Theater News

Just Another Manic Monday

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Euan Morton, Cynthia Nixon, Audra McDonald, and other notables turn up at various fabulous events.

New York City

Monday, May 15 was a night full of awards, benefits, and other special events. The American Musical Voices Project honored seven outstanding theater artists at a ceremony held at New World Stages. Here are three of the worthy honorees, director-musical director-orchestrator Ted Sperling, composer Ricky Ian Gordon, and four-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald, with the lovely Kelli O’Hara, who performed a song from Gordon’s My Life With Albertine.

Also on hand for the festivities were Dirty Rotten Scoundrels star Sara Gettelfinger and Michael Arden, who’s gearing up for his arrival on Broadway this fall in The Times They Are A-Changin’…

…composer-lyricist Adam Guettel, who received one of the American Musical Voices Project Leadership Awards…

…Matthew Morrison, who co-starred in Guettel’s The Light in the Piazza and is now very busy doing film and television work…

…former Piazza stars Celia Keenan-Bolger and O’Hara, who both played Clara in different cities, and who both went straight to the Brooklyn Academy of Music after the ceremony to perform in the star-studded Sundance Institute at BAM concert…

…handsome Howard McGillin, who sang “Time” from the musical Was, composed by another of the evening’s honorees, Joseph Thalken…

…and Barbara Walsh, who will return to Broadway this fall in Company, seen here with cellist Peter Sachon (The Light in the Piazza) and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee star Jesse Tyler Ferguson.

A few blocks east, City Center’s annual gala was graced with the presence of Oscar winners Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward…

…the legendary CBS newscaster Walter Cronkite and his companion, Joanna Simon…

…and two-time Tony Award winner James Naughton, who will debut his new cabaret act at Feinstein’s at the Regency later this month.

The Manhattan Theatre Club’s annual spring gala at the New York Hilton featured entertainment from some of Broadway’s biggest hits. Here are Sutton Foster, Jennifer Smith, Beth Leavel, and Bob Martin of The Drowsy Chaperone.

Cynthia Nixon, who picked up a Tony Award nomination as Best Actress in a Play the next morning for her work in MTC’s Rabbit Hole, was the evening’s host…

…and here are Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio of The Four Seasons, subjects of the smash hit musical Jersey Boys.

Meanwhile, over at Birdland, the Spring Season continued with a performance by the dynamic Euan Morton, who sang selections from his new CD New Clear plus some Broadway tunes and two Carpenters songs.

After the show, Morton posed with his Taboo co-star Liz McCartney — but he couldn’t hang out very long, since he had to hurry down to NYU’s Skirball Center to accept the Obie Award that he won for his performance in The Public Theater’s Measure for Pleasure.