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Oliver discusses the key news items. Topics covered include: Paramour Opening, Spring Awakening Kickstarter, Tuck Everlasting Closing, Dear Evan Hansen’s Broadway Transfer and last weekend’s Theatre World, Lilly, and OBIE Awards.
This year’s race for the Tony Award for Best Musical is a close one – three of the four nominees have a path to winning the coveted award. I lay out the paths to victory for each of the three possible victors: Dear Evan Hansen, Come From Away, and Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812.
There’s been one name on everyone’s list for Best Leading Actor in a Musical for a while now: Ben Platt. We take a look at his competition to see who, if anyone, may pull an upset for the Tony.
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We took a look at the demographics of this year’s Tony nominees. Does the class of 2017 represent the same diversity that earned the class of 2016 the #TonysSoDiverse hashtag?
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“An Upset,” a one-act play by David Auburn first seen in New York in 2008, is being revived around the city timed to the Open, including three shows at 99 Bowery beginning Sept. 12.
“It’s always hard to put a finger on why something is suddenly in the zeitgeist,” said Ruhl, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and a Tony Award nominee. “I don’t know why it is happening with tennis in theater right now. But for me, while researching the Bush dynasty, I realized tennis is such a big part of their lives and a wonderful metaphor for family competition and sibling rivalry.”
In “Scenes From Court Life,” Greg Keller plays George W. Bush as a more shrewd politician than his brother Jeb but an inferior tennis player.
“Athletes are almost another species to playwrights,” Keller said. “The writer’s world is so subjective, but for athletes there is always a winner and a loser.”
Tennis holds undeniable appeal for the theater. For starters, it can encompass widely different settings, including the Bush family compound, the public courts of the Lower East Side and Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Tennis, Keller said, is also “one-on-one, but you are not physically touching each other like in boxing.”
He added, “You are in your own little world.”
Bragen has written other works about tennis, including a monologue called “Game, Set, Match.” He said the sport offered intimacy and isolation — great fodder for writers.
“There’s a kind of dance that I feel as a player, but you are alone in your own head at the same time you are connected to other person,” Bragen said.
Ruhl said she liked the combat mixed with decorum, “the formality within the structure of competition.”
Ryan Sweeney, who played Division I tennis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is producing and starring in “An Upset,” said, “Tennis is a lonely sport, and Auburn’s script touches on the players’ vulnerabilities.”
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