Latest news with #OrpheumTheater
Yahoo
06-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Kenan Thompson & Allison Janney Honored At Las Culturistas Culture Awards With Titan Of Culture & Lifetime Of Culture Accolades
Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang's Las Culturistas Culture Awards made their splashy debut on Bravo, honoring Kenan Thompson and Allison Janney with special trophies. The award show that celebrates culture honored the SNL star with the Titan of Culture award, while Janney was presented with the Lifetime of Culture award. More from Deadline 'Las Culturistas Culture Awards' 2025 Red Carpet Photos: Paige DeSorbo, Bowen Yang, Jamie Lee Curtis & More Las Culturistas Culture Awards 2025 Nominations List: Paige DeSorbo, Lady Gaga, Michael B. Jordan, Egg McMuffin & More Score Nods 'RHOM' Season 7 Midseason Trailer: Kiki Breaks Down Over "Death Threats," Adriana & Julia Friendship Fallout & Marysol Accused Of Being A Manipulator Former SNL co-star Aidy Bryant took the stage at The Orpheum Theater to present Thompson with the accolade. 'Give the Black man the black one,' Thompson joked as he took the stage, referring to the color of his trophy. Thompson's clip package included scenes from his days at Nickelodeon's All That and Kenan & Kel, as well as his time on the NBC late-night sketch show. 'Thank you very much, wow! This is amazing! Yes, it is I, thespian Kenan Thompson. You know me from my work, including but not limited to the words, 'Tweedle-dee-doo,' 'What?!', 'Shut up!', 'No! My Gucci shoes!', and ''Ooh-wee, what's up with that?'' He continued, 'It really is a dream come true for me to win a Las Culturistas Culture Award. Thank you to Aidy 'Sweet Baby' Bryant. Aidy was on SNL for 10 years. And that is only 190 years less than me. I have been on your TV forever. I'm going to be in your hearts for even longer, I hope.' To present Janney with her award, Kristen Wiig took the stage as herself, versus a character she may or may not have played earlier in the show, who was said to be the Riddler's secretary. 'I don't think anything better will ever happen to me in my life. That was extraordinary. May I just say that after 30 years, I am finally excited to receive an award … that is worthy of accepting while not wearing any pants,' Janney said while accepting her award. 'Bowen and Matt, thank you so much for having me tonight. You don't really sit around thinking about your impact on culture. But thanks to you and this very sparkly award — this is f**king gorgeous! I could wear it as a hat — I want to thank Kristen [Wiig] for being here. Working with her on Palm Royale, you all know – she's magic and I love her very much of being here tonight.' She continued, 'I've had an incredibly lucky life and I've had the opportunity of working with so many amazing people and one parakeet — but seriously, I've always said that acting is a team sport, and working in an ensemble with a community of artists brings me more joy than anything I ever could have imagined. And to have my work become part of the cultural zeitgeist and recognized by the Las Culturistas community, it's incredibly humbling and probably my favorite award show I've ever attended.' Now let's all remember how Jamie Lee Curtis greeted Allison Janney on the red carpet of the award show in the video below. Following its broadcast on Bravo, Las Culturistas Culture Awards is also available to stream on Peacock. Best of Deadline 'Wednesday' Season 2 Soundtrack: All The Songs In Part 1 'The Buccaneers' Season 2 Soundtrack: From Griff To Sabrina Carpenter 2025-26 Awards Season Calendar: Dates For Emmys, Oscars, Grammys & More
USA Today
06-08-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Biggest moments from the Last Culturistas Awards, the show for the meme age
Missed the biggest moments from the Last Culturistas Culture awards? I don't think so, honey! The ceremony, essentially one long bit hosted by "Saturday Night Live" star Bowen Yang and his podcast cohost Matt Rogers, aired on Bravo Tuesday, Aug. 5. With over 100 categories, it is the ultimate entertainment industry spoof, swapping competitions like "best supporting actress" for "excellence in lesbianism" (which was not won by an actual person but instead by "probably your grandma even though she was married to your grandpa for 50 years.") Once a smaller offshoot of Rogers and Yang's popular "Las Culturistas" podcast, the awards show, televised for the first time this year, appeared more like a bona fide Hollywood event than an inside-turned-outside joke. Filmed in July, the awards brought major stars like Allison Janey, Jeff Goldblum and Ben Platt to the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles. Here's a look at the biggest (and oddest) awards of the night. Eva Longoria Award for Tiny Woman, Huge Impact Winner: Quinta Brunson The "Abbott Elementary" star was presented the award by "Survivor" star