Andrew Lloyd Webber has made his mark on Broadway with some of the world’s most successful musicals (Phantom of the Opera, Evita, CATS).

After a record-breaking 25 years on Broadway, the Tony Award-winning composer has breathed new life into Phantom of the Opera with the sequel Love Never Dies, which follows the Phantom and Christine to turn-of-the-century New York, where the pair have come to Coney Island.

“It’s high romance. I have to say; I even find the end of it difficult to watch. It’s quite an emotional piece,” Webber told Parade.com.

The Australian production of Love Never Dies has been filmed for the big screen and hits movie theaters nationwide on Feb. 28 and March 5. The DVD will be released May 29.

Andrew Lloyd Webber, 63, talked to Parade.com about bringing the long-awaited Phantom sequel to Broadway, his journey into reality TV, and more.

Were you hesitant about bringing back characters that you are so close to, and that the audience is so close to as well?
“Not really. I wanted to write it because it closes a chapter emotionally for me. I wanted to revisit these characters once more. I always felt that the moment they met again would be a wonderful opportunity.” Read the full story

A former “American Idol” contestant is heading to Broadway with a character who, it’s safe to say, is truly two-faced.

Constantine Maroulis will play the title dual role in a revival of the musical “Jekyll & Hyde” that’s slated to come to New York in spring 2013 after a 25-week national tour that starts in San Diego on Oct. 2, Nederlander Presentations Inc. announced Sunday.

Maroulis, who was a finalist on the fourth season of “American Idol,” had a three-year run in Broadway’s “Rock of Ages” and received a best actor Tony nomination and a Drama League nomination for his performance. He also played the role of Roger Davis in a recent national tour of “Rent.”

Maroulis made his Broadway debut in “The Wedding Singer” and is currently in the title role of “Toxic Avenger” at the Alley Theatre in Houston. His debut album, “Constantine,” was released on his own label, Sixth Place Records.

“Jekyll & Hyde” features a story and lyrics by two-time Oscar winner Leslie Bricusse and music by Frank Wildhorn, who co-conceived the musical. It will be directed and choreographed by Jeff Calhoun.

Additional cast and creative team, as well as tour cities, will be announced later. Read the full story

The cast of 'The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee', performing at the Lake Worth Playhouse. (Photo by Theresa Loucks)

Community theater is a vital part of the arts community because it’s where we’re introduced to our future in the form of fresh, young actors and in new works that show us the direction theater is taking.

Director Rob Dawson brings us The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which opened on Friday at the Lake Worth Playhouse in downtown Lake Worth. The 2005 Broadway production won two Tony Awards, and the lively script and tongue-in-cheek lyrics make this one-act musical comedy surrounding some quirky kids competing in a spelling bee lighthearted fun. But there are also tender and compassionate moments that make your heart want to burst.

Directions, invite a friend

Everyone who has ever known or been a high school misfit will see themselves in these performers. Here are five reasons to see the play:

It’s live theater so anything can happen. Each performance each night is different, which makes it so much fun. The performers start fresh every time. On opening night, a few technical glitches and those well-known jitters tripped up the fine troupe a few times but they kept going.
Read the full story

Frankie Valli brings his show to the Hard Rock Live in Hollywood in March. (Courtesy Frankie Valli)

The iconic Frankie Valli. Iconic may sound cliché but there really is no other way to describe the influence Valli and his group had in the music industry and the legendary hits they produced.

Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ classic hits include “Sherry”, “Big Girls Don’t Cry”, “Walk Like A Man”, “Rag Doll” and “December 1963(Oh, What a Night)”. These are all songs that will never be forgotten and Valli’s solo career that included “My Eyes Adored You” and “Grease” was the icing on the cake.

For many years, Valli always saw himself as part of a group and it wasn’t until his later years that Valli became the front man, eventually pursuing a solo career.

See Frankie Valli in March | See Jersey Boys at the Broward | Visit this writer’s website

Since I mostly review live concerts I’ve often wondered if the passion and happiness we see on the stage from performers continues off stage. We, the audience, assume this life of fame and money leads to a trouble-free, easy-going life, but at what price? Truth is, any career we choose to pursue affects all areas of our life and these are the sacrifices we make for the choices we’ve made. So what really happens once the band leaves the stage?
Read the full story

Someday sociologists will surely study the genesis of two recent phenomena – the healing rite of passage known as the divorce party and the bonding "girls’ night out" theatrical revue.

Historians may even note that the intersection of the two began at the Kravis Center’s Rinker Playhouse with a demographically targeted – and punctuation-challenged – trifle called Divorce Party The Musical.

Its prototype is the wildly successful Menopause The Musical, which began a decade ago in Orlando before being cloned across the country, pulling in $300 million. No wonder producer Mark Schwartz has been in search of another celebration of female empowerment, fueled by existing pop songs with parody lyrics.

Read the full story

Adam Bashian, Donte Bonner and Brandon Morris in 'The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity.'

Because professional wrestling is rigged, with pre-determined outcomes and designated winners and losers, some participants make their living as fall guys.

And in Kristoffer Diaz’s crafty, rock-’em-sock-’em, highly theatrical look at the scripted "sport," The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, the focus is on one such perpetual loser.

No, not Chad, but the guy whose job it is to make Chad look good, a Bronx-born Puerto Rican named Macedonio Guerra – a/k/a Mace – a skilled wrestler so typecast for defeat that he does not even rate an entrance into the ring, elaborate or otherwise.

Yet Mace, the most fully dimensional character, narrates the play that is receiving its thought-provoking, bone-crunching area premiere in a brawny production at Boca Raton’s Caldwell Theatre.

