Comment for your chance to win a free pair of tickets to Broadway's FELA!

FELA!, the most critically acclaimed new musical of the season, has received three Tony Awards^®: Best Choreography, Best Costume Design for a Musical and Best Sound Design of a Musical!

Now featuring Grammy winner and multi-platinum recording artist Patti LaBelle!

His story inspired a nation. His music inspires the world. FELA! tells the true story of the legendary Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, whose soulful Afrobeat rhythms ignited a generation. Motivated by his mother, a civil rights champion, he defied a corrupt and oppressive military government and devoted his life and music to the struggle for freedom and human dignity.
FELA! is a triumphant tale of courage, passion and love, featuring Fela Kuti’s captivating music and the visionary direction and choreography of Tony Award winner Bill T. Jones.

FELA! is currently playing at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre on W. 49th st through January 2nd. Here is your chance to win a free pair of tickets to this Broadway hit! Just post your answer to the following trivia question in the comments section below and also include your email address so I can contact the winner. I will be accepting answers until next Wednesday, November 24th at 3pm so the winner will have a lovely Thanksgiving present!

Bill T. Jones, Tony winning choreographer of FELA! also won a Tony award for choreographing which other hit Broadway musical?

Next to Normal to Close?

There has been no official announcement from the producers so I will wait until then to really get upset, but rumors are flying that Next to Normal will shutter at the Booth theatre on January 2nd of 2011. This happens to be the closing date of FELA! as well as 5 other shows. Unfortunately the winter season after the holidays can be perilous for many Broadway shows. This wonderful production, winner of 2009 TONY awards for best score and best actress in a musical will surely be missed and its absence will leave a gaping hole on West 45th street.

Bernadette Peters to Star in Kennedy Center's Follies

It was just announced today that Bernadette Peters will headline the upcoming Kennedy Center production of Stephen Sondheim's Follies as Sally Durant Plummer. As Sally, she will perform some of Sondheim's most beloved songs including the heartbreaking "In Buddy's Eyes" and "Losing My Mind." This truly is the year for Peters & Soneheim as she is currently playing the role of Desire Armfeldt in the current Broadway revival of his A Little Night Music. The original production of Follies opened on Broadway on April 4, 1971 and ran for over 500 performances. It features music & lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by James Goldman. Hal Prince directed the original production Michael Bennett choreographed.

Other casting includes Kim Cattrall as Phyllis Rogers Stone, Danny Burstein as Buddy, and John Dossett as Ben. Peters and Dossett previously shared the stage in the 2003 Sam Mendes revival of Gypsy as Rose and Herbie. Danny Burstein is fresh off of his acclaimed run as Luther Billis in the recent South Pacific revival and will head into the new production of Women on the Verge of A Nervous Breakdown before rehearsals for Follies begin. Cattrall is perhaps best known for portraying Samantha Jones on the hit HBO series Sex and the City and the subsequent films, but she has enjoyed an extensive stage career on London's West End stages.

Tickets for this sure-to-be-wonderful production go on sale January 30th and the run begins May 7, 2011 and closes on June 5, 2011. Now I'm not one for starting rumors, but the last successful Kennedy Center production (Ragtime in 2009) transferred to Broadway and there is certainly a chance that this production, with its amazing source material and star-filled cast, could be Broadway bound. But regardless, what a great opportunity for DC theatergoers to see Bernadette Peters, a living legend, live onstage.

Fun Fact of the Day: The Gamble of Investing in a Broadway Show

It is no secret that investing in a Broadway show can often be a big risk, but in actuality, 2/3 of all Broadway shows fail to make back their initial investments. In theatre lingo, we call it "recouping" when a show makes back the money initially put into it by investors. At that point all the money that the show makes above its weekly "nut"--or the sum total of its weekly operating costs--becomes profit for the show's producers. So what this basically means is that for every mega hit like The Phantom of the Opera that recoups and makes a huge profit every week, there are two shows like The Little Mermaid and 9 to 5 that are forced to close on Broadway before making back their initial investment. I should note that while some shows fail to break even on Broadway, they often have great success with national tours and subsequent regional productions.

So why do producers continue to invest in Broadway shows? Because for every Taboo and Caroline or Change, there is a Wicked.

Barbie's Showtune of the Day #8: Tell Me On A Sunday/See Me On A Monday

So I've often made my opinions of Andrew Lloyd Webber quite clear--I am completely aware that his music is less intellectual than other composers (cough Stephen Sondheim) and that he recycles melodies from show to show, but he does have some killer songs, at least in my opinion. One that I recently discovered was "Tell Me On A Sunday, Please" which Bernadette Peters performed in the Webber musical Song & Dance. While I didn't enjoy the show as a whole, this song really grabbed me. The lyrics really tell a story and the melody has an inherent emotional life that really struck a chord with me. When I attempted to find a video of Peters performing this song, I found a really funny clip from Forbidden Broadway, an off-Broadway cabaret-style show that spoofs popular musicals. This particular number pokes fun at the demands of Peters' role in the show, from Webber's penchant for long musical phrases that rarely allow the singers to take a breath to his tendencies to write notes that jump all over the map and leave the singers exhausted. I of course was not around yet when the show was playing in 1985/1986 but apparently it was a common occurrence for Bernadette to miss shows due to vocal strain and this song, "See Me On A Monday" plays heavily on that. While I think this video is hilarious, do yourself a favor and also listen to Peters singing the original track "Tell Me On A Sunday".