to all.
Upcoming Locations
June 3-8: The New York Public Library & Bryant Park, West 40th Street and 5th Avenue (Manhattan)
June 11: Wolfe's Pond Park (Staten Island)
June 12-14: J. Hood Wright Park (Manhattan)
June 15: Cathedral of St. John The Divine (Manhattan)
June 17-18: Sunset Park (Brooklyn)
June 20: A.R.R.O.W. Field House (Queens)
June 21: Queens Night Market (Queens)
June 22: Roy Wilkins Park (Queens)
June 25: Maria Hernandez Park (Brooklyn)
June 26: St. Mary’s Park (Bronx)
June 27: Travers Park (Queens)
June 28-29: Prospect Park at The Peninsula (Brooklyn)
https://publictheater.org/productions/season/2425/mobile-units-much-ado-about-nothing/
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
IATI Theater is accepting scripts for its 2026 Cimientos Season.
Cimientos is IATI Theater’s Play Development Program. We provide playwrights the opportunity to develop new, never-before produced plays through a community of cutting-edge theater artists. Through the PPP* and SRP*, Cimientos amplifies as clearly as possible the voice of the author who lays the foundations from which a dramatic work is conceived. Like IATI Theater, Cimientos is committed to supporting playwrights and works that push conventions and explore the avant-garde. We recognize, however, that what is different and ground-breaking is not always what is unconventional and, therefore, we also welcome plays that explore realism and naturalism in innovative ways.
***
The first Gene Frankel Theatre Festival launches in New York City this summer, presenting short plays and one-acts by a range of artists. The festival encourages theatrical variety and aims to feature a diverse and compelling lineup across multiple programs. The applicants will need to produce the work - director, casting, and all production elements. The Gene Frankel Theatre will help with setting up your technical needs such as lighting, sound, and projections.
Eligible Work
Short plays (maximum 15 minutes)
One-act plays (up to 60 minutes)
***
The Venice Abbot Kinney Memorial Branch Library invites you to celebrate 30 years of service at our 501 S. Venice location by submitting your short one act play to VENICE VOICES. To commemorate this event, we are calling on playwrights to contribute short, unproduced scripts – no longer than ten to fifteen minutes. (applications for longer plays cannot be accepted). Please be sure the plays concern themselves with historical, contemporary, or an imagined future in Venice, California. All genres are welcome.
Selected plays will receive a staged reading in mid-August and playwrights will receive an honorarium of One Hundred Dollars. There is no fee to submit. The event is sponsored by the Friends of the Venice Library.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** PATTI LUPONE ***
Broadway legend Patti LuPone has apologized for “flippant and emotional” remarks she made about fellow marquee actors in a New Yorker magazine interview.
The mea culpa came via LuPone’s social media accounts Saturday after more than 600 members of the Broadway community signed an open letter condemning the three-time Tony winner’s controversial comments about Kecia Lewis and Audra McDonald.
The letter, addressed to the American Theatre Wing and the Broadway League, criticized LuPone for calling Lewis a “b----” and saying McDonald is “not a friend” in the New Yorker profile.
More...
https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/patti-lupone-reprimand-open-letter-rcna210129
IATI Theater is accepting scripts for its 2026 Cimientos Season.
Cimientos is IATI Theater’s Play Development Program. We provide playwrights the opportunity to develop new, never-before produced plays through a community of cutting-edge theater artists. Through the PPP* and SRP*, Cimientos amplifies as clearly as possible the voice of the author who lays the foundations from which a dramatic work is conceived. Like IATI Theater, Cimientos is committed to supporting playwrights and works that push conventions and explore the avant-garde. We recognize, however, that what is different and ground-breaking is not always what is unconventional and, therefore, we also welcome plays that explore realism and naturalism in innovative ways.
***
The first Gene Frankel Theatre Festival launches in New York City this summer, presenting short plays and one-acts by a range of artists. The festival encourages theatrical variety and aims to feature a diverse and compelling lineup across multiple programs. The applicants will need to produce the work - director, casting, and all production elements. The Gene Frankel Theatre will help with setting up your technical needs such as lighting, sound, and projections.
