The Morning Line

THE MORNING LINE DATE: Tuesday, June 7, 2016 FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh Emily Motill PAGES: 19, including this page C3 June 7, 2016 Broadway’s ‘The King and I’ to Close By Michael Paulson Lincoln Center Theater unexpectedly announced Sunday that it would close its production of “The King and I” this month. The sumptuous production, which opened in April of 2015, won the Tony Award for best musical revival last year, and had performed strongly at the box office for months. But its weekly grosses dropped after the departure of its Tony-winning star, Kelli O’Hara, in April. Lincoln Center, a nonprofit, said it would end the production on June 26, at which point it will have played 538 performances. A national tour is scheduled to begin in November. The show features music by Richard Rodgers and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. The revival is directed by Bartlett Sher. C3 June 7, 2016 No More ‘Groundhog Day’ for One Powerful Producer By Michael Paulson Scott Rudin, a prolific and powerful producer on Broadway and in Hollywood, has withdrawn from a much- anticipated project to adapt the popular movie “Groundhog Day” into a stage musical. The development is abrupt and unexpected, occurring just weeks before the show is scheduled to begin performances at the Old Vic Theater in London. “Groundhog Day” is collaboration between the songwriter Tim Minchin and the director Matthew Warchus, following their success with “Matilda the Musical.” The new musical is scheduled to run there from July 15 to Sept. 17, and had been scheduled to begin performances on Broadway next January; it is not clear how Mr. Rudin’s withdrawal might affect the transfer. In an emailed statement, Mr. Rudin suggested that he was not satisfied with his ability to influence the evolving show, and had opted to move on. He has plenty on his plate: He has already announced that he will be producing revivals of “The Front Page” and “Hello, Dolly!” on Broadway this season, and is expected to announce a revival of “The Glass Menagerie” as well. “The production in New York is going to be a transfer of the London production, which is not how we had originally conceived the project when I joined it,” Mr. Rudin said of “Groundhog Day.” “The more it evolved, the more it felt that there was no way for me to do what I like to do, so I asked to withdraw. Not every ideal show happens in the ideal circumstances for everyone involved. I wish them well with it. It’s a great show, and I’m sure it will be a big hit.” The withdrawal was confirmed by two other producers, Lia Vollack, of Sony Pictures, and André Ptaszynski, of Whistle Pig Productions. “Scott came to us last week and said he didn’t feel this was something he wanted to continue with in its current configuration,” they said in a joint statement. “We met about it, we did our best to convince him otherwise as we are all close friends, but in the end we respect his decision. We are grateful for his work over the last two years, and we certainly wish we could have completed this journey together.” Mr. Rudin announced the “Groundhog Day” project in April 2015. He has an ongoing relationship with the Old Vic, in the form of a right of first refusal to commercial transfers of the theater’s work. Mr. Warchus is the Old Vic’s artistic director. A spokeswoman for the Old Vic did not immediately return a call seeking comment. C3 June 7, 2016 Review: ‘An Act of God’ Is Back, With Sean Hayes By Charles Isherwood I know it’s traditionally said that the Jews are God’s chosen people. But evidence to the contrary is currently on view on Broadway, where “An Act of God” opened (or rather reopened) on Monday at the Booth Theater. God’s chosen people actually appear to be — gay sitcom stars! Call it the big reveal left out of the Book of Revelation. How else to explain the presence of Sean Hayes, the perky gay star of “Will & Grace,” taking over the role of the Almighty, which was initially played by Jim Parsons, the goofy gay star of “The Big Bang Theory,” when David Javerbaum’s pricelessly funny fusillade of irreverence first opened last season. Technically speaking, Mr. Hayes is not portraying God. In his boundless mystery, God has chosen to come before us in the guise of Mr. Hayes. “For lo, I have endowed him with a winning, likable personality and know of a certainty that your apprehension of my depthless profundities will by aided by his offbeat charm,” as God- in-the-person-of-Mr.