Wicked is one of the hottest shows on Broadway. How, then, can anyone still get amazing seats? Why, the ticket lottery of course! A few hours before curtain, hundreds of entrants try their luck and enter to win those precious few front row seats practically given away at a super discount price.
Tony-nominated for her scenic design of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Donyale Werle once again is ready to take a downtown show uptown to Broadway. This time the task at hand is Peter and the Starcatcher, the play-with-music based on the Dave Barry-Ridley Pearson novel which tells the story of Peter Pan before he became the boy who would not grow up. Using a downtown approach to set design that firmly supports the adage "one man's trash is another man's (or in this case woman's) treasure," Werle and her crew set about capturing audience imaginations by using otherwise everyday objects to adorn the proscenium and sets of the show. To see the show's Playbill click here. For more on the show, click here.
With Priscilla Queen of the Desert's Nick Adams, Tony Sheldon and Will Swenson as the scheduled guests, it's a busy day of preparation as "On Stage" — New York's most watched theatre-based show — gets ready to roll its cameras. Producer Frank DiLella plays tour guide and takes Playbill through the steps of what it takes to get an episode of "On Stage" from script to screen.
Playbill's Broadway 101 series continues with an in-depth look at the things that go bump in the night at The Addams Family. The show's puppeteers take us on a tour to demonstrate how the hairy (Cousin Itt), the scary (the mouse-chomping Venus Flytrap) and the slightly injured (Bob the Bird) puppets work. Acclaimed puppet designer Basil Twist is behind the magic. Click here to read more about Twist's creations on The Addams Family, The Pee-wee Herman Show and more.
Playbill takes a tour of the wardrobe department of Disney's Mary Poppins, which operates on eight floors of Broadway's New Amsterdam Theatre. Here, you'll find over a dozen stitchers, costumers, wardrobe supervisors, day workers and dressers tending to the hundreds of costumes in the big-cast musical. The science of keeping a company dressed in pristine condition throughout a run is a daunting task! Doing 12 loads of laundry a day — which includes sorting hundreds of garments, from socks to caps — while juggling last-minute repairs, cast changes and wardrobe malfunctions keep this costume shop busy.
Playbill's Broadway 101 takes you behind the scenes of a Broadway production to show how the magic comes together. Before the audience enters the house, the lighting and electrics crew is busy testing, tweaking and checking for any last-minute problems to ensure the show goes on without a hitch (and even when it does, that the audience not notice!). The lighting and electrics crew from the Tony Award-winning musical Billy Elliot takes Playbill on a rare tour of the pre-show ritual that is "tech."
In the first part of an ongoing series dedicated to revealing the complexities of a Broadway production, the usher crew at the Broadway Theatre takes Playbill behind-the-scenes to explain how these "keepers of the Playbills" seat over 1,700 patrons, what happens before the doors open and dealing with some strange audience requests.
