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On Friday, May 30, East 9th street between Broadway and University Place was officially co-named Terrence McNally Way in honor of the late legendary playwright Terrence McNally, who proudly lived on East 9th Street for 24 years. The official unveiling ceremony featured speeches by Tony Award-winning producer and late husband of McNally, Tom Kirdahy, Executive Director of the Terrence McNally Foundation Santino DeAngelo, and New York City Council Members Carolina Rivera and Eric Bottcher; Tony Winner Jonathan Groff reading from And Things That Go Bump in the Night; Tony Nominee Francis Jue reading from Love! Valour! Compassion!; Tony Winner Donna Murphy reading from Master Class; Caissie Levy and Tony Winner Brandon Uranowitz performing “Our Children” from Ragtime, accompanied by composerStephen Flaherty; A speech and musical...

Lincoln Center Theater has announced today that incoming Artistic Director Lear deBessonet’s inaugural season will open with a new production of her acclaimed New York City Center Gala revival of Ragtime, starring Tony nominee Joshua Henry, Olivier and Grammy nominee Caissie Levy and Tony Award-winner Brandon Uranowitz.

Ragtime will begin previews on Friday, September 26, and open on Thursday, October 16 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater and will play a limited engagement of 14 weeks only through Sunday, January 4, 2026. Tickets will go on sale to the general public on Wednesday, May 28 at 12 pm Et.

As previously announced, the 41st season at Lincoln Center Theater will be under the leadership of a new executive team, consisting of Artistic Director Lear deBessonet, Managing Director Mike Schleifer, Executive Producer Bartlett Sher, Producer Nicole Kastrinos, Executive Director of Development & Planning Naomi Grabel, and LCT3 Artistic Director & Producer Maria Manuela Goyanes.

Ragtime is a sweeping musical adaption...

Last month playwright Jez Butterworth brought his latest work, “The Hills of California,” to Broadway. The haunting family drama explores the relationships between four sisters and their dying mother in their creaky seaside home, seamlessly moving back and forth in time between 1976 and 1955. The play previously bowed in London earlier this year, and before coming stateside it earned two Olivier Award nominations for Best New Play and Best Actress for Laura Donnelly, who reprises her performance in New York.

Since his Broadway debut only 13 years ago, Butterworth has quickly established himself as one of the theater’s most accomplished contemporary playwrights. He has two Tony nominations to his name, for New York debut “Jerusalem” in 2011 and for his Tony-winning epic “The Ferryman” in 2019. Those nominations alone already tie him with theater royalty including Ayad Akhtar, Tony Kushner, Tracy Letts, David Mamet, Lynn Nottage, Eugene O’Neill, and Wendy Wasserstein — all...

Tom Stoppard won the Best Play trophy for “Leopoldstadt” at the 2023 Tony Awards. This is his fifth win in the category, breaking his own Tony record. The theater legend maintains an impressive lead as the winningest playwright in the Best Play category.

“Leopoldstadt” is a sprawling epic which traces the lineage of a Jewish family in Vienna from 1899 to 1955. The play considers important questions of assimilation and identity. The show picked up four wins in total, with additional victories for Brandon Uranowitz in Featured Actor in a Play, Patrick Marber in Director of a Play, and Brigitte Reiffenstuel in Costume Design of a Play.

Stoppard has now won the Best Play category five times in his career, more than any other playwright in history. He previously prevailed for “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” (1968), “Travesties” (1976), “The Real Thing” (1984), and the three-part epic “The Coast of Utopia” (2007). The Tony Awards do not...

Exclusive: Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has a warrant out, in a manner of speaking, for Broadway actors. Next week’s episode features Tony-nominated Hadestown actor Eva Noblezada and Beetlejuice himself Alex Brightman, and showrunner Warren Leight tells Deadline that’s just the beginning.

Last night, after the episode casting was announced, Leight tweeted, “We are trying to hire every Broadway actor we can while we and they wait for the curtains to rise again.” And he wasn’t joking.

“We know how hard the community has been hit here,” Leight said in an interview. “The goal is to get as many jobs to as many theater actors as we possibly can.”

The offer couldn’t come at a more opportune time. The National Endowment for the Arts recently released figures indicating that while the overall unemployment rate has averaged 8.5 percent, the average among actors was 52 percent.

The NBC New York-based L&o franchise has long been known as a steady source of employment for the city’s theater performers – rare is the stage actor whose Playbill credits don’t include at least one of the L&o series – but the pandemic has pushed Leight’s team to ramp up even those efforts for the current Season 22.

Stage actors already cast in parts for this season include the Tony-winning Adriane Lenox, Elizabeth Marvel, Jane Bruce (Jagged Little Pill), Jelani Alladin (Disney’s Frozen), Michael Mastro (Love! Valour! Compassion!), and Betsy Aidem (Steel Magnolias).

