Laurents may be directing his own West Side Story. He says:

There was a revival in the 1970s that was no good. It was too white-bread. I've come up with a way of doing it that will make it absolutely contemporary without changing a word or a note. And what will annoy you is that I'm not going to tell you what it is.

I'm not particularly losing sleep over it.

Unless that way of making it contemporary is a shitty reality show called "How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria, I've Just Met A Girl Named Maria".

Seriously, do we really think Arthur Laurents has any idea today what "contemporary" is?

A review of [Political] Theatre:



(Thanks to The Playgoer)

• It's in Print now

Every complaint about the Tonys has already been aimed at the Oscars, except for that the Oscars have famous people.

I don't think there's anything they can do to make these award shows better except for to get rid of the awards part, or get rid of all of the speeches at least. We already know throwing Jimmy Fallon in front of the camera doesn't work.

Wouldn't be too surprised to see this moving to PBS sometime soon...

Ben Brantley was recently sent to London to see 28 plays in 21 days.

Do you know what that means?

That's right! We finally got rid of him!

Don't be surprised if Brantley "accidentally" loses his passport. That's part two of the already half-complete plan.

Visiting the NYTimes Theatre Section today, I caught this interesting ad:



Really? A Chorus Line is the best musical EVER? Isn't that kind of pushing it?

Maybe "best" is Latin for "most overrated". Yo, where's my latin scholars at?

This sounds like it just might be worse than the stage show was....

• Beyonce in Aida... (scroll down more than half way... till the Tarzan picture)

In other news, sometimes I look at my webstats to see who's linking, when traffic hits, etc. Interesting to note for the month of June...

• 223 people who found this website searched "Jonathan Groff Gay"
• 38 came here with "lea michele sex scene"
• 26: "idina menzel pregnant"
  
• and 167 people actually searched "Broadway Abridged"! Woot!
  

A fair amount of searches are for scripts to Broadway shows. That's normal.

These not so much, with only a few searches each...

• audra mcdonald white father
• parker posey wallpaper
• how to do asshole sex
• laura jordan
  (interesting, because though Laura appears in an abridge it's not by her actual name)
• what s the monkey s name in the broadway play wicked?
• orchestra music in palace scene of coming to america
• actual fucking in spring awakening
• sir lancelot is not a real person give a reason why
• gil varod (WHO IS GOOGLING ME? Oh that's probably myself)
  
• frank langella let himself go
  
• gil de la tourette (WHO IS GIVING ME TOURETTES?)
  
• will this bewitching floozy seduce this humble newsie
  
• genital cuffs picture
  
• on the glass menagerie what was laura blows out the candles what that symbolism
  (Yeah what was that? "Symbolism"? Seriously what WAS that?)
  
• singing voice change when pregnant
  

I've excluded dozens and dozens of variations of people who are searching to see if Spring Awakening castmates are gay, naked, or both.

Sorry, was on vacation. In case you were too, $450 is the amount Mel Brooks is charging for top seats to Young Frankenstein.

I think Mel Brooks made the right choice, and should have considered an even $500.

I base this opinion solely on the fact that there are too many blogs complaining about this top ticket price, so I thought I'd take the path less followed.

Also: New Broadway Abridged Live Radio Edition coming late July or early August.