and recent memoirist Parvati Shallow. Brunson, who is under 5 feet tall, was nominated alongside the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sabrina Carpenter. "I want to say: To every bathroom mirror that told me I couldn't see, I can see me now!" she said in her acceptance speech. Creatine Award for Straight Male Excellence Winner: Andy Samberg A jocular spin on hypermasculinity, the award, presented by hunks-of-the-moment Dylan Efron and Jack Quaid went to "SNL" alum Samberg. In an ironically fratty fit and tone, the comedian accepted the honor by saying: "It's not that complicated, bro. Just do the work like I do: Rise and grind. When your wife hands you a thank you card she wrote, sign it. And broskis, you gotta wash your hands at least once a week." Best New Artist Award Winner: Gabby Windey The "Bachelor" alum took home the sincerely named but sarcastically doled out Best New Artist award, winning no doubt for her turn as a fan favorite on the reality show "Traitors." Like Yang and Rogers, she hosts a popular podcast, "Long Winded." "This is not the first time a gay man has helped me win something," Windey, who won "Traitors" alongside Efron, joked in her speech. "Big shoutout to Dylan Efron." (Efron is in a long-term relationship with his high school girlfriend.)
Yahoo
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'The Passion and the Cross' set for Orpheum Theater
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) — A local production group is set to bring an Easter musical back to downtown Sioux Falls. The pieces are in place at the Orpheum Theater, now it's all about the final details as 'The Passion and the Cross' returns for a fifth consecutive spring. Documents shed light on pair of shootings & wounded Police officer 'It's an encounter with the witnesses who were there with Jesus, the men, women, children, the religious, the non-religious, people of all walks of life,' show creator Brent Grosvenor said. 'The Passion and the Cross' features an all-local cast of about 140 adults and children. He says the recipe for success is staying organized. 'Musical theater lives and dies by the ensemble. The energy, the vocals, the quality of those large scenes, so we iron all that out first and work hard, hard, hard through those and then work out all the details beyond that with our smaller scenes with either three or five or twelve people in it,' Grosvenor said. 'It's a large group, but everyone's so supportive of each other and get along really well. It's a great group,' actor Mark Ditmarson said. Ditmarson will be playing the role of Simon Peter for the third consecutive year. 'He's very bold, he kind of thinks he's a leader and he does a lot of good things, but sometimes puts his foot in his mouth,' Ditmarson said. After taking a 20-year break from acting, Ditmarson has been part of all five productions of The Passion and the Cross. 'It's impacted my life personally a ton over the past five years, as well as my daughter who's been involved with most of the productions as well,' Ditmarson said. And whether it's your first time or fifth time seeing the show, Grosvenor says it's always a learning experience. 'I think people need to come because they'll get a good broad, as well as a detailed understanding of who Jesus is as the Messiah, as the Redeemer, as the Savior of the world, the hope of the world,' Grosvenor said. And opening night is only 48 hours away. 'We're going to be ready. Two more dress rehearsals though to polish is up and fine tune everything,' Grosvenor said. The 'Passion and the Cross' opens Friday night at the Orpheum Theater and runs through Saturday, April 19. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Premiere Playhouse set to tackle Shakespeare
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) — A play that dates back to the 16th century is about to hit the stage at the Orpheum Theater in downtown Sioux Falls. The stage is set for William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Orpheum Theater. 'It's one of Shakespeare's best, it's one of his most accessible, and it's one of his funniest, so we decided to do this show because we thought everyone could use a laugh,' The Premiere Playhouse Managing Artistic Director Oliver Mayes said. Mayes thought tackling Shakespeare during season 22 was worth the risk. Calls for help to Senator Rounds triple as DOGE cuts hit South Dakotans 'Shakespeare is the great of the greats. He wrote so many things that we kind of live by and we don't even realize that, so to kind of un-crack those scripts and unlock all the beautiful metaphors, similes, and illustrations within them is fun for our actors,' Mayes said. 'There's a lot of research that you have to do that kind of goes into understanding the words that you're speaking since it's from a different time period, the words are maybe a bit more flowery and poetic, so there's a lot of subtext that you kind of have to comb through,' Sioux Falls actor Alex Newcomb Weiland said. Newcomb Weiland is playing the role of Hermia and says A Midsummer Night's Dream is her favorite Shakespeare show. 