“This is a bit of a surprise,” marveled David Muse, artistic director of Studio Theatre, accepting the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Play during a ceremony held at the Lincoln Theatre Monday, April 6. His company’s 2014 production of Cock, Mike Bartlett’s drama about a gay man contemplating leaving his longtime same-sex partner for a woman, was an upset winner in the crown-jewel category that also included Studio’s most successful production ever, Bad Jews. Cock also defeated Olney Theatre’s Colossal, about the struggles of a gay college football player. Still, Olney’s production took home four awards, including Outstanding Original new play or musical.
Technically, Cock was one of two works crowned Outstanding Play at the 31st annual awards ceremony, presented by Theatre Washington to honor works that opened in 2014. For the first time, the Helen Hayes honored two people or productions in most of its leading categories, nearly doubling the number of awards in a slightly confusing process. Essentially, there are “Hayes” nominees, including Cock, or productions distinguished by a higher ratio of Actors’ Equity members to non-union contractors, and then there are “Helen” nominees, with fewer union members, often associated with smaller or newer companies. Most significant among the smaller “Helen” companies was Theater Alliance, which won seven awards, more than any other company. (Kennedy Center was second best, with five.)
Alliance’s wins included 2014’s other Outstanding Play, The Wonderful World of Dissocia, and Langston Hughes’s Black Nativity, one of three Outstanding Musicals honored. The other two were the result of a tie in the Hayes category: Kennedy Center’s Side Showand Signature Theatre’s Sunday in the Park with George. Side Show also won for its ensemble and costume designer Paul Tazewell, while Sunday won for its director, Matthew Gardiner, and lead actress, Brynn O’Malley.
Other winning highlights at the 31st annual ceremony: Erin Weaver, who won for her supporting work in the musical Ordinary Days at Round House Theatre and Mother Courage and Her Children at Arena Stage; Sam Ludwig as lead Hayes actor in Olney’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying; Barbara Walsh for her scarily good portrayal of the deranged fundamentalist mother in Studio Theatre’s 2ndStage Helen show Carrie: The Musical; Nanna Ingvarsson for her astounding performance in the one-woman tour-de-force The Amish Project, a Helen production from Rick Hammerly’s fledgling theater collective Factory 449; and e’marcus Harper-Short, honored for his musical direction of Theater Allance’s Black Nativity.
Forest Hills is alive with the sounds of salsa, disco, and '70s soul inside the Castro household, ground zero for the devastating domestic events of John Leguizamo's new drama The Other Americans.
One of seven world premieres marking Arena Stage's 2024-25 season, The Other Americans arrives in a powerhouse production directed by award-winning actor-director Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and led by Leguizamo as proudly Colombian-American laundromat owner and family man Nelson Castro.
Nelson holds court in his expansive home in affluent, mostly white Forest Hills, Queens, having moved his family from what he calls "ghetto-ass" Jackson Heights. A scrappy business owner with a small empire of 'mats all over the borough, he might say he's living the American dream, but we're here to witness him waking up to very harsh reality.
“It's all about nourishing yourself -- mind, body, and soul through the arts,” says Kate Villa. The Kennedy Center’s Director of Comedy and Institutional Programming is telling me about “Nourish,” an array of events centered on “the profound impact of food and artistic expression on our lives.”
The arts and wellness festival, which places a strong emphasis on food, runs through the end of October at the nation’s performing arts center in Washington, D.C.
“I'm excited to bring in the culinary arts because it's something that's underappreciated as an art form,” Villa, her jet-black hair styled in a short, Ina Garten-inspired bob, says during an energetic and wide-ranging conversation one crisp fall morning.
Sometimes, a book or movie or play speaks so directly to the zeitgeist, it's as if the artists are responding in real-time to a conversation we're all having. That's the case with John Leguizamo's The Other Americans, currently in its world-premiere run at Arena Stage. In the aftermath of the presidential election, amid feverish appraisals of Latino voters' support for Trump, this modern-day tragedy about a Queens Latino family fraying at the edges arrives at a moment of perfect relevance.
Offering insight into the struggles of son-of-an-immigrant laundromat owner Nelson Castro -- portrayed by Leguizamo, whose own family immigrated to the U.S. from Colombia when he was three -- the play also tackles everything from mental health to housing discrimination.
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