Broadway’s ‘Flying Over Sunset’ Joins ‘The Music Man’ & ‘MJ’ In Targeting Fall/Winter 2021 Following Latest Shutdown Extension

Actor, model and socialite Christian Wilkins has slammed media coverage of his dress at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Fair Day event on Sunday.Trigger Warning: This story has details of homophobic media coverage and homophobic slurs, which might be distressing to some readers. For 24 hour crisis support and suicide prevention call Lifeline on 13 11 14. For Australia-wide LGBTQI peer support call QLife on 1800 184 527 or webchat.Christian, son of veteran Channel Nine reporter Richard Wilkins, was dressed in a fabulous, pink halter neck mini dress for a Fair Day event at Victoria Park, Sydney. Christian Wilkins (left) calls out the Daily Telegraph’s homophobic headline (right).The experience was however marred, when on Monday Daily Telegraph’s Sydney Confidential section featured Christian’s photos with a homophobic headline.“Dude looks like a lady! Richard Wilkins’ flamboyant son Christian flaunts his VERY toned figure in a skin-tight pink mini dress with daring cut-outs”, the headline screamed. Christian, who came out as gay in public in March 2018 on the front cover of a magazine, did not mince his words when calling out the publication over its homophobic coverage.   A post shared by CHRISTIAN WILKINS (@theprincewilkins)In 2021, Christian had made his acting debut in the Stan Original series Eden, in an LGBTQI role, playing a twin named Leander. Christian has previously been a fashion correspondent for E News and starred in shows Dancing With The Stars and Filthy Rich and Homeless. In his coming out interview, Christian had said that he had “taken it upon myself to become the best damn gay I can be!”  A post shared by CHRISTIAN WILKINS (@theprincewilkins)Christian had in an interview said that he had never come

Bolton Wanderers now have other options to turn to in central midfield and there may well be times now where they are not as reliant on MJ Williams starting as they once were, Ian Evatt believes.

Bruno Fernandes is delighted Manchester United have finally been able to score from a set-piece in the Premier League this season.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticThe Right Girl, a new musical based on (and co-written by) the real-life story of former screenwriter Louisette Geiss and the sexual harassment by Harvey Weinstein she says ended her film career, will be presented in a film version to a live audience for the first time next month.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticRacist imagery and cultural stereotypes in six Disney animated classics including Peter Pan, The Jungle Book, Lady and the Tramp, The Aristocats, Dumbo and Swiss Family Robinson are being flagged on the Disney+ streaming site with warnings and detailed explanations of the “negative depictions” in each title.“These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now,” reads an explanation on Disney’s Stories Matter website regarding the new advisory notices.Accompanying the 1970 film The Aristocats, for example, is the following advisory about the Siamese cat character Shun Gon, voiced by Paul Winchell: The cat is depicted as a racist caricature of East Asian peoples with exaggerated stereotypical traits

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticThe state of California will appeal the Trump administration’s decision to reject a disaster relief request for damage caused by the six fires that burned 1.8 million acres of land.“The request for a Major Presidential Disaster Declaration for early September fires has been denied by the federal administration,” said Brian Ferguson, a spokesman for the governor’s office of emergency services, yesterday, adding that the state will appeal the decision.The president has repeatedly blamed forest mismanagement for the fires, shrugging his shoulders at the certainty of climate change.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticBlame the coronavirus for this year’s drastically reduced roster of eligible Tony Award nominees, and Tony nominators for overlooking at least a few possibilities. Even with only 18 Broadway productions in the running for a 2020 award, feelings were bound to be hurt.Let’s start with the good news: The list of nominees for the 74th Annual Tony Awards is a solid one, with no noticeable contenders – at least to my eye – sneaking in due to the decreased competition.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticRefresh for updates Acknowledgements, thank yous, laments for shuttered theaters, pleas for racial justice and get-out-the-vote plugs (for one presidential candidate, anyway) are being offered by this year’s crop of Tony Award nominees.