'I love the contrast in the show, I love the humor in the show, I think the humor is timeless and very fun to play regardless of what era you're setting it in,' Newcomb Weiland said. The comedic masterpiece is more than 400 years old but will feature some original aspects, including a more contemporary setting. 'We have set it in the late 1920s of Athens, Georgia, it's usually in Athens, Greece, so you're maybe going to see some flapper-wear and things of that sort, get kind of a jazz ambiance to it,' Mayes said. And the all-local cast is ready for opening night. 'Now that we have our costumes and the set, we were in rehearsals for so long and now we've been transported into the Orpheum, I think we've all even stepped up our game more so an audience will just kind of seal it for us, and so we're really excited to share it with the rest of the community,' Newcomb Weiland said. A Midsummer Night's Dream opens Thursday night at the Orpheum Theater and runs through Sunday, March 30th. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
New York Times
22-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Finding a Common Thread in Jonathan Larson's Unheard Music
In his Tony-winning musical, 'Rent,' Jonathan Larson asked: 'How do you measure a year in the life?' The question took on an even heavier weight, with striking resonance, after Larson died unexpectedly at the age of 35 in 1996, hours before the show's first preview. In the years after, dozens of his unheard songs were discovered, revealing the inner workings of a prolific artist looking for his big break. Now, a new musical, 'The Jonathan Larson Project,' celebrates those songs and raises a new question: How do you thread together snippets of Jonathan Larson's creative output into a musical? 'It was like an expedition,' the show's creator, Jennifer Ashley Tepper, said of what it was like to pore over the archive of Larson's work at the Library of Congress. 'Like a musical theater historian expedition, because you would go and you would find one lyric that sort of matched up with one demo that sort of matched up with an idea of another notebook.' The show is a collage of Larson's life as told through his unproduced music, some of it written when he was as young as 22, including compositions for downtown revues and cabarets, music from Larson's futuristic dystopian musical 'Superbia' and songs cut from 'Rent' and 'Tick, Tick … Boom!' The new show, which is in previews and opens March 10 at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village, has been years in the making. It evolved from a 2018 song cycle that Tepper staged at 54 Below, a basement cabaret club where she is the creative and programming director. Partly a tribute to Larson, the musical is also its own universal story of the artist's struggle: surviving in an unforgiving city, plumbing the depths of lived experience to create something authentic, weathering rejection after rejection. On a recent afternoon at one of Larson's old haunts, the Ear Inn on Spring Street, another question hung in the air: Who is Laurie? A former lover? A fictitious archetype? She's just one of the many mysteries in the hundreds of cassette tapes, scripts and music demos the writer left behind. Over turkey burgers and beer, Tepper, the director John Simpkins, the music supervisor Charlie Rosen and the actors Adam Chanler-Berat and Taylor Iman Jones discussed what it took to produce a cohesive musical out of disparate songs and material, and what it means to keep Larson's legacy alive. There's something of a mystique to Larson. ('Kind of a weird juju about it,' as Jones put it. 'That's positive. Things just keep falling in place.') So it was fitting that we met at the Ear Inn and, later, visited Larson's old apartment (thanks to a generous current tenant), where he lived for 12 years, and died. Larson, who brought humanity to myriad social issues like addiction and homophobia, never shied away from politics. In songs like 'White Male World,' written in 1991, and 'The Truth Is a Lie,' written in 1990, Larson's lyrics feel eerily familiar in today's culture. 'What emerged immediately was this connection between the time in which he was writing and right now,' Simpkins said. 'And so to us, we became immediately interested in the dialogue that we could have between Jonathan, the time in which Jonathan was writing, and the time in which we find ourselves right now.' In one tongue-in-cheek political campaign scene, Larson lists 'Trump Industries' as a corporate Republican sponsor. 'We haven't changed a word,' Tepper said. 