Sure, we'll all be spending three hours Sunday night watching the Tony Awards on CBS-TV, but for theater fun the day before, tune in to UNC Radio (www.uncradio.com), from noon-5pm(Eastern) Saturday, for the Tenth Annual TotalTheater Tony Show. Hosted by Stagebuddy theater editor Dave Lefkowitz, the show promises a mix of interviews, music, trivia, giveaways and (sorry) edutainment.
As in years past, the host will interview critics and theater journalists about specific Tony categories and ask whom they think will win vs. whom they hope will win. Among guests lined up for the special are such notables as New York Daily News critic Joe Dziemianowicz, New York Post critic Elisabeth Vincentelli, Drama Desk President Isa Goldberg, AM New York reviewer Matt Windman, Manhattan TV reviewers Charles Gross, Eva Heinemann and Leslie (Hoban) Blake, and producer-director Richmond Shepard. First-timers on the special will include Clyde Fitch Report founder Leonard Jacobs, the AndyGram's Andrew McGibbon, HuffPo critic David Finkle and New York Magazine scribe Jesse Green.
Also as in previous years, the show will include trivia questions, a CD giveaway, and lots of showtunes. New for the 10th Anniversary broadcast is a big segment called "Broadway 101," where virtually all the shows of the 2013-14 Broadway season will get a quick overview, including songs from musicals and dialogue snippets from the plays. The idea behind "Broadway 101," says Lefkowitz (aka me), "is a way to include everyone in the fun of the Broadway season. Sometimes over the years, I've worried that the show might be a little too `inside,' with names and titles and nominations flying out at listeners who may be hundreds of miles from Broadway or simply not as obsessively theater-oriented as my colleagues who are in the thick of it. So this year, we're gonna go show-by-show, with information and snippets to make everyone feel clued in and ready for the big night."
Listeners to Lefkowitz's weekly radio program, "Dave's Gone By", on the station, will also be familiar with frequent guest Rabbi Sol Solomon. A stage performer himself - "Shalom Dammit!" played two New York engagements in 2012 - Rabbi Sol offers a weekly mini-sermon called a "Rabbinical Reflection" on events in the news. Annually on the Tony special, he offers a Reflection on the Awards, generally noting which categories have the most Jewish people in them. Miraculously enough, we have an excerpt from tomorrow's Reflection:
"On the whole, this was not the most Judeo-friendly year on Broadway. Yes, you had Billy Crystal in “700 Sundays,” but you also had “Soul Doctor”, about smooth-singing, hippie-grooving, teenager-touching Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. The musical sold so few tickets, they held 'kaddish' at the box office. Harold Pinter had two plays revived – both of which were hits, neither of which were nominated. There was a play called “The Velocity of Autumn”, about a spunky old lady in a Brooklyn Brownstone and her gay son; both of them should have been Jewish but weren’t. That show went down faster than Malaysian Flight 370."
Ahem, and so on...
The 10th Annual TotalTheater Tony Special will air live, Saturday, June 6, noon-5pm(Eastern) on the radio station of the University of Northern Colorado, www.uncradio.com. The show will then be archived and available for free streaming or download at www.davesgoneby.com.