“The closing of Broadway theatres (indeed almost all American theatres) this year has left us without a vital resource to gather together and examine ourselves and our nation and has reminded us just how important live theatre is to our personal and civil lives,” said playwright Matthew López, whose The Inheritance was nominated in 11 categories.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticRefresh for updates…The nominations for the 2020 Tony Awards will be announced virtually at noon ET by actor James Monroe Iglehart. Deadline will keep you up to speed on the nominations as they happen.For How To Watch the nominations, go here.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticDavid Byrne’s American Utopia will return to Broadway next fall. Producers announced today that the critically lauded production will hit the stage Sept.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticKent L. Wakeford, a cinematographer who served as Martin Scorsese’s director of photographer on the groundbreaking 1973 film Mean Streets and the following year’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, died Oct.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticProducer and recording artist Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson is partnering with Eli Roth and entertainment studio 3BlackDot for a three-picture feature film deal. The deal expands Jackson’s G-Unit Film & Television in the horror film space.Jackson’s G-Unit will team with the Arts District Entertainment, Roth’s banner with Roger Birnbaum and Michael Besman.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticThe Beverly Hills City Council has banned trick-or-treating – whether house-to-house or car-to-car – and shaving cream blitzes for this year’s Halloween due the the coronavirus pandemic.Specifically, giving candy, toys or treats to anyone outside one’s household is prohibited, no matter if the hand-outs pass through a front door or the trunk of a car (the latter known now as “trunk-or-treating”).The city also banned “spraying shaving cream on others,” though it gave licensed barbers an exemption. Beverly Hills residents can also feel free to spray-cream members of their own households – within those households.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticEXCLUSIVE: Bedlam, the small, critically acclaimed Off Broadway theater company known for its clever, spare and unconventional stagings of classics like The Crucible and Saint Joan, is developing Bedlam: The Series, an eight-episode New Media mash-up of Shakespeare plays using the Bard’s own language.The series, to be released on an as-yet-unannounced platform, begins filming this month in New York City and New York’s Hudson Valley.Written by Bedlam artistic director Eric Tucker and Musa Gurnis and directed by Tucker, the series will combine characters and plots from King Lear, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Merchant of Venice and other plays in an all-new story.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticEXCLUSIVE: Here’s the story of how the Brady Bunch might reclaim the now ubiquitous, Zoom-era Brady Bunch-style screen squares. With the help of the son and daughter of series creator Sherwood Schwartz, original Bradys Barry Williams and Christopher Knight and a cast of Broadway performers, a Maine theater company will present a benefit reading of the all-new A Very Brady Musical, squares and all.The benefit for the Ogunquit Playhouse, featuring remote performances by Broadway’s Gavin Lee (SpongeBob SquarePants) as Mike and Kerry Butler (Beetlejuice) as Carol, will premiere Oct.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticWith no fewer than three acclaimed Broadway productions of plays written by Kenneth Lonergan to his credit – This Is Our Youth, Lobby Hero and The Waverly Gallery –actor Michael Cera seems the playwright’s ideal, go-to stand-in, an embodiment of the confusion, awkwardness, deadpan humor and sly charm that helps give Lonergan’s work its punch.This Sunday, Cera adds another Lonergan work to his resume with a livestream table read of Hold On To Me Darling, a benefit project directed by Neil Pepe that will bring Cera together with two other Lonergan veterans: Mark Ruffalo, whose breakthrough performances arrived with the 1998 Off Broadway premiere of This Is Our Youth and, two years later, the film You