-Hayes says. God later adds, “He has no idea he’s here.” The Almighty is not wrong about Mr. Hayes’s appeal. (How could an all-knowing being be wrong?) Just as Mr. Parsons made for an endearingly cuddly deity, so does Mr. Hayes. He almost looks like a grown-up cherub — albeit one who’s been on the Atkins Diet — and he channels the same fresh-faced boyishness and impish zest that made the character Jack a constant scene-stealer on “Will and Grace.” For those who missed it the first time around, in “An Act of God,” first a series of tweets and later a book before coming to the stage, God has taken corporeal form — a holy being doing so for only the second time in Christian history (it appears to be working out better this time) — in order to correct mankind’s dire misconceptions about His thinking and His works. A certain set of Mosaic laws, specifically, have begun to grate on His nerves, despite their undeniable popularity. “Yea, I have grown weary of the Ten Commandments, in exactly the same way that Don MacLean has grown weary of ‘American Pie,’” he says. And so he has come before us to expand the list. Or rather rewrite it, since some of the originals were too good to let go. God is accompanied by two archangels: Gabriel, played with a funny air of poker-faced self-importance by James Gleason, who mans a Gutenberg Bible, reciting quotations at God’s command; and Michael, played by a feisty David Josefsberg, who takes questions from the audience and eventually, to God’s annoyance, begins challenging his ideas. Michael loses a wing for his impertinence. But mostly it’s just God up there, chatting away like an amiable neighbor who has just settled down on your sofa for a good gossip. (The handsome set, by Scott Pask, suggests a celestial talk show, its centerpiece being a sweep of pristine white couch on which God mostly perches.) Aside from the inevitable jokes about “Hamilton” — one is tiring of those, but I’ll give God a pass — and that real estate mogul who has improbably become the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, “An Act of God,” once again smoothly directed by Joe Mantello, remains essentially the same show, a gut-busting-funny riff on the never-ending folly of mankind’s attempts to fathom God’s wishes through the words of the Bible and use them to their own ends. Mr. Javerbaum’s wit, one is tempted to say, is almost as infinite as God’s wisdom. There’s a good gag a minute, maybe more, in this 90-minute show. And in Mr. Hayes, God has a delightful infinite-wisdom delivery system. His God is by turns comically admonishing, affectionate and just occasionally petulant, as who would not be when his carefully laid plans have resulted in, well, the world in its endless imperfection. “An Act of God,” by contrast, could be fancifully viewed as one of God’s better-realized creations. It’s an hour and a half of comedy heaven, and I’d gladly watch it annually. What’s Neil Patrick Harris doing next summer? C1 June 7, 2016 Review: ‘War,’ a Deathbed Drama About Identity by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins By Ben Brantley Identity. Look hard — and then harder — at that word until it wavers, fragments and dissolves before your eyes, and you begin to wonder if it amounts to anything other than an assemblage of diversely shaped letters that might as well be runes. It’s enough to give you a headache, isn’t it? Well, that’s sort of the experience of watching Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “War,” a portrait of family as a state of civil conflict that opened on Monday night at the Claire Tow Theater at Lincoln Center. This is a heavily confused play about cultural confusion, a consideration of identity — racial, social, political, anthropological, even biological — that never settles into a coherent identity of its own. You could call it a casualty of the very existential maladies it investigates. And it seems fitting that it should befall a work by Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins, who is both one of the most exciting young dramatists working today and one of the hardest to categorize. His specialty is the ambiguity of self, particularly as defined by skin color, and the futility as well as the necessity of looking for solid answers. To explore this knotty subject, Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins has taken such radically different approaches that it would be hard to immediately determine the authorship of his individual plays if his name weren’t on them. His works have included a satisfyingly cynical thriller, about murder in the workplace(“Gloria,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year), and a genre-bending detonation of a 19th-century melodrama about interracial love (the brilliant “An Octoroon”).

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