Five New Musicals Top $1 Million at Box Office Following Tony Awards

In its first week of performances after winning the Tony Award for best musical, “Kinky Boots” had its best run yet at the box office, grossing $1,474,349 through last weekend. Two other Tony winners, “Matilda the Musical” and “Pippin,” also had their strongest weeks so far, as did the audience favorite “Motown: The Musical,” which came up empty-handed at the Tonys ceremony on June 9.

“Motown” was just behind “Kinky Boots” in ticket sales last week, with a gross of $1.44 million, while “Matilda” grossed $1.18 million and “Pippin” â€" the Tony winner for best musical revival â€" took in $1.01 million. “Pippin” also became the first show in the 92-year history of the Music Box Theater to gross more than $1 million during a week of performances. That theater is usually home to plays, which typically earn less money than musicals like
“Pippin,” which tend to draw more tourists willing to pay full price for tickets. (Many plays, by contrast, offer discounts on tickets.)

The Tony winner for best play also had its best week yet: Christopher Durang’s “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” grossed $654,304, about 20 percent more than it took in during the week leading up to its Tony victory. It was virtually sold out and grossed 85 percent of its maximum potential amount, very high for a play.

The number of new musical productions showing strength at the box office is unusually high: In addition to “Kinky Boots,” “Motown,” “Matilda,” and “Pippin,” “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella” also grossed more than $1 million last week, and the revival of “Annie” grossed $962,027 - one of its best weeks in recent months.

The Broadway play “Ann” continued to struggle, meanwhile, grossing $185,623 - a nearly 20 percent decline from the prior week - as the one-woman show about Texas Gov. Ann Richards heads to an early closing date of June 30.

Over all, Broadway musicals and plays grossed $24.8 million last week, compared to $25.5 million during the same week in 2012 â€" a reflection of the greater number of vacant Broadway theaters compared to last June. Year-to-year attendance was also down, with 227,831 people seeing shows last week and 269,169 in the comparable week last season.

Streisand Lends Her Support to Israeli Women

Barbra Streisand spoke out against the treatment of women in Israel by ultra-Orthodox Jews during a speech on Monday as she accepted an honorary degree in Israel, the Associated Press reported. Referring to recent incidents involving the ultra-Orthodox men, Ms. Streisand said she was distressed to read about women in Israel “being forced to sit on the back of the bus” and women being assaulted while praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

The singer was being given an honorary doctorate by Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where officials praised her dedication to Israel. In her speech, she urged the country to continue working toward equality for women and praised the university for issuing its largest-ever number of doctorates to women this year.

The speech was the first event on Ms. Streisand’s tour of Israel: she plans to attend the 90th birthday party for former Israeli President Shimon Peres this week then give her first-ever concerts in the country this weekend.

Neil Patrick Harris Set to Star in ‘Hedwig’ on Broadway

Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images for Tony Awards Productions Neil Patrick Harris

Neil Patrick Harris has made no secret that he wants to return to Broadway after his long run as the womanizing Barney Stinson on TV’s “How I Met Your Mother” wraps up. Now he’s making good on the promise, aiming to star in a Broadway production of the musical “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” in the spring of 2014, the producers of the show announced on Monday.

Mr. Harris, who has won raves â€" and an Emmy Award â€" as the tireless host of the Tony Awards, will play the title character, an East German-born, transgender rock singer. The production will be the first Broadway mounting of the show, which features a book by John Cameron Mitchell and music and lyrics by Stephen Trask. Mr. Mitchell starred as Hedwig in the original production Off Broadway in 1998 and recreated his role when he directed the 2001 film adaptation.

David Binder, a producer of “Legally Blonde” and “33 Variations,” is the lead producer for “Hedwig.” A creative team, additional casting and a Broadway theater are still to be announced. Mr. Harris was last on Broadway in the 2004 revival of “Assassins”; his other Broadway credits include “Proof” and “Cabaret.”

Neil Patrick Harris Set to Star in ‘Hedwig’ on Broadway

Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images for Tony Awards Productions Neil Patrick Harris

Neil Patrick Harris has made no secret that he wants to return to Broadway after his long run as the womanizing Barney Stinson on TV’s “How I Met Your Mother” wraps up. Now he’s making good on the promise, aiming to star in a Broadway production of the musical “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” in the spring of 2014, the producers of the show announced on Monday.