Even Raúl Esparza, a four-time Tony nominee known to the wider TV audience for his six-season Svu run as Assistant D.A. Rafael Barba, is making a temporary franchise comeback to reprise the role for this week’s episode “Sightless in a Savage Land.”

Leight says the Broadway-filled roles range in scope from one-day parts to more substantial turns, but have an important practical impact for the actors, adding to the work day minimums required for Actors Equity-Broadway League health insurance.

The casting offers a significant logistical benefit to the show as well: casting New York actors is the more practical and efficient option during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the prospect of long-distance flights from Hollywood and required quarantine protocols can complicate using Los Angeles-based actors.

“In the past we’ve done what you could call Hollywood stunt casting,” Leight says, “but a lot of those players aren’t going to be willing to get on a plane and quarantine right now. We realized early on that we’ll have to cast locally much more.”

The Broadway shutdown also allows the show to get around the planning issues that Broadway’s usual performance schedule demands: Coordinating a shoot around the identical eight-performance weeks of working stage actors like Noblezada and Brightman (who Leight says enact “a horribly failed virtual romance” in the Jan. 14 episode) is daunting. There’s only so much guest-starring that can be crammed into a dark Broadway Monday.

Yet another plus for the production: Stage actors, accustomed to the tightrope walk of eight shows a week, are what Leight calls “money players,” guest stars who “hit their marks and can do it over and over” quickly. With pandemic safety precautions enforced on set – minimal personal contact, Covid testing, noisy stop-and-start ventilation, among other things – the production, he says, “doesn’t have time for actors who need to find it.”

“Our directors need to know that [guest actors] can do two scenes with Olivia and not be nervous,” he adds, referring to star Mariska Hargitay’s Olivia Benson character.

Leight himself has an extensive stage background, including his 1998 Tony-winning Best Play Side Man, a Pulitzer finalist that starred the Tony-winning Frank Wood.

And yes, Wood will be popping up on Svu this season. Leight says Svu‘s medical examiners office has been “augmented” to include a role for his old friend.

Leight’s Tuesday night tweet was met with a quick response from New York stage actors. Jennifer Mudge, whose Broadway and Off Broadway credits include Into The Woods, Rocky and The Philanthropist, tweeted, “Warren, I feel like now is the time to tell you that only Svu is missing from my L&o trifecta completion. (Mothership twice!),” to which Leight responded, “On it.”

Three-time Tony nominee Carolee Carmello tweeted a simple, “Much appreciated,” while West Side Story actor Danny Wolohan wrote, “Broadway’s Officer Krupke says thank you!”

And Chris Orbach – actor, writer, musician and, as the son of the late Jerry Orbach, a member of an L&o royal family – weighed in. “God love you,” he responded to Leight’s tweet. “You cats are good like that.”

Law & Order: Svu, from Wolf Entertainment and Universal Television, airs Thursdays at 9 pm on NBC.

Thank you, @warrenleightTV! My last L&o stint was an episode staring John Ritter! I think it's time I came back for a visit! ❤️

— Erin Leigh Peck (@ErinLeighPeck) January 6, 2021

God love you, you cats are good like that ❤️

— Chris Orbach (@chrisorbach) January 6, 2021...

The Hollywood community continues to be upended by the coronavirus pandemic, with more people contracting Covid-19 as the days pass. While many have recovered, some have died from complications of the illness. These are the names of those we’ve lost.

Terrence McNally, a four-time Tony Award-winning playwright, died on March 24 at the age of 81 of complications from the coronavirus. His works included “Master Class,” “Love! Valour! Compassion!” and “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” which later became a film with Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino.

Italian actress Lucia Bosè, who starred in such films as Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Story of a Love Affair” (1950) and Juan Antonio Bardem’s “Death of a Cyclist” (1955), died on March 23 of pneumonia after contracting Covid-19, according to the Guardian. She was 89.

Read original story Celebrities Who Have Died From the Coronavirus (Photos) At TheWrap...

The New York theatre community is normally all abuzz in June. The Tony Awards provide excitement at the start of the month, warm weather brings in major tourist dollars, and New Yorkers collect their rainbow studded Playbills to celebrate Pride. But the coronavirus had different plans for June of 2020: Broadway is shuttered, the Tonys are indefinitely postponed, and new safety measures have cancelled Pride events worldwide. So thank the theatre gods for the tonic that is the American Masters documentary “Terrence McNally: Every Act of Life.”

