Image Credit: STEPHANIE BERGERNext Sunday, Geoffrey Rush could be on stage at L.A.’s Kodak Theatre collecting his second Oscar for The King’s Speech, but this week he began treading the boards at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as a midcentury Russian paper pusher who’s losing his marbles in The Diary of a Madman. EW stage editor Thom Geier finds the Tony-winner (for 2009’s Exit the King) a “superlative stage actor” and “a gifted physical comedian.” He gives the show an A- review, writing that “Rush rules the stage with utter fearlessness, shuttlecocking between low comedy and high tragedy with remarkable skill and bouncy energy.”  READ FULL STORY »

Image Credit: Joan MarcusJanuary’s post-holiday lull — when New York’s ticket-buying tourists flee the city — is never kind to theater grosses. Add 20-plus inches of snow and you get last week’s Broadway box office freeze, when even the top earners – Wicked, The Lion King, Jersey Boys, American Idiot, and Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark, which is still in previews — played to only 85 percent capacity. But things are looking up for the beginning of February: Melissa Etheridge stepped into American Idiot as drug pusher St. Jimmy on Tuesday for a one week stint; no word yet on how that affected ticket sales. And several new off-Broadway shows opened over the last few days, some getting pretty high marks from our critics.  READ FULL STORY »

Image Credit: Joan MarcusAndrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera is creeping up on its 23rd anniversary this month, and the top-grossing, longest-running musical in Broadway history shows no sign of retiring its mechanical chandelier. In fact, the show just broke its own weekly box office record, grossing $1.39 million for the week ending Jan. 2. (Phantom‘s previous record was $1.37 million, for the same Christmas-New Year’s week one year ago.) And it’s not the only Broadway record-breaker this week. Over at the slightly larger Gershwin Theatre, Wicked shattered the mark for the top-grossing week in Broadway history: $2.23 million for the week. (Previous record: $2.15 million, set just last week by the eight-year-old hit.)

Across the Great White Way, box office was up 28 percent over the previous week, to a robust $34.7 million. Even better, every single show on the boards showed an increase in ticket sales for the week. Unfortunately, eight shows were entertaining their final audiences last week — and another five shows will have their final curtain this weekend. That will leave roughly half of all Broadway houses dark for the traditionally slow winter months, though producers promise many new arrivals by the late-April deadline for this year’s Tony Awards.

More Stage coverage from EW.com:
‘Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark’ exclusive: Bono and The Edge in NYC to attend all preview performances
‘Spider-Man’ stuntman set to be released from rehab center
Billy Crudup will return to Tom Stoppard’s ‘Arcadia’ on Broadway
John Leguizamo will star in Broadway solo play ‘Ghetto Klown’

Broadway theaters earned nearly $25 million for the week ending Dec. 26, with grosses up $1.1 million over the previous week, according to the Broadway League. But with a whopping 10 shows set to close this Sunday (including the just-announced early shutdown of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), Santa wasn’t exactly fair in doling out holiday bonuses.

In fact, the biggest presents were bestowed on long-standing hits like Wicked (up $521,000 for the week), The Merchant of Venice (up $454,000), The Phantom of the Opera (up $267,000) and The Lion King (up $252,000). Even the much-buzzed-about musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark raked in $944,000 and played to 100 percent capacity — despite delivering only four performances due to a widely reported on-stage mishap that sent a cast member to the hospital and scuttled several shows for safety checks.

Some soon-to-shutter shows, like the deliberately short-lived holiday hit Elf (up $107,000, to a theater-record $1.6 million), saw a box office boost. West Side Story and Fela! also saw upticks from the previous week; the latter even played to 93.6 percent capacity. But even some surviving shows appear to be struggling: If Lombardi (playing to 59 percent capacity), Million Dollar Quartet (52 percent capacity), and La Cage aux Folles (51 percent) can’t consistently fill houses during tourist-heavy Christmas week, one wonders how they’ll fare during the traditionally slower post-holiday winter months. To borrow a phrase from Jerry Herman’s Mame, they need a little (more) Christmas right this very minute.

Image Credit: Paul KolnikOnly three of the shows on my list of the top 10 theater productions of 2010 are still playing: a stripped-down revival of the musical La Cage aux Folles, the ingenious, soon-to-close film-to-stage adaptation Brief Encounter, and the Sondheim revival A Little Night Music (a 2009 production that got a boost of invigorating new energy last summer when Bernadette Peters stepped into the lead role). Several of these shows were launched with deliberately limited runs, it’s true — the Denzel Washington-led revival of Fences would have played for as long as Washington dared to stay away from his movie career; likewise the Alfred Molina-topped art drama Red. But I openly confess my disappointment that theatergoers stayed away (in droves) from my No. 1 pick: The Scottsboro Boys, the final Kander-Ebb musical and a moving, challenging, melodic tribute to nine real-life victims of racial injustice. It was easily the best show of the year — one hopes it has a long and fruitful life in regional theaters in the coming years. Here are the rest of my selections:

1. The Scottsboro Boys (Broadway)
2. Red (Broadway)
3. Clybourne Park (Off Broadway/Washington, D.C.)
4. La Cage aux Folles (Broadway)
5. Gatz (Off Broadway)
6. Brief Encounter (Brooklyn/Minneapolis/Broadway)
7. The Orphans’ Home Cycle (Off Broadway)
8. Fences (Broadway)
9. A Little Night Music (Broadway)
10. Stuffed and Unstrung (Off Broadway)

So, PopWatchers. Now’s you chance to weigh in. What did I get right (and wrong)? And what was your favorite theater production of the year?