Mr. Harris, who has won raves â€" and an Emmy Award â€" as the tireless host of the Tony Awards, will play the title character, an East German-born, transgender rock singer. The production will be the first Broadway mounting of the show, which features a book by John Cameron Mitchell and music and lyrics by Stephen Trask. Mr. Mitchell starred as Hedwig in the original production Off Broadway in 1998 and recreated his role when he directed the 2001 film adaptation.

David Binder, a producer of “Legally Blonde” and “33 Variations,” is the lead producer for “Hedwig.” A creative team, additional casting and a Broadway theater are still to be announced. Mr. Harris was last on Broadway in the 2004 revival of “Assassins”; his other Broadway credits include “Proof” and “Cabaret.”

Nowadays, Fewer Tears at Her AIDS Concerts

Michael Nagle for The New York Times Mimi Stern-Wolfe  has been organizing AIDS concerts in New York almost every year since 1990.

Mimi Stern-Wolfe organized her first AIDS concert in 1990, after the death of a friend, and with a few exceptions she has made it an annual event - a kind of musical counterpoint to the changing shape of the epidemic. At the first concert, at Middle Collegiate Church in the East Village, the audience was dotted with men emaciated by the then-untreatable virus; listeners wept during the performance or left in tears.

For this year’s concert, on Thursday at Judson Memorial Church, Ms. Stern-Wolfe expects a much less directly emotional connection.

“It really can’t be cathartic in the same way,” she said in her East Village apartment, which is filled with musical scores and where she has lived for about 40 years. “It was very moving, because everybody was affected by it at the time. It wasn’t just bringing up something from the back burner, which I’m sort of doing now.”

This year’s concert, with Ms. Stern-Wolfe accompanying singers on piano, will precede a screening of a documentary film about the concert series, “All the Way Through Evening,” made by a young Australian filmmaker named Rohan Spong.

As in recent years, she said, the concert will be less an exploration than a historical reminder, like the Oscar-nominated movie “How to Survive a Plague” or the exhibition “AIDS in New York: The First Five Years,” currently at the New-York Historical Society.

“Young people don’t know too much about that time,” Ms. Stern-Wolfe said. “But for those of us who are older, remembering the agony that people were going through, it was just horrific.”

As an artistic inspiration, AIDS has always been as much a political topic as a medical one; as history it feels embedded in a particular moment in New York, when the social order was fraying and the streets were full of possibility, benign and not. The early AIDS years were a time, as one interview subject says in “All the Way Through Evening,” of high art and low sex - of poetry and opera and gay bathhouses and public toilets.

“That combination of tragedy and giving birth to new things,” Ms. Stern-Wolfe said. “I hope that people will keep that memory alive. That’s what I want to do with this thing.”

Ms. Stern-Wolfe, who gave her age as between 70 and 80, has made a specialty of themed concerts, usually with a political edge. She has organized concerts of works by female composers, of civil rights music and of composers who died in the Holocaust. In her apartment was a photograph of her protesting the Vietnam War, carrying a sign that read “Brahms Not Bombs.”

When her friend Eric Benson, a tenor, died of AIDS complications in 1988, she began collecting works by composers who were affected by the virus, many of them her friends through Mr. Benson.

Later, after the arrival of effective antiretroviral drugs in 1996, it became harder to find new works related to AIDS, she said.

“I noticed the change over time. But I kept it going anyhow. And I always took the old-timers’ music, because there was lots of music that these guys wrote that was not even published, and friends of theirs knew about it.”

Ms. Stern-Wolfe has decided that her next series of concerts will be around the theme of breast cancer.

In the meantime, from her downtown apartment, she runs the nonprofit Downtown Music Productions, and recently organized a 22-piece concert for children and another concert by a 30-member senior chorus.

Her political enthusiasms have not always helped her raise money, she said.

“I’d go for funding and I’d notice how their eyes would start rolling in their heads,” she said,  “so then I would slow down and thank them for their time and leave.”

Ms. Stern-Wolfe said she was encouraged by the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in 2011, and organized a concert of protest songs in support, including “Brother Can You Spare a Dime.”

But in truth, she found the demonstrators’ methods bewildering, she said.

“I come out of an old left thing. There’s a structure in my meshugas. They were a little loose,” she said. “They got the right issues, but they wanted everybody to express what everybody felt, which is enormously democratic. I’m not sure I’m that democratic myself.”