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticAudiences moved to tears – actually, moved to sobs – were commonplace throughout last year’s nine-week Broadway run of Sea Wall/A Life, the pair of solo one-act plays starring, respectively, Tom Sturridge and Jake Gyllenhaal. Directed by Carrie Cracknell, the plays – unconnected except by themes of unthinkable grief and the thin, piano-wire possibility of hope – combined for a powerful evening of theater, winning critical raves and full houses, recouping its $2.8 million investment just two months after its August 2019 opening at the Hudson Theater.No small part of the production’s success, commercially and artistically, was the casting.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticEXCLUSIVE: With Broadway dark at least until next summer, The Music Man starring Hugh Jackman has set a new opening night for 2022.The highly anticipated musical revival, costarring Sutton Foster, now will begin previews at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre on Monday, December 20, 2021, with Opening Night scheduled for Thursday, February 10, 2022.The new dates fall eight months past the most recent targets of Spring 2021. The announcement marks the first confirmed rescheduling following today’s decision by the Broadway League to extend Broadway’s coronavirus pandemic shutdown from the previous January 2021 to May 30 2021.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticBroadway will remain closed through at least May 30 2021, the Broadway League announced today. The four-month extension beyond the most recent January date will force producers hoping for a Spring opening to come up with new plans.The Broadway League announced the continued suspension of all ticket sales for Broadway performances through May 30, 2021.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticJack White will perform as musical guest on this week’s Saturday Night Live, replacing country star Morgan Wallen, who was dropped from the show earlier this week after video surfaced of the singer partying maskless at a crowded house party.SNL creator Lorne Michaels said this morning on NBC’s Today, that White, formerly of The White Stripes, would perform on tomorrow night’s show, along with possible surprise guests.“It has to be somebody who is ready to go,” Michaels said in announcing the last-minute fill-in.Wallen was dropped from the show – which will be hosted by comic Bill Burr – when a TikTok video of his maskless partying made the rounds on the internet.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticTommy Rall, the actor and dancer who brought Broadway skills to Hollywood films like Kiss Me Kate, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Funny Girl and Pennies From Heaven, died Tuesday of congestive heart failure in Santa Monica. He was 90.His death was announced by friend Cynthia Wands on Facebook.“A hospice nurse was by Tommy’s bedside,” Wands wrote, “and found a box that held the cards and letters that had been sent to him in the last few weeks.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticUPDATED: The MDA Kevin Hart Kids Telethon, a reboot of the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s longtime signature event the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon, will stream live on Hart’s Laugh Out Loud (LOL) Network, organizers said Thursday.The news comes as the event added to its roster of guests who are participating in the live two-hour telethon October 24, with Garcelle Beauvais, Aloe Blacc, Bryan Cranston, Adam Devine, Fat Joe, Liz Gillies, Aldis Hodge, Edwin Hodge, DJ Khaled, Daniel Levy, Loni Love, Leslie Mann, Robin Thicke, Gabrielle Union Wade and John David Washington now aboard. They join host Hart and previously announced Jack Black, Usain Bolt, Josh Gad, Michael B.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticEXCLUSIVE: Broadway’s annual I Put A Spell On You concert-slash-party event to raise funds for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, will go virtual this year due to the pandemic. The concert event, hosted by characters spoofing the 1993 film Hocus Pocus, will feature performers from such productions as Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, Waitress, Mrs.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticMorgan Freeman, Laurie Metcalf, John Malkovich, Zachary Quinto, Vanessa Williams, David Alan Grier, Elizabeth Ashley, Matthew Broderick, Lucas Hedges and Paul Mescal are among the actors who’ll take part in a benefit series of new, livestreamed stage reading productions of works by such major playwrights as Gore Vidal, David Mamet, Kenneth Lonergan and Donald Margulies.Producer Jeffrey Richards announced the new line-up of the weekly Spotlight On Plays, a web series at the recently launched Broadway’s Best Shows website. Proceeds from ticket sales will be donated to The Actor’s Fund, with the livestreamed events available for a strictly limited amount of time.