Eligible Work
Short plays (maximum 15 minutes)
One-act plays (up to 60 minutes)
***
The Venice Abbot Kinney Memorial Branch Library invites you to celebrate 30 years of service at our 501 S. Venice location by submitting your short one act play to VENICE VOICES. To commemorate this event, we are calling on playwrights to contribute short, unproduced scripts – no longer than ten to fifteen minutes. (applications for longer plays cannot be accepted). Please be sure the plays concern themselves with historical, contemporary, or an imagined future in Venice, California. All genres are welcome.
Selected plays will receive a staged reading in mid-August and playwrights will receive an honorarium of One Hundred Dollars. There is no fee to submit. The event is sponsored by the Friends of the Venice Library.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** PATTI LUPONE ***
Broadway legend Patti LuPone has apologized for “flippant and emotional” remarks she made about fellow marquee actors in a New Yorker magazine interview.
The mea culpa came via LuPone’s social media accounts Saturday after more than 600 members of the Broadway community signed an open letter condemning the three-time Tony winner’s controversial comments about Kecia Lewis and Audra McDonald.
The letter, addressed to the American Theatre Wing and the Broadway League, criticized LuPone for calling Lewis a “b----” and saying McDonald is “not a friend” in the New Yorker profile.
More...
https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/patti-lupone-reprimand-open-letter-rcna210129
***
“Thank you for including me, honest to God,” LuPone said. “And just, you know, think of me. Because I don’t want to be onstage anymore. Period.”
This was almost like a queen proclaiming her abdication. LuPone is Broadway’s reigning grande dame, with a big voice and an even bigger mouth. She’s one of the city’s last living broads: brassy, belty, and profane, with the ferocity of a bullet train coming right at you. She’s as famous for playing musical theatre’s iron ladies—Eva Perón in “Evita,” Rose in “Gypsy” — as she is for her offstage rumbles.
She’s fought with Andrew Lloyd Webber, who in the nineties replaced her with Glenn Close in his musical “Sunset Boulevard.” (LuPone trashed her dressing room, sued his company, and used part of the settlement to build herself a pool, which she christened the Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Swimming Pool.)
She’s fought with co-stars. (In her memoir, she called Bill Smitrovich, who played her husband on the TV drama “Life Goes On,” a “thoroughly distasteful man.” Smitrovich: “She’s a very, very guileful woman.”) She has even fought with audience members. She once palmed a cellphone from a texter’s hand, mid-play. In 2022, during a talkback for the musical “Company,” she berated a spectator, “Put your mask over your nose. . . . That is the rule. If you don’t want to follow the rule, get the fuck out!”
Ask her about Madonna (“a movie killer”) or “Real Housewives” (“I really don’t want to know about those trashy lives”), and you’ll get a zinger worthy of Bette Davis—one of her heroines, along with Édith Piaf. (“I prefer the flawed to the perfect,” she told me.) Her bluntness has made her a kind of urban folk hero. On the Tony Awards red carpet in 2017, she declared that she would never perform for President Trump. Asked why, she responded, “Because I hate the motherfucker, how’s that?” The clip went viral.
More...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/02/patti-lupone-profile
***
"Patti and I never had a negative moment, by the way. Working together didn’t change our friendship. I think our friendship is deeper now," said Farrow.
The Rosemary's Baby actress admitted it "never crossed my mind" that she'd one day work with LuPone because "she is the goddess of Broadway."
"We live near each other. Always have. Two of our kids were in the same class at school, at the same school, her son and my son, and I met her on New Year’s Eve, actually," Farrow recalled. "She and her husband gave a New Year’s Eve party, and Steve Sondheim, who was one of my oldest friends, 50 years, he invited me to come to the party at Patti’s 30 years ago, and that’s how I met Patti."
Farrow's comments come after LuPone apologized for her harsh comments made in an interview with The New Yorker that was published May 26. (Farrow mentions the New Yorker interview in the Deadline conversation but did not address the controversy.)
More...
https://people.com/mia-farrow-never-had-negative-moment-patti-lupone-11748076
***
There are many pleasures to be had in watching Patti LuPone perform, particularly on a Broadway stage. There’s her powerful, flexible singing voice, undiminished at age 70. There’s her operatically expressive face, her sharply detailed characterizations. There’s also the plain fact that to see LuPone at maximum, commanding intensity — her default mode — is to see that most thrilling and increasingly rare of theatrical sights: a true diva. (And one who has endured a diva’s share of backstage drama.) “I knew at 4 years old where I was going and what I was going to do,” said LuPone, a two-time Tony Award winner who will be starring in a revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Company” next year. She added with a snap, “And I didn’t think I was going to be in the chorus.”
