Beauty Break: Tony Awards Best Dressed

by Nathaniel R

BERNADETTE PETERS, LESLIE ODOM JR, JEREMY POPE

The following stars are presented In no particular order, just the looks we loved the most on Tony night. Turtlenecks are definitely back for men as is lots of color (which has been decades in coming and for which we could not be more grateful) and as with the Emmys, basic black for women is gaining renewed force. 

Fashion is of course highly subjective and what looks great on one person could well look hideous on other but that's why it's fun to gawk at and think about. Which were your favourite looks from the big night?

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Tony Awards 2021: Winners, Performances, and Takeaways

by Nathaniel R

The incredible Audra McDonald hosted the 74th annual Tony Awards last night

Did you watch the Tony Awards on Paramount Plus or the "Broadway's Back" concert on CBS last night? Two years and three months after the 73rd Tony Awards and 11 months after the nominations were announced the 74th "Annual" Tony Awards were finally held. Those awards were celebrating the very short very depressing theater season of 2019/2020 which ended with lots of sickness (Moulin Rouge the Musical in particular was hit very hard by COVID-19 in the spring of 2020) and lots of crushed dreams as several shows never opened and others were pushed back two years and some had to close well before they ran out of steam. Cut to September 2021 and the shows that did somehow survive the two years shutdown are reopening or will reopen by the end of the year.

Let's look at the winners, the hightlights, and what we can clean from all of this after the jump... 

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Review: Aretha biopic "Respect"

by Patrick Ball

The scene is a packed movie theater in Oakland, California on Christmas Day, 2006. The film is Dreamgirls. We’re finishing up the iconic musical number “Listen”, a solid 75-80% into the movie. Beyoncé’s Deena Jones hits the last passionate note and the audience loses it, clapping and hollering, and a woman stands up and screams “You GO, EFFIE!” That was how powerful Jennifer Hudson’s Academy Award winning performance was, that this woman was ascribing every fabulous moment in the movie to her and her character, even when another character/actress was onscreen.

Hudson has had a bumpy road as a film actress since then, but is back in a big way in Respect, the long awaited Aretha Franklin biopic...

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Amazing Sondheim Celebration, 'Take Me to the World'

by Nathaniel R

Meryl will drink to that! (and she did not disappoint for Sondheim's 90th)ICYMI last night (and thousands did since it started over an hour late!) make sure to watch the Sondheim birthday celebration concert benefitting ASTEP (Artists Striving to End Poverty). While it's reductive to cite favourite moments because the concert was chalk full of life-affirming, ear-pleasuring, moving music and delicate or funny performances, we've had to share a few notes after the jump.

But honestly we loved it all. It doubled as not just a tribute to the world's greatest living musical theater composer but as a melancholy collective longing for the return of Broadway which originally housed most of those tremendous songs...

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All-Star Free Virtual Sondheim Concert This Sunday!

by Nathaniel R

Meryl & Bernadette both played "The Witch" in productions of Into the Woods. But which songs will they sing at this concert?

Please place this in the "silver linings" bin of the horrific coronavirus pandemic. There will be a virtual concert this Sunday April 26th at 8 PM EST celebrating Stephen Sondheim's 90th birthday. You will NOT believe the performer's list. It's jaw-dropping in its starpower...

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