A Week Of New York Theater Tweets 12/21/09

What did you think was the best theater of the decade in New York? We held a contest, mostly via the New York Theater Twitter account, to find out your favorites. That consumed a LOT of the twittering this week, but it was worth it: The results were illuminating, and added something to the other year-end summaries and top ten lists. Words you will see over and over again below: “Ruined.” David Cromer/”Our Town.” “Orphans’ Home Cycle.”

Monday, December 14, 2009

The word “robot” was coined in a 1921 play. Now in Japan, robots are performing in a play, alongside human actors

“The Man in Room 306,” a one-man show that imagines Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine motel the night before he was murdered, will be presented at the 59E59th Street Theater starting on King’s birthday, January 15

Lincoln Center is launching its own TKTS-like booth at the newly renovated David Rubenstein Atrium for day-of discounts to shows at Lincoln Center (including South Pacific). Starting on January 7, it will also offer $20 tickets for 20 days.

John Cullum, Brandon Victor Dixon, Colman Domingo (Passing Strange) to star in Kander & Ebb’s “The Scottsboro Boys”

Tuesday, December 15th
Today, Wicked becomes the 20th longest-running show on Broadway – 2,535 performances
Longest-running Broadway shows still running: Phantom (1st of all shows), Chicago (7th), Lion King (9th), Mamma Mia (13th), Wicked (20th)

Lin-Manuel Miranda will star in the film version of his ‘In the Heights’ directed by Kenny Ortega, who directed all the “High School Musical” movies. Take that, Corbin Bleu haters. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, see last week’s tweets, “A Week of New York Theater Tweets 12/14/09″)

Only in The Theater Tweet from @nyneofuturists: “If you own a NYC theater space that is affordable and can support a full hot tub, just let us know.”

Producers talk of moving Horton Foote’s “Orphans’ Home Cycle” to Broadway. My review of Part I, The Story of A Childhood

Wednesday, December 16th
The economics of Broadway means there will be more shows with Hollywood stars for limited runs. Bloomberg News

Tonight’s performance of “Our Town” at the Barrow Street Theater will make it the longest-running “Our Town” in the play’s 71-year history.
The original Broadway 1938 production of Thorton Wilder’s “Our Town” ran 336 performances. Tonight’s Barrow Street show is its 337th.
Here is my goofy rumination on this production, comparing “Our Town” to “My Space.”

Top 10 Top 10 Lists Of The Decade, 2000 to 2009 (top movies, ‘Internet moments’ etc.)

Thursday, December 17th
Favorite Theater Of The Decade: The Results
In chronological order:
The Complete Lost Works of Samuel Beckett
I Am My Own Wife
Spring Awakening
Next to Normal
Hair
Ruined
For descriptions, explanations, and more pictures, as well as quotes from the theatergoing participants, go to the results page.

Terry Teachout’s Take On Theater in 2009: Loved “Ruined,” hated “Bye, Bye Birdie,” worships David Cromer. from the Wall Street Journal.

What’s Britain’s biggest growth industry? Playwriting, apparently” The number of plays produced in England has doubled over the past 6 years.

My review of Horton Foote’s next 3 plays: Love Makes A Difference: Orphans’ Home Cycle Review Part II – in their plain underplayed way so engaging, so moving, that at several moments it can be hard to avoid the embarrassing spectacle of quietly crying in your seat.

Stanley Tucci to Direct ‘Lend Me a Tenor‘ on Broadway

Friday, December 18th
Broadway dodges threatened theater workers’ strike. Crain’s

National Endowment for the Arts Survey: 47 Million Watch Music, Theater, or Dance Performances Online Each Week. Washington Post

Tim Robbins’ theater company wanted to go out of business. Instead, he said: WTF — and created the WTF Festival, offering a new economic model for struggling independent theater. NPR

More and more, theaters are making performances accessible to the blind and the deaf. Boston Globe

Ben Brantley’s 2009 favorite theater (alphabetically): Brief Encounter (pictured). The Brother/Sister Plays. The Emperor Jones. Fela. Mary Stuart. Next Fall. Next to Normal. The Norman Conquests. The Orphans’ Home Cycle. A Streetcar Named Desire.