Patinkin, Mac To Collaborate on ‘Apocalyptic Vaudeville’ for Classic Stage

The Tony Award-winning actor Mandy Patinkin and the downtown performance artist and playwright Taylor Mac will team up in December for a new Off Broadway piece, “The Last Two People on Earth: An Apocalyptic Vaudeville,” telling the history of humanity through music ranging from Rodgers and Hammerstein to R.E.M., Classic Stage Company announced on Monday. In addition to “The Last Two People,” which will be directed and choreographed by Tony winner Susan Stroman (“The Producers”), Classic Stage also announced its latest Brecht production, “A Man’s A Man,” and a new David Ives adaptation, “The Heir Apparent,” as part of the company’s 2013-14 season.

It will begin in September with a production of “Romeo and Juliet,” and Classic Stage on Monday named its Romeo: Finn Wittrock, who played Happy in the 2012 Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman.” He will star opposite the previously announced Elizabeth Olsen (“Martha Marcy May Marlene”).

“The Last Two People” will be staged in December, running at the Henry Street Settlement. According to the season announcement, the piece - created by Mr. Patinkin and Mr. Mac - centers on the two survivors of a flood of biblical proportions, who find that their common language is song and dance.

“A Man’s A Man,” a farce about a dockworker in colonial India who is transformed as a member of the British armed forces, will be another collaboration by director Brian Kulick and composer Duncan Sheik, following their work on the company’s current production of Brecht’s “Caucasian Chalk Circle.” The new show is set to begin in January 2014.

The season will conclude in the spring with another farce, “The Heir Apparent,” which Mr. Ives has adapted from the play by Jean-Francois Regnard about a young man trying to finagle a large inheritance. John Rando will direct. Mr. Ives’s previous works at Classic Stage include “The School for Lies” and, in 2010, “Venus in Fur,” which was later re-mounted on Broadway and won a best actress Tony Award for Nina Arianda.

Patinkin, Mac To Collaborate on ‘Apocalyptic Vaudeville’ for Classic Stage

The Tony Award-winning actor Mandy Patinkin and the downtown performance artist and playwright Taylor Mac will team up in December for a new Off Broadway piece, “The Last Two People on Earth: An Apocalyptic Vaudeville,” telling the history of humanity through music ranging from Rodgers and Hammerstein to R.E.M., Classic Stage Company announced on Monday. In addition to “The Last Two People,” which will be directed and choreographed by Tony winner Susan Stroman (“The Producers”), Classic Stage also announced its latest Brecht production, “A Man’s A Man,” and a new David Ives adaptation, “The Heir Apparent,” as part of the company’s 2013-14 season.

It will begin in September with a production of “Romeo and Juliet,” and Classic Stage on Monday named its Romeo: Finn Wittrock, who played Happy in the 2012 Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman.” He will star opposite the previously announced Elizabeth Olsen (“Martha Marcy May Marlene”).

“The Last Two People” will be staged in December, running at the Henry Street Settlement. According to the season announcement, the piece - created by Mr. Patinkin and Mr. Mac - centers on the two survivors of a flood of biblical proportions, who find that their common language is song and dance.

“A Man’s A Man,” a farce about a dockworker in colonial India who is transformed as a member of the British armed forces, will be another collaboration by director Brian Kulick and composer Duncan Sheik, following their work on the company’s current production of Brecht’s “Caucasian Chalk Circle.” The new show is set to begin in January 2014.

The season will conclude in the spring with another farce, “The Heir Apparent,” which Mr. Ives has adapted from the play by Jean-Francois Regnard about a young man trying to finagle a large inheritance. John Rando will direct. Mr. Ives’s previous works at Classic Stage include “The School for Lies” and, in 2010, “Venus in Fur,” which was later re-mounted on Broadway and won a best actress Tony Award for Nina Arianda.

Jay-Z Teams Up With Samsung to Release New Album

Jay-Z is teaming up with Samsung to release his new album, and the company is giving away a million copies to its cellphone subscribers as a promotion.

The Brooklyn rapper made the announcement with a three-minute commercial during the half-time of the NBA finals on Sunday night. The album, called “Magna Carta Holy Grail,” will come out on July 7, but will be made available for free three days earlier to Samsung subscribers through a mobile application.

The commercial shows Jay-Z hanging out in a studio, working on the album â€" his 12th studio effort â€" with the producers Rick Rubin, Pharrell Williams, Swizz Beatz and Timbaland. “Pretty much what the album is about is this duality, how do you navigate your way through this whole thing, through success, through failures, through all this, and remain yourself,” he says.