Chances are you already knew that the fix is in in pro wrestling. Fortunately, playwright Diaz has more on his mind than that. After all, Chad Deity was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2010, for what the play has to say about us as a nation, our faux-reality show mindset, society’s pervasive racism and our collective suspicion of all things foreign.

Directions, nearby dining, invite a friend

On another clever Tim Bennett set, dominated by a wrestling ring at center stage and two huge video and projection monitors on the sides, Mace clues us in on the inner workings of THE Wrestling. That is the corporation that broadcasts and promotes these televised "bread and circuses" for the bloodthirsty, xenophobic masses.

Read the full story

Avi Hoffman (right) with Sy Fish in 'Brooklyn Boy'. (Photo by R.J. Colman)

While his wife, Laura Turnbull, continues at Palm Beach Dramaworks in The Effect of Gamma Rays in Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds in a role she insists has little in common with herself, Avi Hoffman is preparing to appear in the opening show of Boca Raton’s Parade Productions in a part he finds has numerous similarities to himself.

"In many ways, it’s not far off from me," Hoffman says of Eric Weiss, the title character in Donald Margulies’ Brooklyn Boy, the dramatic comedy of a best-selling author at middle-age, battling with his ethnic roots.

"What I don’t talk about a lot in my one-man shows" – Too Jewish? and its sequels – "is for how long I tried to escape from my Jewish background," he concedes. "I was doing more and more projects with some kind of a Jewish content, and it was becoming a trap.

“In a similar way, Eric Weiss "has been spending his life trying to get away from himself. The show is about how do you accept who you are and where you’re from."

After two critically admired novels that virtually no one bought, Eric writes about his Jewish roots and suddenly he has a best-seller on his hands. "And I think he struggles with the idea that this may be a sellout," says Hoffman. "He’s also talking a lot about success, and while unfortunately I have yet to experience the kind of success that Eric Weiss is experiencing, hopefully one day I’ll be able to say that that too preys on my mind."

Read the full story

By CHRISTINE DOLEN

After gigs in Fort Lauderdale, Miami and all over the country, New Jersey’s most famous quartet is back onstage at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts. And oh, what a night the guys deliver. Matinees too.

Jersey Boys, the hit-packed story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, is one of those musicals that could and should tour for years. More than six years after its Broadway opening, the best of the jukebox musicals is still doing great business in New York and on tour, for so many reasons.

The show features a terrific streets-to-stardom script by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, craftsmen who are adept at weaving facts, drama and laughs into a compelling whole. Director Des McAnuff keeps the show flowing as flawlessly as a Four Seasons classic, building to the moment when Valli, Bob Gaudio, Tommy DeVito and Nick Massi don matching jackets and blast into pop music’s stratosphere with “Sherry”. Then, just as the hits kept coming for Valli and the Seasons, Jersey Boys keeps on thrilling the audience for the rest of its 2½-hour running time.

Directions, invite a friend

Told from the shifting perspectives of each original group member, Jersey Boys explains how four different guys coalesced into hitmakers now enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Producer-lyricist Bob Crewe (still being played on tour by the wry Jonathan Hadley) had plenty to do with the Seasons’ success, certainly. But Jersey Boys argues that it was the magical combination of Gaudio’s music and Valli’s voice, with its huge range and distinctive falsetto, that set the group apart.
Read the full story

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat was nominated for nine Carbonell Awards, including Best Musical Production and Best Actor in a Musical for John Pinto Jr. (center)

The Maltz Jupiter Theatre had far and away the most nominations in the upcoming Carbonell Awards for local theater, picking up 25.

All but one were for three Maltz musical productions — The Sound of Music, Crazy For You and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. The other was for Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps.

Joseph led the way with nine, while The Sound of Music had eight and Crazy For You seven.

Director Mark Martino is nominated twice for Best Director for a Musical for both Crazy for You and Joseph, and the theater also has at least one nominee in all four musical acting categories.

Among Palm Beach County theaters, Palm Beach Dramaworks had 10 nominations, the Caldwell Theatre had six and the defunct Florida Stage had two.

Palm Beach County theaters had the most nominations with 43, while Miami-Dade had 28 and Broward 27.
Read the full story

Kate Shindle, Miss America 1998, stars in 'Cabaret' (right, with Christopher Sloan) at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre. (Shindle photo by Richard Graulich / Palm Beach Post; 'Cabaret' picture by Alicia Donelan)

That waving, smiling, tiara-laden walk of victory taken each year by the new Miss America has led to many places – anchor desks, Gotham City, even a gig as a "Desperate Housewife."

But right now, that walk has landed Kate Shindle alone and bleak at the edge of a stage in a slip, her eyes blackened with smudged makeup and desperation, singing an ominous song.

And it’s exactly where she wants to be.

"People have the misconception that (a pageant queen) must not be very smart, who just wants to be famous and get married, who is content with having peaked at 22," says Shindle, Miss America 1998, who for the next two weeks stars as deluded songstress Sally Bowles in the Maltz Jupiter Theatre production of Cabaret.

Directions, nearby dining | Review: Life is a ‘Cabaret’ at Maltz

The South Jersey native, 34, calls herself an unlikely beauty queen, having been a self-described awkward theater kid, but is proud of having used her time in the sash as a social platform.

And she wants to challenge the notion of the women in that system as just vapid, pretty girls who blather on about world peace.

"When you’re done, it’s hard to do something that’s bigger. But it just made me think ‘I gotta get to it,’ " says Shindle.

Read the full story