Terrence McNally sadly passed away in March due to complications from Covid-19, so it is only fitting that the life story of this pioneer playwright should roar loudly during Pride month. The film was completed before his death, with a premiere at the Tribeca Film festival in 2018. The documentary now reaches a wider audience with a celebratory Pride airing on Sunday June 14th,...

Playwright Terrence McNally’s death from coronavirus-related causes in late March deprived the theater world of one of its greatest talents, a four-time Tony Award winner known for Master Class and Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, among many other works. Just how much he achieved in his 81 years comes into focus in the Emmy-contending documentary Terrence McNally: Every Act of Life, directed by Jeff Kaufman and produced by Marcia Ross.

“At every stage of Terrence’s life, he keeps pushing himself in a new direction,” Kaufman tells Deadline. “He never plays it safe. He’s a truth teller.”

The film premiered on PBS last year as part of American Masters. That series, winner of 28 Emmys to date, is once again up for consideration as Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series, and the Terrence McNally episode will appear on nomination ballots in the directing, editing, cinematography and sound categories.

IndieWire asked Jeff Kaufman, the writer-producer-director of “Every Act of Life,” a documentary about Tony-winning playwright Terrence McNally, to remember the writer of the books for musicals “Kiss of the Spider Woman — the Musical,” and “Ragtime,” as well as “Master Class” and two plays that he adapted into “Love! Valour! Compassion!” and “Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune,” which were directed by Joe Mantello and Garry Marshall, respectively. On Wednesday, McNally, who had been fighting lung cancer, succumbed at age 81 from complications of the Coronavirus.

When I first spoke to Terrence McNally about making a documentary on his life, he said something like, “Everything you need to know about me is in my work. What is there to say?” As everyone who has seen or read Terrence’s plays, books for musicals, opera librettos, and screenplays knows, there is so much to discover (and appreciate) in the characters and worlds he created.

Acclaimed playwright Terrence McNally has died of complications due to coronavirus. The author of Master Class, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune and Love! Valour! Compassion!, among many other major works, was a lung cancer survivor with chronic pulmonary disease, and died Tuesday at Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Sarasota, Fl. He was 81.

McNally’s death was confirmed by his spokesperson Matt Polk. The Tony Award-winning playwright is survived by his husband, Broadway producer Tom Kirdahy.

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One of the greatest American playwrights of his generation, McNally was a four-time Tony Award winner, recipient of the 2019 Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, and 1994 Pulitzer Prize nominee.

Few if any living playwrights have been as successful for as long as Terrence McNally. “Every Act of Life” provides a predictably starry, rather standard, but satisfying overview of a prodigious career that is still going full-steam as the writer nears his ninth decade. It may require posterity to deliver a film that really weighs McNally’s influence, strengths, and weaknesses as a dramatist; Jeff Kaufman’s feature is more of a biographical valentine, aimed squarely at fans already somewhat knowledgeable about the subject’s life, works, and times. It should play well wherever such aficionados can be found — which is to say, anywhere Broadway and gay theater have a loyal base.

Opening with footage of McNally receiving a Tony — one of four won so far — for “Master Class” in 1996, this straightforward bio then backtracks to the start of a strictly chronological hagiography. Our protagonist traces lifelong “feelings of not...

In late April, theater lovers devote most of their attention to the clutch of Broadway shows rushing to open before the eligibility cutoff for Tony nominations. But this year fans should be keeping an eye on things downtown too: New projects by or about Broadway talent aren’t onstage. They’re at a film festival — the Tribeca Film Festival (running April 18-29), where Terrence McNally, Howard Ashman, Michael Mayer and Stephen Karam are all in the mix.

Every Act of Life (pictured top)

Jeff Kaufman and Marcia Ross’ documentary, making its world premiere at the festival, chronicles the life of McNally, the veteran, out-and-proud playwright and four-time Tony winner behind “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Ragtime,” “Love! Valour! Compassion!” and more. The biopic — which counts Audra McDonald, Christine Baranski, Angela Lansbury, Meryl Streep and Bryan Cranston among those involved — touches on everything from McNally’s romance with Edward Albee to...

Regent Entertainment's genre division here! Films is ramping up its activities, inking a three-picture deal with producer Barry Krost, a two-picture deal with producer Ian Praiser and film projects with producer Gwen Field and writer-director P. David Ebersole. The deals will allow here! to aggregate its production pipelines to service here!'s output for theatrical releases followed by showings through the company's here! Pay Per View, a 24/7 national programming service. The company hopes to have as many as 24 original films per year culled from original productions and acquisitions as well as four to six original series per year. For his deal, Krost -- a manager-producer who has been involved in the careers of Angela Lansbury, Liza Minnelli, Joely Fisher and Joan Collins -- has been given a discretionary fund to develop three projects for here! Krost's producing credits include What's Love Got to Do With It and Love! Valour! Compassion!...