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticA one-night-only Halloween benefit concert presentation of the Tim Burton/Danny Elfman spooky 1993 classic The Nightmare Before Christmas is drawing top-notch Broadway talent, including James Monroe Iglehart (Aladdin), Adrienne Warren (Tina: The Tina Turner Musical), Danny Burstein (Moulin Rouge!) and Rob McClure (Beetlejuice), for starters.Iglehart, who won a Tony Award for his performance as the Genie in Disney Theatricals’s Aladdin, is presenting the event in cooperation with Burton, Elfman and Disney Music Group.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticSir Tim Rice has written lyrics for some of the most beloved and successful musicals of the past century, from Jesus Christ Superstar and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat to Chess, Evita, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, but these days he’s doing a lot of talking.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticPaul McCartney’s 50-year-old hit “Maybe I’m Amazed” gets a whole new lease on contemporary life in James Corden’s parody version “Maybe I’m Immune,” performed on The Late Late Show last night.Sung from the perspective of President Donald Trump, “Maybe I’m Immune” contains lyrics like “Maybe I’m immune to the way the polls are looking” and “Maybe I’m immune to all the lies that I have made/I shouldn’t have downplayed/Maybe I’m afraid of the way that I might lose this”.Corden’s parody references Trump’s recent boasts that he might be immune to COVID-19 now that he has it, a theory not found in science or logic.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticValerie Bertinelli, who met and married guitarist Eddie Van Halen when she was still starring in the sitcom One Day at a Time, says she and the ex-couple’s son Wolfgang were with the rock great when he died yesterday.The actress and the rock star married in 1981, separated in 2001 and divorced six years later, but remained close. Van Halen reportedly attended Bertinelli’s 2011 wedding to financial planner Tom Vitale.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticTyra Banks apologized, more or less, for the end-of-show flub on last night’s Dancing with the Stars. “Wowzers,” she tweeted after the ABC broadcast, “Live TV.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticMötley Crüe’s Nikki Sixx remembers Eddie Van Halen as “the Mozart of rock guitar,” and Jimmy Kimmel writes that a conversation with the groundbreaking guitarist were “two of the bewst hours of my life.” Van Halen’s ex-wife, Valerie Bertinelli, simply tweeted a row of broken heart emoji.Actors, musicians, rock critics and fans of all sorts today are praising and mourning Van Halen, whose innovative, lightning-quick and tap-tap playing took him to the top of guitar great lists and made him a breakout star of early MTV, died today of cancer at 65.“My heart is broken,” tweeted KISS cofounder Gene Simmons. “Eddie was not only a Guitar God, but a genuinely beautiful soul.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticSelena: The Series, the Netflix biographical drama about Tejano music legend Selena Quintanilla, will premiere Dec. 4.The announcement was made today on Netflix social media.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticLos Angeles Times Executive Editor Norman Pearlstine will soon step down from the position, with the newspaper set to launch a search for his replacement.Pearlstine, 78, made the announcement at a morning staff meeting with top editors, and then followed with a note to staff, according to an article on the Times’ website.“It has been an honor to serve as your executive editor since Patrick and Michele Soon-Shiong acquired the Los Angeles Times in June of 2018,” Pearlstine wrote to staff.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticAlec Baldwin yesterday defended Saturday Night Live‘s inclusion of jokey references to President Donald Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis, saying the show likely would not have gone near the subject if “there was ever the suggestion that Trump was truly, gravely ill.”In an Instagram video posted yesterday, Baldwin, who plays Trump on the NBC sketch show, said, “If there was ever the suggestion that Trump was truly, gravely ill, if people said, ‘Oh, Trump is really in trouble,’ I bet you everything I have that we wouldn’t even get near that in terms of the content of the show.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticArmelia McQueen, who rose to Broadway stardom with her debut in 1978’s Ain’t Misbehavin’ and played the sister of Whoopi Goldberg’s haunted character in 1990’s Ghost, died Saturday. She was 68.Her death was confirmed by her friend Dorian Hannaway in a Facebook post Sunday.

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticMurray Schisgal, whose writing brought a 1964 Tony Award nomination for the Broadway play Luv and a 1982 Oscar nomination for the hit Dustin Hoffman comedy Tootsie, died Oct. 1 at a nursing home in Port Chester, New York.