'The idea is not to fix something he wrote or to make it relevant, it's to do what he wrote and to honor it.' In 'Likability/La Di Da,' a song about political candidates bending to the whims of voters and so-called experts, Larson uses the phrase 'Make America great.' He wrote it in 1989, perhaps as a nod to Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign slogan. If the Larson mystique wasn't already present, there were coincidences that, despite Tepper's avoidance of what she called 'woo woo' tendencies, did seem auspicious. Shortly after rehearsals started, one of the actors, Lauren Marcus, returned home to find that of the dozens of posters on her wall, one was missing. Her 'Rent' poster had slipped to the ground. Not long after, Tepper's 'Jonathan Larson Project' poster, which she'd had on her wall since 2018, fell to the ground in an impossible-to-reach spot behind a bookshelf (where it remains). Later, they realized that the show's load-in day at the Orpheum took place on what would have been Larson's 65th birthday. 'The Jonathan Larson Project' — called a 'project' for its range of genres and story lines — supplements its minimalist set with video footage of SoHo to ground the show in today's Manhattan. But it's also awash in nostalgia. 'You can lean into the homage, right?' Jones said. 'Like, I don't necessarily need to play Mimi in a song,' she said, referring to a 'Rent' character she has played before in community productions, 'but I don't need to shy away from Mimi-isms or 'Rent'-isms. It's hard to describe, but I definitely feel there's like a 'Rent' method of acting. It's really fun to lean into that.' After years of delays — because of the pandemic shutdown and the time it took to book the right theater — getting the musical to the Orpheum stage happened at lighting speed. The venue was confirmed in late November, then rehearsals began in January, and previews started this month. It was fueled by fandom and discovery from the start. Back in 2014, Tepper chose five songs, largely unheard by the public, for a concert in the New York City Center lobby ahead of an Encores! performance of 'Tick, Tick … Boom!' The response was so enthusiastic, from 'Rentheads' and new fans alike, that she began dreaming of expanding the concert into an evening-length work. She checked in with Larson's family, who gave her the green light. 'They said, like, go for it, kid,' Tepper said. She deepened her research and in 2016 started taking the train to Washington to dig through Larson's collection at the Library of Congress, where she would spend the entire day completely immersed in his journals and music demos. When she found the song 'Greene Street,' she was so overcome that she left the library, sat outside and cried, in awe that it had gone virtually unheard. 'It was like the wildest, wildest dream of being a fan,' she said. In 2018, a show was born. Tepper staged a 12-performance run of 'The Jonathan Larson Project,' a longer song cycle version of the City Center event, at 54 Below. The show featured five actors and a band — as does 'The Jonathan Larson Project' today — who recorded the songs as an album the following year. 'It's a little bit of, like, a seance when the composer is no longer with you,' said Rosen, the musical supervisor. 'You don't want it to be a pastiche,' he added. Tasked with orchestrating and co-arranging, Rosen looked to Larson's musical influences, the time period and the many genres in his work to piece things together — and make it relevant. Thankfully, the quality of Larson's demos helped. 'The fact that he even had the ability to record a piano and then go back and record his voice over the already recorded piano,' Rosen said, 'most people didn't have access to that then.' Larson, Tepper said, felt his work was incomplete without instrumentation beyond piano. Arranging his songs with a full band is a way of finishing what he started, a production quality Larson simply couldn't afford. 'When I listen to this music, I hear it as a survival guide for getting through hard times,' said Chanler-Berat, who plays a version of Larson's characters and himself. 'And I mean that as an artist, but I also mean that as a citizen.' The artist's life that Larson lived in the '80s and '90s looks a little different today. There's a Sweetgreen around the corner from his apartment on Greenwich Street. The view he once had of the Hudson River has been replaced with a towering glass building. There is no trace of the phone booth that once sat across the street, where, in the absence of a functional buzzer, Larson's visitors would call to have him throw down a key to the building. But at its core, as his music transmits, the trials artists face is the same: finding the time to create; mustering the resolve to flout traditional expectations of success; staying financially afloat and cutting through the dull rhythm of manual labor or the fog of corporate malaise to excavate what alights the soul. 'Oh piano,' Larson croons in an unfinished song, 'you saved my soul again. Oh piano, you saved my soul, amen.'