There’s a bit of a paradox going on with Broadway musicals right now. On one hand, they seem to be in good shape, because shows like “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Frozen” are making so much money. But on the other hand, those shows are not really vehicles for traditional musical-theater stars like yourself. “War Paint” was that kind of show and struggled to find an audience. Does that at all make you wonder where you fit in the Broadway ecosystem these days?
No. But some of those shows should be in Las Vegas and not on a Broadway stage. The thing really bugging me now about Broadway musicals is that they’re making me deaf. They’re all so damn loud. But you don’t know what’s going to hit. You don’t know what’s going to flop. I was disappointed that “War Paint” didn’t catch on, because it was beautiful, and Christine Ebersole and I played like gangbusters. How can you know why it didn’t hit? It could have been where the theater was located. It could have been because other musicals attracted people. So when you ask me how do I fit: I know that I have box-office draw, and I know that I’m relied on for it. In a way, that’s unfair. The pressure shouldn’t be on me to draw a crowd. The pressure should be on the producers.
There was a time on Broadway when having a theatrical star like Mary Martin or Ethel Merman in a show was a guarantee that it would play for at least a full season. Is that kind of star power a thing of the past?
No. They used to write for the stars, and they don’t anymore. Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers were writing for Ethel. So you know you had a good combination. But I don’t think it’s over. Last night, there was a line for the cast of “Betrayal,” especially for Charlie Cox and Tom Hiddleston. Hugh Jackman is going to come onstage for “The Music Man.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/21/magazine/patti-lupone-broadway-company.html
***
I first saw Patti LuPone, currently starring as the community-theater maven Irene in Shows for Days, onstage in Three Sisters. It was 1975, I was in high school, and the world was free of cellphones. LuPone was playing the youngest sister, Irina. The friend with whom I went insists to this day that the production, from The Acting Company, also featured Kevin Kline. It did not. Kline had played Vershinin when the Chekhov production was on Broadway in 1973-74, but had moved on by the time of the reprise, in repertory at the Harkness Theatre.
Of LuPone what I chiefly remember is the passion with which Irina insisted she was a grown-up. I also remember thinking that I wished I had seen her, as Lady Teazle, in The Acting Company’s earlier production of The School for Scandal. It had been presented, in 1972, at the Good Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church, which is on West 66th street and shares a city block with the Juilliard School, from which LuPone and Kline had graduated in the famous first class of the Drama Division.
More…
http://www.lct.org/explore/blog/watching-patti-lupone/
***
Patti LuPone’s quick snatching of an audience member’s cellphone on Wednesday made her a vigilante heroine to those frustrated by breaches of theater etiquette. But the incident, at an evening performance of “Shows for Days” at Lincoln Center, also highlighted a seemingly intractable problem: What to do about people who think a darkened theater is a great place to check Facebook?
“I’m at my wit’s end,” said Ms. LuPone, who in 2009 stopped in the middle of a song in a Broadway production of “Gypsy” to berate a photograph taker.
Theaters’ standard practice is to use recorded preshow announcements, often laced with humor, to encourage the silencing of mobile devices. And once a show starts, an usher may try to quell a rule-breaking patron. In rare cases, actors like Kevin Spacey, Hugh Jackman and Laurence Fishburne, have broken the fourth wall to address silence-shattering rings during a show.
More…
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/theater/theaters-struggle-with-patrons-phone-use-during-shows.html
***
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Evita opened at the Broadway Theatre September 25, 1979. The musical would go on to run for 1,567 performances. Patti LuPone starred as Eva Peron, with Mandy Patinkin as Che Guevara, the quasi-narrator of the musical.
The musical defied mixed reviews and received 11 Tony Award nominations. LuPone and Patinkin won Tonys for their roles, and Harold Prince won for Best Direction of a Musical. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice received Tonys for the score and book, and the show took home the top honor of Best Musical.
Look back at Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin in EVITA on Broadway 1979 - 35 photos.
https://playbill.com/article/take-a-look-back-at-patti-lupone-and-mandy-patinkin-in-evita-on-broadway
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