The only reference to Samsung is some text on a black screen at the end plugging Samsung’s Galaxy phone and directing people to a Web site that explains the download.

The commercial provoked grumbling on Twitter among hip-hop fans who accused Jay-Z of selling out. It is not the first time, however, that Jay-Z has partnered with a cellphone company to market his music: He made a deal with Nokia to preload an “The Black Album” on one model back in 2003. And Jay-Z has proven himself a master of leveraging the marketing power of major corporations and basketball teams in other contexts.

His partnership with Budweiser on the new “Made in America” music festival in Philadelphia is an example, not to mention how he used his tiny stake in the Brooklyn Nets and Barclays Center last year to raise his own public profile.

Samsung is a leader in the mobile phone market, and its Galaxy smart phones have been challenging Apple’s dominance in the market. The Wall Street Journal reported the company had paid Jay-Z $5 for each of the one million albums it will give away as part of the promotion.

But the partnership seems to signal two realities of today’s market: cellphone companies see music and music discovery as key to marketing their phones, and corporate partners are playing an increasingly important role in marketing in the music industry, which has seen album sales cut in half over the last decade.

Chappelle Will Lead Comedy Tour

In a packed theater in Richmond, Va., on Saturday, Dave Chappelle introduced a comedy bit by explaining that there was a time when he didn’t want to return to the public eye. “I didn’t want to do comedy,” he said, explaining that he wasn’t sure he had something to say. That’s certainly changed.

After years of dropping by clubs for surprise sets and occasionally playing theaters, Mr. Chappelle is returning to the spotlight in the Oddball Comedy & Curiosity Festival, a tour produced by FunnyorDie.com that will feature Mr. Chappelle, Flight of the Conchords, Hannibal Buress, Demetri Martin and Kristen Schaal, among others. The monthlong tour, which includes a second stage hosted by the comic Brody Stevens, begins in Austin, Tex., on Aug. 23 and will make stops in New Jersey at the Susquehanna Bank Center on Sept. 6 andthe PNC Bank Arts Center on Sept. 7.

Almost since he left his Comedy Central hit “Chappelle’s Show” in 2005, there have been rumors of his return, which have heated up in the last year since he appeared with Chris Rock at the Comedy Cellar in New York. Mr. Chappelle is now touring the South playing to sold-out audiences. At a show in March, his performance was freewheeling with extended exchanges with the crowd. This past weekend, his two sets still had that same spontaneity, but the jokes had tightened, and the transitions were quicker. Wearing a tank top, and roaming around the stage in a quickening pace, he had the look of a man getting ready.

Anatomy of a Scene Video: ‘Man of Steel’

In this video, Zack Snyder, the director of “Man of Steel,” narrates a scene from the film involving a battle between Superman (Henry Cavill) and Faora (Antje Traue), the sidekick of the film’s main villain, General Zod (Michael Shannon). He discusses how he used a sound stage in Vancouver to replicate (and destroy) an International House of Pancakes restaurant, and more. Read the Times review of the film here.

My First Wig

Dear Diary:

A few days after moving to Brooklyn, I receive a rather shocking bobbed haircut chopped several inches above my chin. I decide the only hope for this new cut is to cover it up, so I set off to an observant Jewish neighborhood riddled with wig shops.

I don’t remember the exact terms of the Jewish law surrounding wigs. I just notice that every Orthodox woman of a certain age has that perfectly coiffed “wiggy” look: stiff, heavy and perfect.

I arrive at a small, busy wig shop off 13th Avenue. The store is studded with blank white heads wigged in all the latest Eastern European styles. Delighted, I run my fingers through a silky russet one. “I love this,” I gush.

The store owner eyes me suspiciously, “You look very young,” she says. “Is this your first wig?”

“Oh yeah, um, I guess I’m a … wig virgin?” I say, dumbly.

“It’s her first wig!” the store owner shrieks to the rest of the store.

Soon, clusters of women circle around me. “Mazel tov!” “Baruch hashem!” “You must be so excited!” “Who is the lucky man?”

I then remember that Orthodox Jewish women don’t begin donning wigs until after they get hitched.

Embarrassed, I confess that I am not engaged, then run out of the store before any of the women have the chance to tell me they can change that.

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