Saturday, December 19th
Today in Broadway history: The Music Man opened, 1957, starring Robert Preston and Barbara Cook

The New Yorker Magazine’s list of the best Off Broadway in 2009 (“in no particular order”): Ruined. Telephone. This Beautiful City. Our Town. Circle Mirror Transformation. The Lily’s Revenge. Machines, Machines, Machines…Twelfth Night. Beowulf: A Thousand Nights of Baggage. Angela’s Mixtape. Chautauqua (pictured).

List of best and worst theater of 2009 from Time Out New York’s three theater writers

Entertainment Weekly says it, so it’s official: Theater geeks are in (and computer nerds are out)

Entertainment Weekly’s best plays of 2009: 1. Ruined. 2. Hair. 3. The Brother/Sister Plays. 4. The Norman Conquests. 5. God of Carnage. 6. Our Town/ Brighton Beach Memoirs (These are two different plays, one Off Broadway, one on — one a continuing hit, the other closed after a week — but put together as one entry because they were both directed by David Cromer). 7. A Streetcar Named Desire. 8. Let Me Down Easy. 9. Twelfth Night. 10. Becky Shaw
More than half of Entertainment Weekly’s selections for best theater in 2009 were Off-Broadway

‘Race’ and Race On Broadway -my review of the David Mamet play: “… I would not say that the main problem is that “Race” suffers from a lack of imagination, as represented by the title, even though this is the same playwright who three decades ago entitled one of his early plays “Revenge of the Space Pandas, or Binky Rudich and the Two-Speed Clock.”

Sunday, December 20th
One theatrical trend in 2009 was the marathon event — Les Éphémères, The Norman Conquests, Lipsynch, The Lily’s Revenge, The Orphans’ Home Cycle. These were all plays offered in several parts or all at once, that last at least eight hours.

Christopher Isherwood: The best theater in 2009 were “little shows” without celebrities,such as “Our Town” and “This” and “The Emperor Jones” (pictured).

“The Best Theater of 2009″ from The New Yorkers’ Hilton Als is a decidedly quirky list of five, um, events e.g. Diane Keaton at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Actual plays Hilton Als seemed to like in 2009 (it’s hard to tell): Quartett, Idiot Savant, Desire Under the Elms. He even misspells the name of an actor he lauds — Pablo Schreiber from Desire Under The Elms.

From @scandalwomen: Today in 1928 The Ethel Barrymore Theater opened in New York, named after the actress, the great aunt of Drew Barrymore.

Avatar fans, take note From @andynyman: The first presentation of 3D films to a paying audience took place at Manhattan’s Astor Theater on June 10, 1915

British playwright Nichola McAuliffe, in NYC for her play, writes for a British paper about New York as a nightmare

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Brittany Murphy (November 10, 1977 to December 20, 2009) appeared on Broadway as Catherine in Arthur Miller’s “A View From The Bridge” from November, 1997 to August, 1998. Ben Brantley talked of “a cast that approaches perfection” and noted Murphy’s “youthful effervescence.” Don Shewey wrote: “Twenty-year-old Brittany Murphy, making her Broadway debut as Catherine, embodies adult flirtatiousness dangerously wrapped around a child’s need for affection.”

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Photographs from the top: Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff in “Spring Awakening”; robot thespians in Japan; Craig Alan Edwards in “The Man in Room 306″; Erin Mackey and Dee Roscioli, the current stars of “Wicked” on Broadway; writer Horton Foote in a collage of some of his works; poster from Barrow Street Theater’s productino of “Our Town”; Condola Rashad, Cherise Boothe and Quincy Tyler Bernstine in Lynn Nottage’s “Ruined”; Hannah Yelland and Tristan Sturrock in “Brief Encounter”; scene from “Chautauqua”; David Alan Grier in “Race”; John Douglas Thompson in “The Emperor Jones.”; Brittany Murphy